Kerlin Gallery is delighted to announce PHOENIX PARK, an exhibition of new work by six exciting young artists, Aoife Collins, Vera Klute, Eoin McHugh, Clive Murphy, Seamus Nolan and Sonia Shiel.

PHOENIX PARK is an exhibition of six very different practices, 5 Irish and 1 German, located in either Dublin or New York, working in a range of media that includes animation, drawing, sculpture, sound, installation and painting.  Avoiding the constraints of a thematic show Phoenix Park seeks to celebrate the current cultural climate, presenting a multiplicity of individual practices, occupying a shared space articulating a very diverse set of concerns and subjects.

Aoife Collins’ work often employs existing materials or objects, transferring them with a painstaking attention to detail and craft into new and disturbingly altered configurations.  Through a carefully considered de-construction and re-construction of everyday found objects for example a plastic potted plant or displays of plastic flowers Collins’ questions the roles of function and form while generating new objects of striking beauty and complexity.  

Vera Klute employs the very immediate and accessible discipline of drawing, to create sophisticated animations, drawings and paintings. For this show Klute has made an animation that is played on two screens.  The images are immediately recognizable yet strange and mysterious.  The work eschews any traditional linear narrative fostering instead a rich and limitless world of associations and curious suggestions.

Eoin Mc Hugh’s practice is centred around a profound interest in the psychology of imagery.  He explores the communicative and social nature of art and its action on both public and domestic architecture.  Through delicate paintings and an ambitious non-pattern wallpaper, Mc Hugh creates a 2 dimensional investigation of the gallery space as a bridge between the public and the intensely private.

Clive Murphy’s practice draws from the peripheries of visual culture, mining lo-fi sources for familiar signifiers in order to explore their wider cultural resonance.  Murphy uses material often overlooked, striving for results that are greater than the sums of their parts; a disused cardboard box is transformed into an inflatable with dangerous, explosive potential, a cassette recorder is transformed to become the source of a constantly moving landscape drawing replete with soundtrack or the oft discarded hotel brochure becomes a series of subtle yet provocative drawings.

Seamus Nolan’s work investigates the relative value of objects and social processes as they appear within different economies and contexts.  Nolan attempts to unravel in social and political terms the inherent structures and codes from which we understand the world around us.  His practice has led to active work in community organisations, most notably ‘Hotel Ballymun’ a large scale sculptural performance which saw the transformation of the 15th Floor, of Clarke Tower, Ballymun into a boutique hotel.  In the Kerlin Nolan will recreate a large scale sculpture that is confrontational and compelling.

Sonia Shiel presents a new body of paintings rich in both painterly description and narrative associations.  Shiel’s use of paint itself is suggestive and enigmatic.  The emergent imagery is loaded with references to mythologies and anecdotes from popular history and art production.  Each painting can be read as a  stage for characters to emerge from the paint itself and take up roles evoking worlds of exaggerated drama, vulnerability or of  tender intimacy. Worlds that seem at war between the real and the fantastical.