Mirror Machine
An exhibition of video works by 7 artists practising in Northern Ireland
Louise Shine, Jenny Keane, Ciaran Hussey, Allan Hughes, Laura O'Connor, Paola Bernardelli & Linda Monks
Bluewall gallery Saturday November 12th to Saturday December 10th
Opening reception - Saturday November 12th - 3pm to 5pm
"Mirror Machine” is an exhibition exclusively of contemporary video works that brings together seven Northern-based artists, all graduates of the M.F.A. at Belfast College of Art and Design. Paradigms of simulation and reality within contemporary culture thematically link the works of these artists. Contemporary media sources such as television, film, cartoon, comic and comedy, alongside everyday life, provide the inspiration for the video works of Linda Monks. With a self-confessed sense of amusement and naivety, she communicates her own relationship with popular culture and art. Louise Shine’s playful and performative work is a reaction against her own social conformity. She produces a kind of satirical commentary about the notion of conditioning in consumerism, where everyone is implicated including the artist (albeit knowingly). Ciaran Hussey addresses the psychological effects of conformity to contemporary capitalist society. He draws attention to aspects that define us in an age of technological advances and uncertainty - emptiness, repetitiveness, alienation and apathy in a world of paper-thin representations, instant gratification and blurring of reality.
Allen Hughes explores the blurring of historical event through the production of re-mediated histories, employing deconstruction of post-production processes. His work examines the precarious position of subjectivity within the constructed narratives of history and the processes of their representation and reception. The photographic work of Paola Bernardelli includes an extensive documentation of demilitarized British Army barracks in Northern Ireland and a body of work relating to the theme of surveillance. Her more recent video work deals mainly with the elements of dreams, reverie and the optical unconscious.
Jenny Keane’s work explores the self-portrait in an attempt to investigate the dichotomy between fear and desire. She focuses on the idea of compulsive repetition, a pause or loop that subverts the constructions of narrative. Repetitive visual echoes become a play between a stuttering traumatic episode and a rhythmic sensual meditation. Laura O’Connor’s video works concentrate on images of women portrayed in media, advertising and film, combining the gloss-look of advertising and cinema with an interest in “normal” women to explore notions of female beauty in contemporary culture and the effects these images have on them in terms of beauty rituals and regimes.
Jenny Keane
Jenny Keane is a visual artist based in Belfast. Her practice is focused on the word 'horrific'. Through video installation and performative drawings, the work explores the self-portrait in an attempt to investigate the dichotomy between fear and desire, its relationship to language and connection to the (female) body.
Abjection and the Uncanny have been very influential in the practice, as has Feminist thought as well as theories of language and psychoanalysis. The work has always had references to contemporary visual culture, and the most important influence is society's fascination with fear and its artistic expression in horror films. The theorist Barbara Creed discusses the horror film as 'constantly restaging the threat and rejection of the feminine.' Images of blood, vomit, faeces, hair, etc. are central to our socially constructed notions of the horrific.
Keane's practice of both video installations and drawings are focused on 'liminality' and the idea of compulsive repetition; a pause or loop that subverts narrative. This repeating becomes a play between an internalised traumatic event and a sensual meditation.
Ciaran Hussey
Ciaran’s work revolves around the psychological effects that contemporary capitalist society has placed upon its practitioner. Through a multidisciplinary practice he draws attention to aspects that define us in an age of technological advances and uncertainty. In a world of paper-thin representations, instant gratification and blurring of reality we are left with a sense of numbified emptiness, repetitiveness, alienation and a general lack of apathy. We have developed an agitated sense of expectation, as we await some form of salvation, in the guise of commodities, services, fame and celebrity, that will deliver some solace, but instead are left with a niggling dissatisfaction and a constraining feeling of being cheated. Currently his practice involves highlighting these aspects using the medium of video installations and playing with peoples notion of aspirations, expectancy & escapism.
Linda Monks
Ideas come from many sources: TV, film, cartoons, comic books, everyday life and comedy her intention is that her work reflects that. Thrilled at having no epic cause to pursue, Monks makes art that amuses her. She uses drawings, photography, paper, puppets, stop-motion animation and video to communicate her relationship with art, popular culture, and her own peculiar slightly naïve outlook.
Louise Shine
Louise Shine produces work that is both playful and performative. She is concerned with the paradigms of simulation and reality present within Consumer Culture. Her work accumulates as guerrilla style ad-lib interventions, video performance and installation. She produces a kind of satirical commentary about the notion of conditioning in Consumerism. Her work is not the action of a dogmatic anti-consumer. It is instead an immersion in this very framework set up as a means to control. Everyone is implicated in this environment, but Shine is implicated knowingly. Her work is a reaction against her own social conformity.
The method of art simulating, referencing and subverting that which is already simulated, creates a more conversant hypothesis towards the referentiality of consumption.
Paola Bernardelli
Bernardelli is an Italian lens based artist who lives and works in Derry, Northern Ireland. Her work deals with the elements of reverie and representation and is inspired by the recurring themes of the European pictorial tradition.
Allan Hughes
Hughes is an artist based in Belfast and working out of Orchid Studios. His video installation work explores the production of remediated histories through the deconstruction of post-production processes. His works examine the precarious position of subjectivity within the constructed narratives of history and the processes of their representation and reception.
The Listening Station explores the partial and on-going decommissioning of the British Army communications post on the summit of Black Mountain. The site was initially put into service during the Cold War and has subsequently figured as a totemic sentinel of Britain’s political and military surveillance of Belfast, being visible from nearly anywhere in the city on its strategic vantage point. The facility is currently being dismantled after the land was sold to the National Trust for environmental conservation in 2005.
The work explores the site as an active agency and its current, on-going devolution to a former, ‘neutral’ existence. Specific references to both time and decoding forms a structural crux of the work, through references to ‘number stations’; cryptic short-wave radio transmissions thought to be cyphered communiqués to field agents.
The work aims to negotiate the conditions of surveillance, contrasting the exterior panoptic visual profile of the facility against the enclosed and internalized activities of the listener. A dynamic is established between the viewer and the audio, whereby listening, as much as looking, is marked as an activity of production and creates an unstable space where the process of synchronization is in continual formation.
Laura O’Connor
O'Connor's work deals with images of women portrayed in media, advertising and film. Looking at theorists such as Laura Mulvey and directors such as Hitchcock, combining the gloss look of advertising and cinema with an interest in “normal” women; the effects these images have on them in terms of beauty rituals and regimes, and the notion of beauty in contemporary culture. Her aim is to explore the boundaries between public and private space, using the camera as a mirror (Dull, Limp, Lifeless).She graduated with a Masters of Fine Art, from the University of Ulster, Belfast in 2011 and have been exhibiting national and internationally for the past 5 years.
