QUEER AS YOU ARE Summer Group Exhibition at Luan Gallery
BREDA LYNCH Breda Lynch is an artist, curator and a full-time lecturer in Fine Art at the Limerick School of Art and Design. She holds a BA Hons degree from the Crawford College of Art, Cork, an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art, London and an MPhil Fine Art and Digital Media from the University of Wolverhampton, England. Lynch has created art from her ongoing engagement with discourses on identity, appropriation and re-appropriation, hidden histories and queer culture. Additionally, she engages with methodologies and approaches that respond to the history of mechanical reproduction, digital reproduction online, the persistent circulation of images in the public domain, all the while querying our relationship with the image, its consumption, distribution, reproduction, value and forcing (re)considerations of authenticity within art. After all, the online civilisation is historically speaking, a relatively new space wherein pictures circulate devoid of origins. QUEER AS YOU ARE at Luan Gallery will present her most recent instalment of the on-going project Fragments of a Lost Civilisation. A continuous issue, lesbian queerness and sexuality is still largely invisible, in part because it wasn’t seen as so significant in legal and religious terms. In a somewhat labour of love, Lynch endeavours to archive the hidden history of women’s same-sex desire and make it comprehensible. KIAN BENSON BAILES Kian Benson Bailes is an Irish artist residing in the West of Ireland. He graduated from the Institute of Art and Design Technology IADT, Dublin, in 2016, his multifaceted practice explores rural Ireland, visual language and identity politics. For Bailes, queer artworks are functional objects, not only as educational tools but as artefacts that further contextualize and embody queer academia and relational queer art practices. Drawing parallels between the aesthetics of rural and marginalised communities, he builds alternative narratives using figuration and motifs associated with rurality, superstitions and folklore. Often considered twee, pastoral or craft, Irish folklore frames the visual landscape of rural communities and art spaces in Ireland. Craft nor queer are essentialist terms, each resist definition and have complex identities. Bailes highlights the intersection between rural and queer heritage noting that there is a necessity of these aesthetics in its function, building communities that lack the same kinds of urban infrastructures and economics.
CONOR O’GRADY Conor O’Grady is an Irish multi-disciplinary artist based in Donegal, who actively employs a socially engaged art practice. His work explores the research methods of relational aesthetics and dialogue as a medium to examine the lived experiences of marginalised communities in society. He works collaboratively translating his conversations with these groups into moving image, site-specific intervention, and archival processes. Emotive and complex his output is often an examination of the moments where minorities are told that they are unwanted by the rest of society. At times the viewer may feel like passive, voyeuristic bystander but who is, in fact, an active witnesses to the experiences of the underprivileged and unheard. Current works by the artist focus on the symbiotic relationship between different marginalized groups. Mapping isolated spaces within urban and rural settings as sites of ‘promise’ or ‘victimisation’. He offers unique perspectives on class, generation and the negotiations of safety by closeted gay men outside the commodified ‘gay bar’. Abstract and ambiguous O’Grady documents groups whose lives have not been affected by the changing political landscape and who actively aim to leave little to no trace of their existence. STEPHEN DOYLE Stephen Doyle is a Cork-based artist currently working from Backwater Studios. They explore issues of queer identity through the relationship between figuration and the politics of representation. Doyle makes figurative work of LGBTQIA+ people, and often includes objects in the paintings, a gesture of ‘othering’ the art that mirrors the subject matter it investigates. Painting, and portraiture in particular, is associated with the iconography of power (for example politicians and religious figures), and consequently with mainstream worldviews, of which queer identity and culture have always been excluded. By invoking them, Doyle makes an ironic comment on the subalternisation of the existence of the LGBTQIA+ community, and simultaneously does their part to illuminate it.
As part of its Summer 2021 programme Luan Gallery is delighted to present Queer As You Are; a group exhibition of Irish artists which explores the gaps and fissures of queer presence within Irish history and considers how queer historical discourses, or lack thereof, populate our past, present and future. The exhibition will run from mid-July to mid-September, pending public health restrictions and will feature artists; Kian Benson Bailes, Stephen Doyle, Austin Hearne, Breda Lynch and Conor O’ Grady. The artists within this exhibition examine the tension in translating different historical, social, and cultural contexts into something that can be understood by others today. Addressing the absence of objects to assist in their storytelling, each supplement alternative materials, drawing on psychoanalysis, activism, archaeology, hook up culture, the occult and autobiographical accounts. From queering the rural to dragging religious hegemony and ‘lesbian spotting’ the exhibition sceptically, pulls apart linear time into constitutive pieces and analyses it from a variety of perspectives, taking nothing for granted. Queer As You Are is subject to Government Health restrictions in place at that time. Exhibition dates will be announced via Luan Gallery media; Instagram @luangalleryathlone and Facebook: @LuanGallery
AUSTIN HEARNE Austin Hearne is an Irish artist living in Dublin. He holds an MFA from NCAD, and has since exhibited extensively; with a new film work Whispers premiered at The Darkroom, Dublin in May. In his practice Austin Hearne attempts to (re)appropriate and queer religious imagery, seeking a way to celebrate queer memory whilst simultaneously acting as a point of resistance. Despite holding a staunch position himself, Hearne’s practice is a nuanced reflection on religion and suffering, rather than sacrilege. The infiltration of religious institutions into the queer Irish life is represent through a serious of domestic and interior items. Unapologetically camp they remind us that intermingling the sexuality and materiality of bodies with the transcendental concepts of spirituality and religion can still shock. QUEER AS YOU ARE presents his latest works Devine Dividers and Self Portrait; an installation which addresses the ‘hypocritical’ drag of the church juxtaposed by Hearne’s raw self-portrait in which he reflects on his own bodily integrity and physicality.
www.corkpride.com
#CorkPride2021
148
149
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker