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Public Art Projects Video Artists Installation Art Interactive Art Conceptual Art Contemporary Art Irish Art New Media IAT Denis Connolly Anne Cleary Boulevard Barbès Paris Dance The Place Political Art Works The City In Context 3
The City
Suburbban sprawl
transport
The City as a work of art
Ballymun Sequence is the result of a year of work during which we developed a project with the residents of Ballymun, a Dublin suburb which has focused some of the worst social problems that the city has known, and which is now in full redevelopment. We worked with community groups of all ages to produce a work that is a mix of dance, music, juggling and urban movement (see our Public Art page).
The young Irish composer Andrew Hamilton kindly gave us permission to use his work Phrase for Goran Zivadinovic to accompany this choreography of the contemporary city.
A public art project for the Ballymun Primary Healthcare Facility. Ballymun, Dublin. Ireland
2006-2007
Dance
Workshop
Dance Ireland
Foley Street, Dublin
27 February - 1 March 2008
With
Natalie Grand
Emma Fitzgerald
Cindy Cummings
Ailish Claffey
Mary Keane
Deirdre Murphy
PHOTOS >
(Extract)
Digital Film
2007
17’ 03”
music
Dinahbird
Jean Philippe Renoult
video
Denis Connolly
Anne Cleary
PHOTOS >
The City is a force of nature in its own right, constantly reshaping and reinventing itself, struggling to shake off a century old skin of concrete, iron and asphalt that it has outgrown. The transformation of the Boulevard Barbès is one of the waves of works sweeping the north of Paris, urban regeneration sparked by a growing sensitivity to the environment. There are five Natures in Construction: EarthWorks: machines pierce and tear the earth; TarWorks: hot bitumen; StoneWorks: the weight and hardness of masonry; WoodWorks: urban trees are shorn; PublicWorks; layers of urban life printed on the pavement.
With support from the Département de l’Art dans la Ville (Mairie de Paris) and the Mairie du XVIIIe arrondissement, Paris.
The
Observer
Effect
CityLoops Dublin
2007- 2008
Collinstown Park Community College
With
Fiona Delaney
Marie O'Connell
April Gallagher
Conor Miley
Kenneth Dunne
Robbie Smith
Paul Hughes
Sean Price
Stacey McKenna
Mar-May 2008
It would be impossible to make a project about everyday movement in Dublin without considering the car. So many Dubliners spend so much of their days looking through windscreens at tarmacadam and listening to the radio. If these loops are repetitive and often lonely, yet most drivers enjoy the sense of security and of control over their lives they feel when they are in their cars.
Since February 2008 we have been exploring the visual and aural experience of driving in Dublin, greatly aided by Cóilín Rush - who invented various contraptions for us to film a car’s eye view of the world - and abetted by recordings of Gerry Ryan, Marty Miller, Mary Wilson, Jim McCabe & Co. on Irish radio.
In March 2008 we worked with a group of 5th year students Collinstown Park Community College, one of the few secondary schools in Dublin which really serves a single community. In their art class, We taught them to use a professional video camera and discussed the whole question of community and everyday movement, and what that means to an adolescent today.
The term observer effect refers to how people change their behavior when aware of being watched.
We were concern not to interfere with what we wanted to observe and, as in Life of Saint Mary, we asked the students to film their own everyday journeys, with complete freedom to adopt whatever filming strategy they felt was neccessary. But the camera, passed from hand to hand, inevitably transforms the everyday into an adolescent spectacle. The result of their efforts is a funny and pertinent patchwork of suburban life at 17.
General release: Autumn 2008?
... At first he was quietly standing by a tree, watching us skillfully improvise our way round the piles of dog shite, looking pretty rough and not all that steady on his legs. Generally speaking, someone you’d probably avoid if you were on your own. But we (the participants of the ‘Body and Camera’ workshop with Denis Connolly and Anne Cleary) were connecting to each other through our first language and having a great time inbetween the rain showers. Seamus saw this and started a shy little dance next to his tree. As Denis glided by with his steadycam, I whispered to him: ‘look at yer man, he’s dancin!’ Denis swooped around to catch Seamus in his treedancingmoment and that was all the invitation he needed to join in.
Extract from a text by
Cindy Cummings
Psycle
Photo Series
CityLoops Dublin
2007- 2008
Cycling seems to have little appeal to the new generation of Dubliners, wooed by sophisticated and omnipresent car advertisements or intimidated by the hard motor-centred road networks. The Psycle photo series is an attempt to cast a dissenting stone into the river of seductive and spectacular auto adverts.
An Extended Family.
The installations for this exhibition all belong to one family. Some of them are new-born and some have survived and evolved through several generations.
In new technologies, generations are short. The grandfather of the family was only born in 2005 - though probably conceived several years earlier - under the name of House Guests. It was a room with a fixed camera, a computer and a screen. The screen showed a film recorded on a fixed camera, mixed with live video from the same camera showing the spectators in the same space as the film. After a private debut in early June at Nicolas Schoffer’s Studio in Paris (on the invitation of the artist’s widow, Eleonore) it passed the summer months in an architect’s house in Brittany before travelling, with Eriko Momotani, to the Yokohama Triennial in Japan for its public debut. It was a little clumsy at first, needing constant supervision, dropping video frames and regularly crashing. But all in all, it survived its travels well. A year later it turned up on the other side of the world in Limerick City Gallery of Art under a new name, Here Then and Now, and with four little offspring in tow. Over the winter it had been thoroughly overhauled and remodelled and it was during this time, when it went briefly under the name of Avant-Pendant, that the family HereThereNowThen was born.
The second generation of the family owes much to the father, although they each have their own defining character. Unlike their father, none is particularly concerned about the past. But, like him, each is concerned with the present, in fact with the continuous present. Now is a constantly changing drawing of the present moment, erasing itself as it moves on, while Here sees only what is moving through the present, perceiving stillness as emptiness; Here and There sees the passing seconds as contrasting stripes of black and white; Now and Then shifts the three colours of it’s camera eye to watch how bodies move through the present.
Two years later, after many scattered individual appearances, the family is re-united for a pompy doo in Paris. The father is now a grandfather, with a couple of third generation installations making their public debut and two more in the nursery. Plucky and robust, the newcomers can do things their parents only dreamed of. But the older members of the family have the benefits of maturity; debugged with fully developed software, faster processors and more memory, as well as an acumen that can only come from experience.
Despite their electronic nature the family are all gregarious in character. From the beginning they have invited in visitors - adults, children and even pets - to converse with them and to challenge them. And they have continuously invited artists to perform with them: musicians, dancers, actors, even standup comics... They can be grave or comic, meditative or burlesque, straightforward or elusive, always in deference to their guests.
Dancer Claire de Monclin works with the installation Here&There