Artist-Initiated Projects 2023
Pallas Projects/Studios are delighted to announce the participating artists in our programme of Artist-Initiated Projects 2023. The series of 8 x 3-week exhibitions from March-November 2022 will present exhibitions of new work by: Daniel Tuomey, Venus Patel, Bog Cottage, Tanad Aaron, The Freebirds M.C.C. Project with Brigid Mulligan, Banbha McCann, INTER_SITE, Aoibheann Greenan.
Artist-Initiated Projects at Pallas Projects/Studios is an open-submission, annual gallery programme of 8 x 3-week exhibitions taking place from March-November 2023. This unique programme of funded, artist-initiated projects selected via open call is highly accessible to artists, with a focus on early career, emerging artists and recent graduates. Projects are supplemented with artists' talks, texts, workshops or performances, and gallery visits by colleges and local schools.
Artist-Initiated Projects aims to act as an incubator for early careers, and support artists' practices at crucial stages, providing a platform for artists to produce and exhibit challenging work across all art forms. The model of short-run exhibitions with a relatively short turnaround time of 3–6 months is an alternative to the normal institutional model, where the process of studio visit to exhibition can take several years. Shorter lead-in times allow the programme to be quick and responsive, reflect what artists are currently making, and encourage experimentation and risk-taking.
Pallas Projects/Studios Artist-Initiated Projects is funded by The Arts Council
—
Programme info:
Exhibitions will run Thurs–Sat for 3 weeks, with openings taking place on the first Thursday evening.
Daniel Tuomey — March 23-April 8
Venus Patel — April 13-29
Bog Cottage — June 15-24
Tanad Aaron — June 29-July 15
The Freebirds M.C.C. Project with Brigid Mulligan — July 27-August 12
Banbha McCann — September 14-30
INTER_SITE — October 5-21
Aoibheann Greenan — November 2-18
—
Pallas Projects/Studios is one of Ireland's longest running artist-run spaces, with a dedicated tradition over 22 years towards the professional development of artists in a peer-led, supportive environment, providing opportunities for emerging and mid-career artists to develop and exhibit new work. PP/S have established a nationwide and international reputation among artists and organisations, and a public profile through successful and critically engaged exhibitions, publishing, collaborations and partnerships, and education programmes for schools. Recent projects include the 4-year research project and publication 'Artist-Run Europe', published by Onomatopee, Eindhoven in 2016, and the annual 'Periodical Review' exhibition now in its tenth year.
Biogs of selected Artists:
Daniel Tuomey was born in Dublin, and currently lives and works in Rotterdam. His work stages the political and discursive consequences of formal gestures, exploring how hegemonic masculinity constructs itself through an attempted mastery of space and storytelling. He articulates points of crisis and vulnerability in this edifice, building fragile narrative installations with foundations in drawing, architecture and moving images. The characters in these narratives support themselves with a rough assemblage of props and scaffolding: chairs, pop songs, games, jokes, and gestures. His material stories often depart from absurdist autofiction and arrive at a poetics of absence, tracing an archaeological path through the perversions and politics inherent to his own living situations.
@danieltuomey | danieltuomey.info
Born in Los Angeles with a BA in Fine Art from TU Dublin (2022), Venus Patel is an experimental film and performance artist. She uses her work to talk about her experience as a trans femme of colour, trying to navigate the world. Through the use of clothing, makeup, and loose gender expression, she encapsulates the campy blend of her queer identity. Coming from a theatre and film background, her art ties into these vast tropes from the past. Venus questions the heteronormative society we live in, why the need to conform is so heavily enforced, and how that affects the perceptions of ourselves, others, and the world around us. Although her work deals with serious subject matter, she utilizes a unique mix of humor, absurdity, and abjection to create multi-faceted performances and experiences.
Bog Cottage is an artist collective, started in Sligo in 2019. Born from a need for queer community in rural Ireland, bog cot began as friends hanging out. Having a clay day, trying out oil painting, sharing a tufting gun. Filling time in a small town, and creating space for individual growth as artists and queers, through sharing and making.
Tanad Aaron Statement 2022. My solo practice is a form of research driven and object-making versus installation based work. Over the past two years I have begun to develop a critical process for teasing out both notions of permanence and semi-permanence within my work. Using texts and writing which form the bulk of the research and often find their way into the finished work, my practice also has a heavy focus on materials research and studio based testing and probing. Taking issue with today’s paradigm of cycle implied in excess, waste and recycling in a notional sense, my work undermines exhibition makings’ transience by creating texts, wall works and sculptures made of permanent elements alongside or within fleeting architectural interventions. Permanence here is represented as presence vs. time, where objects are created to last and therefore specifically question material associated with their durability e.g plastic, lead or oil paint. The installation becomes the counterpoint that presents itself as the ‘acting of an environment’ through its constituent parts and is shown to be the agency of a semi- permanent space soon to be changed and reconfigured thereafter acting on objects and visitors.
