Come Back To Me

National College of Art & Design

2 May - 10 May

Opening reception - 2 May at 6pm

Val Bresnihan, Steven Doody, Sarah Edmondson, Andrej Getman, Barry Gibbons, Jacqueline Hackett, Mirona Mara, Niamh McGuinne, Luke Monaghan, Ciarán O'Keeffe, Gary Reilly, Charlotte Reynolds, Aidan Sharkey, Lena Willryd

Come Back To Me is an exhibition of new work by 14 artists from first year MFA Fine Art in the National College of Art and Design, involving a range of media including performance, video, painting, printmaking and installation. The exhibition is an interruption into space and time, grappling with the complex predicaments of contemporary culture and society.

'An artist's studio is a catapult for contemporary concepts. An idea, once loaded, may be drawn for an intensive period of time with variable tension. This gestation period of elasticity lends itself to repetitive stretching, looping conceptual thinking, referential appropriation, consistent reevaluation of the contextual terms of loaded entity and its relationship with the evolving environmental factors it may encounter once released into orbit.

Once aimed, and the trajectory fixed on a point in time and space, the artist 'lets go' and we encounter the alien object in another place, not of its origin. Its journey so often alluding us. The enigmatic source only surmised by the traces scrutinised by the viewer. The artifact now takes on its own independent existence, It speaks to the other phenomenon in its proximity creating a new terrain for discourse. These reverberations, in turn, may speak to us in many languages and of multifarious conditions and tensions.

Come Back To Me - a pre-apocalyptic lament, often situates the individual as a point of departure, where we may consider identity as a distorted perception of self and memory as form. These works then sprawl into a psychogeography that encounters contemporary modular forms, deserted architecture and the imposition of new borders. Haunted by nostalgia, and laden with the clunk of contemporary disillusionment, Come Back To Me contemplated perhaps the ultimate escape; to outer spae, as we wrestle to comprehend the impending catastrophe of the geological epoch; the Anthropocene.

Come Back To Me. This is not a boomerang.'

- Brendan Fox

A programme of events organised by the exhibiting artists will run concurrent to the exhibition.

Image Credit: Lena Willryd