Dirty Rag (damp)

Work shown as part of a group exhibition at the Wexford Arts Centre, in response to a residency awarded by the Cow House Studios in Ireland in 2014.

Give Way, Exhibition & Gallery Talk

Wexford Arts Centre in collaboration with Cow House Studios are pleased to announce a group exhibition of 2014 residency artists Emma Schwartz (USA), Joey Bryniarska (UK), Mathilde Ganancia (France), Paul Gaffney (Ireland) and Woosung Lee (Korea). Now in it’s eighth year, Cow House Studios is a progressive artist-run school and residency programme situated on the O’Gorman family farm at the foot of the Blackstairs Mountain. The autumn residency programme offers a valuable support structure for emerging Irish and international visual artists, situating contemporary art practice alongside a deeply rural, agrarian setting.

This exhibition will bring together new works made during and since the eight week residency programme, and will include drawing, painting, photography, installation and video. These works represent the diverse practices of all five participating artists. Expectations give way to experience, events and new undertakings can overwhelm or disappoint, in the end we simplify and compartmentalise these moments and observations to gain perspective, to study and learn. The works included in this exhibition explore possibilities within the self contained, where complexity is derived from precise explorations of discrete occurrences.

'The dirty rag was the starting point for Joey Bryniarska’s large watercolour works; baggy grids that move in waves of compression and expansion, outlining a visual field that is not homogenous or static. The dirty rag on the floor of the studio is picked up, utilized and discarded countless times; never washed, never thrown away. The dirty rag performs various tasks, but most of the time it wipes away excess and mops up leakage. Stains, crusts and blobs imprint upon its surface, embedding themselves into the warp and weft of the grey cotton weave. It is both derivative and generative of the painter’s painting. The milking stools that accompany these paintings are also objects associated with leakage, an agent in a process of supplication and extraction. Online e-commerce marketplaces selling vintage goods appropriate the adjective ‘milking’ and add it to the noun ‘stool’, in order to connect the object vicariously to an authentic origin. The layers of paint that have been added over time and scratched or worn away, also perform a type of leakage, a sign of excess.'

Give Way runs from Monday, September 14th to Thursday, October 8th at Wexford Arts Centre. A gallery talk will be led on Tuesday, September 29th at 2pm by Curator and Cow House Studios Co Director Frank Abruzzese.

• http://www.wexfordartscentre.ie/group-gi...