Brigid Mulligan’s collaborative practice involves using art as a medium to tackle complex subjects like the experience of grief. ‘The Freebirds M.C.C Project’ involved collaborating with twelve male members of Freebird’s Motorcycle club from county Longford across various artforms including film, archiving and sculptural installation. The ‘Freebird’s M.C.C Project’ focused on taking time to look back at the motorcycle clubs shared histories and the significant loss of three club members due to road traffic accidents. The result was a 35 minute film screening & exhibition at the Backstage theatre Longford & an Taibhdhearc theatre Galway 2022. Mulligan holds a Master-in-creative Practice & First-Class Honours Degree in Fine Art Sculpture from ATU Galway. Recent awards include the Irish Hospice Foundation, Seed Grant 2022, the Pilot Mentor Scheme Award 2022, the Project Realisation Award 2021, R&D, Artist in the community award, 2021 from Create collaborative arts and the Arts Council of IRE.
The ‘Freebird’s M.C.C Project’ is a socially engaging project that involves twelve male members of the Freebird’s motorcycle club from county Longford along with club member and little sister Brigid Mulligan as lead artist and Bruno Pierucci as cinematographer. In 2021 the group received a project realisation award from the Arts Council IRE managed by Create collaborative arts supporting the group to work together. In a yearlong collaborative project creating a film, sculptures and an archival exhibition based on the club members shared histories and communal effects of loss. In 2002 two of the club members tragically died in motorcycle accidents. In January Kevin Mulligan (18) and in April Sean Mulligan (21). Seventeen years later in 2019 another club member died tragically in a car accident Noel Sheridan (35). This mammoth loss had a huge effect on all the club members. The ‘Freebird’s M.C.C Project’ resulted with a 35 minute film screening & exhibition at the Backstage theatre Longford & an Taibhdhearc theatre Galway 2022. ‘Freebird’s M.C.C Project’ have recently been awarded the Irish Hospice Foundation seed grant 2022/2023 towards touring their work to audiences who may benefit from an open conversation about grief.
@brigidmulliganart | brigidmulliganvisualartist.com
Banbha McCann’s practice focuses on the power of the built environment to convey societal aspirations, personal identity and nostalgia. Although the work is often devoid of the human figure the presence of inhabitation is felt, conveying a glimpse, or a moment caught within a narrative. The subjects are studied at micro and macro level, moving between scales, dimensions and perspectives, a reflection of how an architect designs and explores context. The work is thus a combination of a record and a way of examining emotional resonance and the legacies of experience. Recent projects include a residency and solo exhibition in Fujiyoshida, Japan (2022) which will be shown in Studio 1 Temple Bar in 2023, and a solo exhibition in Dublin (2021) as well as two group exhibitions in Dublin and London (2022). She will participate in Can Serrat residency, Spain with support from a Dun Laoghaire Rathdown Creative Ireland Bursary in 2023.
@banbha_mc_cann | banbhamccann.com
INTER_SITE is an artist collective based in Cork City established by Padraic Barrett, Deirdre Breen, Aoife Claffey and Kate McElroy. They are a group of recent graduates from the MA in Art and Process, MTU. Since the reopening of events in Ireland in May 2021, they created 6 exhibitions, 35 at PADA studios, Barreiro, Portugal, inter_site at Queen’s Old Castle, Grand Parade, Cork City, Pulsating, p(l)ace, for Faoin Speir curated by Ciara Rodgers, Wandesford Quay, Cork, (2022) Oileán, Spike Island, Cork and Oileáin, Fitzgerald’s Park, Cork City, curated by Sineád Barrett and inter_site, the Marina Market, Cork City. (2021) They were awarded a project award in 2021 to realise these projects. Most recently they exhibited in Sluice, an international artist-run Biennale in Barreiro, Portugal. Artists include Aoife Claffey, Kate McElroy, and Pádraic Barrett.
Aoibheann Greenan's work across moving image, live performance, installation, sculpture, costume and drawing, elicits the coercive mechanisms underlying our increasingly designed experiences. Methods of mediating affect and attention are amplified within theatrical installations that probe our complicity with capitalist systems of control. Strange loops emerge between consumer culture, biological processes and archetypal symbolism.
Greenan holds an MA in Artist’s Film & Moving Image (2020) and an MA in Performance Making (2018) from Goldsmiths University. Her work has been selected for New Contemporaries 2021 (Firstsite, Colchester and South London Gallery) and Film London’s Selected Program (Nottingham Contemporary; Spike Island, Bristol, Fabrica, Brighton; Phoenix, Leicester) Greenan’s work has been presented at The Starr Cinema, Tate Modern; DRAF, London; Raven Row, London; KW institute, Berlin; Import Projects, Berlin; IMMA, Dublin; Project Arts Centre, Dublin; Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin; EVA International, Limerick; The RHA, Dublin. Greenan is a co-founder of the artist collective East London Cable
@hrodeo.oracle | aoibheanngreenan.com
Image description: Artist-Initiated Projects Pallas Projects/Studios is formed out of the white negative space of bright blue dots, with Pallas square logo in the centre