Singing the Real

The RHA is delighted to bring Singing the Real, a major exhibition of contemporary Irish art to the Éigse Carlow Arts Festival. The exhibition will show in the Carlow IT, Kilkenny Road daily from 11 am – 7 pm.
Patrick T. Murphy, Director RHA and the exhibition’s curator explains. “Singing the Real is a multi-media, cross generational and gender diverse exhibition that explores the combination of scientific method and art practice that is an evident and strong strain in Irish art today. Observing, recording, describing, hypothesizing and analyzing are the empirical dynamics that underscore the artwork in this exhibition. As if by the co-option of empirical that the artist can directly engage the material, and indirectly the new materialism in Ireland, to establish new relationships with traditional values of the land and the community.”
The artists are Barrie Cooke, Dorothy Cross, Grace Weir, Susan Tiger, Cecily Brennan, Nick Miller, Neva Elliott, John Gerrard, Gary Phelan and Martin Healy.
Barrie Cooke and Dorothy Cross incorporate the natural sciences of biology and chemistry as they explore issues of pollution and behaviour that tacitly address the impoverishment of the spirit in the contemporary relationship to the land. Grace Weir, Cecily Brennan and Susan Tiger take the observational techniques of physics to underline the laws of nature, which imply a critique of our more socially controlled and determined environment.Nick Miller challenges optics in his attempts to accurately paint the landscape as it is outside of the lyrical tradition of painting in Ireland and the trope of the picturesque. Neva Elliott and Gary Phelan employ the quasi-scientific approach of quantitive analysis to expose some of the volatile seams opening in the social fabric of the country. John Gerrard subverts the fantasy of computer virtual reality by introducing qualities of time and mortality. And Martin Healy in his anthropological stance questions the need for myth in contemporary society.
The exhibition will include three video projections, two installations, two monitor pieces, twenty photographs, six drawings and eight paintings.
This exhibition was brought to the Iziko South African National Gallery, Capetown , South Africa in summer 2007 with the generous support of Culture Iireland. Such collaborations increase the reach of the Academy’s links considerably and create conduits for Irish artists to gain recognition abroad. For more information pls. contact RHA Marketing at 01 6612558. Please click on link for more information about Éigse: http://www.eigsecarlow.ie/

Selection of images from the exhibition