"Installations by Tonico Auad and Willie McKeown"
2003-12-17 until 2004-01-24
Project Arts Centre
Dublin, , IE Ireland

A new exhibition of works by Willie McKeown and Tonica Auad opened on the 16th of December at the Project Gallery in Dublin. McKeown presents an installation with paintgs and Auad shows a site specific work created from the carpet in the gallery. McKeown is an artist based in Dublin. Auad is a Brazilian artist who works between Sao Paulo and London.

For the last ten years Willie McKeown has worked in the genre of monochrome paintings - although his work fits oddly into this category. Unusually for work of this kind, they attempt to express notions of freedom, inclusion and the equality making them simultaneously complex and naïve. At Project the paintings will be hung in an artificial room constructed inside the buildings existing architecture. The room's dimensions are taken from a convent in County Waterford where McKeown spent a year painting and made significant developments in his work. Beyond its autobiographical nature, the room structures the viewer's perception in a particular way, becoming the threshold onto an illusionary space.

Tonica Auad's practice takes materials from everyday life and puts it though a process of transformation. Subtle surface shifts brought about though the intervention of touch, produce artworks and situations that can be poetic and luxurious, slight, degraded, chancy, unintelligible or melancholic. These interventions include a bunch of bananas with a face pricked onto their surface with a pin. Fake gold jewellery dropped onto the floor at an opening and the figure of an animal made from a bunch of grapes with the fruit removed. At Project, Auad will carpet the gallery and use this as a starting point from which to develop his piece.

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for Ireland

Other Important Exhibitions in Dublin