Press Release – 21 March 2011
Children Get Choosy with
IMMA
Art Alongside / 23 March – 9 April
2011 / Wexford Arts Centre
Children Get Choosy with IMMA opens to the public at Wexford Arts Centre on Wednesday 23
January 2011. An initiative of the Arts Department of Wexford
County Council, Art Alongside is a
visual arts programme based in primary schools throughout County Wexford.
The six schools involved in the 2010 / 2011 project are Barntown
National School,
St. Patrick’s N.S, Craanford, Scoil Naomh Aine, Rathgarogue,
Cushinstown National School,
Kildavin National
School and Courtnacuddy National
School.
This year’s Art Alongside
continued its hugely successful partnership between Wexford County Council, the
Arts Council of Ireland, the National Programme of the Irish Museum
of Modern Art, Wexford Arts Centre and primary level schools.
For the
current project, children from County Wexford primary schools were shown high quality
reproductions of artwork from the Irish
Museum of Modern Art’s
Collection. Guided by project artists Mary Claire O’Brien and Helen
Robbins, the children involved were facilitated in looking carefully at each of
these reproductions and made their choice of work to be included in their
exhibition in Wexford Arts Centre. Following this period of research, the
classroom art projects were devised, based on the student’s understanding
of and responses to their chosen piece of work. The children worked extensively
in a variety of different media including painting, drawing, photography, textiles
and weaving, clay, construction and papier mache.
Art Alongside provides an exciting
opportunity for participating classes to become familiar with the IMMA collection,
and in a meaningful way the children explore a piece of contemporary art of their
choice.
The selection of work from each of
the schools will be shown in this countywide exhibition at Wexford Arts Centre,
alongside the work of the project artists, and works selected by the children from
IMMA’s collection including Landmarks
of Industrial Britain by Canadian artist Carl Zimmerman, Study for Arcadia by Gary Coyle and Untitled by Louise Bourgeois.
Carl Zimmerman evokes
eighteenth-century Enlightenment debates about power and the sublime in his
photoworks of enormously scaled public buildings only to mischeviously
deconstruct them. The sepia tones of Mausoleum, Birmingham, England
and the imperial authority of the building have all the hallmarks of the real
thing. The photograph is real but the architecture it portrays is artificial, shot
from a meticulously created maquette by the artist and digitally enhanced to
place it in a setting as convincing as Piranesi's megalomaniacal prison
drawings. Totalitarian aspirations, as embodied in public buildings, are mocked
as the viewer is sucked into the fiction, only to find that they have been
deceived and the authority of image and ideology is undermined. The classical
simplicity of the composition and the high production values assert an
aesthetic authority in its place
Gary Coyle returns to subject matter he has previously
explored, namely crime scenes. What continues to interest Coyle in these images
is the problematic claim on reality. The field provides excellent examples of a
world anticipated by Jean Baudrillard in which these images of reality are
themselves simulations. Their authenticity is a special effect. They are hyper
real rather than really real, as the distinction between reality and image has
become effaced. As Baudrillard puts it “we live everywhere in an
aesthetic hallucination of the real”. Somehow these images are unable to
express what lies within them. They seem to make more sense in the realm of art
than in the domain of the real. For, to quote Gerhard Richter,
“Photography has no reality, it is almost 100 % picture; and painting
always has reality”. Interspersed among these images of sex and death are
drawings based on images culled from the contemporary mediascape, of lifestyle
and celebrity magazines, tabloids and holiday brochures
Trained as a painter, Louise Bourgeois began to work in sculpture in New York in 1938 after
her marriage to the art historian Robert Goldwater. In the late 1940s and early
1950s, she virtually abandoned painting and began to create a series of totemic
figures in wood whose verticality evokes the human form. The artist
reinterpreted these early works and some of the most arresting of
Bourgeois’ later works are a series of extraordinary upright and
front-facing fabric heads, one of which can be seen in the exhibition. Sewn
with a crudeness that belies their structural sophistication, they are
nevertheless uncannily lifelike – open mouths appear moist from
exhalation and their eyes apparently focus directly on the viewer or seem to
deliberately glance away. These are difficult works to confront; a difficulty
compounded by the mute and resistant glass cases which encase them.
IMMA’s National Programme is
designed to create access opportunities to the visual arts in a variety of
situations and locations in Ireland.
Using the Collection of the Irish
Museum of Modern Art and
exhibitions generated by the Museum, the National Programme facilitates the
creation of exhibitions and other projects for display in a range of venues
around the country. The National Programme establishes the Museum as inclusive,
accessible and national, de-centralising the Collection, and making it
available to communities in their own localities, on their own terms, in venues
with which the audience is comfortable and familiar.
Exhibition continues
until 9 April 2011.
Admission is Free.
Wexford Arts Centre
Cornmarket, Wexford
Opening Hours: Monday to Saturday 10.00am to 6.00pm.
Tel: 053 9123764
Email: info@wexfordartscentre.ie
Website: http://www.wexfordartscentre.ie/
Wexford County
Council Arts Department
County Hall, Spawell Road, Wexford
Tel: 053 9176369
Email: arts@wexfordcoco.ie
Website: http://www.wexford.ie/arts
For further information and images please contact Vanessa Cowley or Patrice
Molloy at Tel: + 353 1 612 9900; Email: press@imma.ie.
21 March
2011
Vanessa Cowley
Acting Senior Public Affairs Executive
Irish Museum of
Modern Art
Royal Hospital
Military Road
Kilmainham
Dublin
8
Ireland
Switchboard +353 1 612 9900
Fax +353 1 612 9999
Email vanessa.cowley@imma.ie
Website www.imma.ie
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