Cavanacor Gallery

Susan O’Brien - Solo Exhibition

27th June—30th August 2009

 

Peter O’Kane Solo Exhibition at Cavanacor Gallery
 The  Award: A solo exhibition for a Fine Art student from the RDS Student Art Awards

Exhibition, the year following the selection,  in Gallery 5  at Cavanacor.
 Cavanacor Gallery was established in 1999 and is dedicated to showing contemporary art. The gallery aims to increase the audience for contemporary art and has established a professional, commercial venue in the Northwest. The gallery shows work by emerging and established national and international artists. Cavanacor Gallery would like to contribute to the career and development of future young artists by offering a solo exhibition to one artist each year.
Cavanacor Gallery have created a unique award beginning in 2008 of a solo exhibition to a Fine Art student from the RDS Art Student Award Exhibition.
The  Exhibition will be curated by the Gallery Director and  included a studio visit to the artist earlier this  year. Susan O’Brien, National College of Art & Design, is the first recipient of the award which was announced at the prize giving at the RDS on Thursday 31st July 2008.

 

 

Susan OBrien A Fine Line 20x20cms

 

 

 

 

 

Susan OBrien Ground Control 20x20cms

 

 

 

 

Susan OBrien Hangman 20x20 cms

 

 

 

Susan O'Brien  Sea View 20x20 cms

 

 

Susan OBrien Landscape 40x40 cms 3 panels

 

Artist’s statement

Today’s world exists as a mediated platform that performs our ‘globalised, unified’ lives before us as they have been, are and should be. It has arguably universalised us, standardised and categorised us, and the power of the medium has undoubtedly sold us the uniform of contemporary identity. It is what Gilles Deleuze refers to as the ‘powers of the false’ (2006, p.53), where truth becomes appearance as truth. Hence, as the documentation of fact is an increasingly ambiguous task,  the purpose of this study is to investigate ‘the fact of life’ in our present world, how one struggles to identify and communicate as ‘self’, as ‘other’, and how one relates through a sense of knowing and familarity, or becomes an outsider through feeling detached or at odds in a world that imposes immense demands within the restrictions it ordanes
If science is to be understood as the study of facts, systematic knowledge of the material/ physical world, then I would say that  my concerns are embedded in that place in between; the human and unpredictable response to what is left in the place of (perceived) cold hard certainty; the metaphysical world. My work to date is predominantly concerned with feelings around and the reality of our fragility, vulnerability and the endless network of complexities embedded in human nature and the ambiguity of ‘being’ human in the contemporary world, how ‘it’ (our world) impacts upon us, and how we impact, act and react to our position within ‘it’.

 

 

 

Cavanacor Gallery Ballindrait, Lifford, Co. Donegal, Ireland

Telephone / Fax 00353 74 9141143

email: art@cavanacorgallery.ie