‘The portraits capture the intricacies of self-presentation and highlight a young woman’s discomfort when she sees an image in the mirror that fails to live up to her desires.’
We’re continuing our SATURATION spotlight series with visual artist Eva O’Leary and her photographic portraits featured in the exhibition.
Spitting Image (2017) comprises fourteen portraits of ‘self-identifying girls between the ages of eleven and fourteen, reacting to their reflection through a two-way mirror.’
Installation view of Spitting Image (2017). Photo by Jed Niezgoda.
Using a large-format 8x10 camera, O’Leary notes that ‘these girls – who belong to a generation fluent in selfies, tags on social media, and using iPhone cameras as mirrors – understand how to construct identity through images. Nonetheless, the gulf between their appearance and the commercial imagery with which they are inundated remains vast.’
Eva O’Leary (b.1989) primarily works through photography and video to navigate structural and social systems that perpetuate ideologies of fantasy, power, and control within American society. Her work specifically focuses on the impact these systems have on young women and their experience in the world.
Conor Clinch
'I approach everything as an absolute outsider. It is the only way I can break so many rules.'
Together with model Ryan Zaman and fashion stylist Giulio Ventisei, the Irish photographer channels the spirit and otherworldly 'look' of the irrepressible performer Klaus Nomi. In other works featured in the exhibition, Clinch similarly elevates fashion photography for Vogue Italia through bold and unexpected use of form and colour.
Originally from Dublin, Conor Clinch is currently based in London and endeavours to tell stories in an authentic and inclusive way through his documentary-style films and distinct fashion imagery. Referring to SATURATION, he says: ‘I am so honored to be in the company of so many amazing Irish artists.’
Click here for information on a Saturation Panel Discussion.
Pádraig Spillane
‘All image surfaces are ripples of thoughts and forces that shape and comprise contemporary experience.'
- Pádraig Spillane
Our SATURATION spotlight series continues with Pádraig Spillane, an artist, educator, and exhibition-maker who works across image making and installation.
Paradise Transmission (2019) and What was lost was never there (2021) are among the five works by Spillane featured in SATURATION. The artist considers ‘how images function in shared and private realms by taking them apart for reassembly and re-presentation.’
Spillane’s interest in the construction of images leads to a searching or questioning of how they function as ‘social and desire-loaded affective structures, tracing the networks that create spaces to be with images.’
You can view a recording of Audrey Gillespie & Pádraig Spillane: In Conversation below.
Dragana Jurišić
“During the summers of 2020 and 2021, Vis island provided shelter to my friends and I, offering some semblance of normality in a world becoming increasingly inhospitable. The underwater world became a place of play, joy and healing.
I am looking forward to having my work exhibited in SATURATION: the everyday transformed and seeing the exhibition which is unabashedly about the pleasures of seeing.”
Dragana Jurišić is a Yugoslav artist and Assistant Professor at the Dublin City University. Working primarily with image, text and video and looking at the effects of exile and displacement on memory and identity, Jurišić has shown her work extensively and won many awards, including the Golden Fleece Special Recognition Award, IMMA 1000 Residency Award and numerous Bursaries and Project Awards. Her work is in a collection of the National Gallery of Ireland, the Arts Council Collection and the Irish State’s National Art Collection.
Michael Hanna
“It is exciting to be part of the exhibition SATURATION: the everyday transformed, and I am looking forward to seeing the work installed in the Crawford Art Gallery.”
Michael Hanna’s ‘A Living Colour Index’ is a photo series produced in response to the days and weeks blending together during the first Covid lockdown in Northern Ireland. The interior of the artist’s home was lit entirely with a different colour each week, moving through the spectrum from red to violet. The colour provided a new sensory living environment within the same space, testing the idea that novel experiences play a part in memory formation and in turn set the parameters for our experience of time. An image was posted online each day with an accompanying quotation.
Michael Hanna, 'A Living Colour Index' (1 of 49), 2020, photographic print. Courtesy of the Artist and MAC, Belfast
Hanna’s ‘A Living Colour Index’ was one of the 225 artworks that was acquired for Ireland’s National Collection of art in 2021, as part of a major acquisition fund provided to Crawford Art Gallery and the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. Learn more about the National Collection here.
Michael Hanna, 'A Living Colour Index' (1 of 49), 2020, photographic print. Courtesy of the Artist and MAC, Belfast.
Hanna is an artist based in Northern Ireland. He has exhibited in group exhibitions in the UK and internationally including Multiplicity at NURTUREart, New York and Quicksilver at Freelands Foundation, London. Solo exhibitions include Short Films about Learning at Lismore Castle Arts, Ireland, and Looking Backward at PS2, Belfast. He has recently completed a residency at Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, and the Freelands Artist Programme, a 2-year fellowship with PS2, Belfast and Freelands Foundation, London.
Michael is a co-founder of AMINI, an artist led initiative for the promotion and critical discussion of artists’ moving image in Northern Ireland.
Ruth Medjber
In this video, Ruth Medjber (aka Ruthless Imagery) introduces us to ‘WORSHIP’, an immersive visual and audio experience as part of SATURATION: the everyday transformed at Crawford Art Gallery.
Medjber’s homage to Ireland's live music-loving culture is presented through photographs of 'larger-than-life-sized’ crowd scenes which are synchronised with a mesmerising lighting display, designed by Conor Biddle, and a rapturous soundscape by Alma Kelliher. See you up the front!
Click here for information on a Saturation Panel Discussion.
Audrey Gillespie
In this video, Audrey Gillespie introduces us to her ‘This Hurts’ series, part of SATURATION: the everyday transformed at Crawford Art Gallery.
“This exhibition carries an array of emotive work as well as being rich in colour and conception – being close to my own work’s motives, I can imagine that this exhibition will highlight each artist’s integrity and style in all the best ways.”
In this video, Audrey Gillespie introduces us to her This Hurts series, part of SATURATION the everyday transformed at Crawford Art Gallery
Audrey Gillespie’s series 'This Hurts', part of SATURATION: the everyday transformed at Crawford Art Gallery, is a multimedia series that uses analogue images, painting and silkscreen printing to translate heavy emotions through colour-saturated images. Creating blurred lines between anxiety-fuelled dreams using experimental double exposures, hallucinogenic atmospheres, soft focus and deep tones fuse the subject and backdrop in Gillespie's images before whipping it back to sun-glazed scenes, settling into a fugue state.
Image Audrey Gillespie installing the series This Hurts at SATURATION the everyday transformed, 2022.
Gillespie is an Irish fine artist from Derry, Northern Ireland. Currently living and creating in Belfast, her media include analogue photography, painting and printmaking. Gillespie explores themes of queerness, mortality and conflict with youth and anxiety in her current series 'This Hurts'.
You can view a recording of Audrey Gillespie & Pádraig Spillane: In Conversation below.
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