Fri 21 November – Wed 17 December

Curated by Maud Cotter
Aisling O’Beirn, Bill Albertini, Clive Murphy

As curator/initiator of this project, I exercised a light curatorial hand, allowing the contributions the artist’s to emerge over the year. I imagined that within this open landscape that is the gallery volume, things would carom, find commonality, enter an immersive place in unison.

Aisling O’Beirn’s video, Proton Dancing (Zagreb 2013), typifies the quest inherent in The Land of Zero, in examining the contribution of visual arts in a rapidly changing context. Aisling speaks of her lack of understanding of the mathematical theory of teleportation while finding that unknowing an apt place from which to start her work. An inter-disciplinary tension exists between the physical enactment of this process by a group of students of Fine Art, and the complex scientific concept of teleportation. This conjures an ambiguous space, hinting at aesthetic relations as a means of bringing these incongruous elements together.

In Clive Murphy’s inflatable Pneutopia II, 2014, we encounter the tumble and flawed ambition of linear progress. Clive’s generously scaled piece surrounds a nerve centre of borrowed objects, flashing lights and business. Engineering drawings, abbreviations, and symbols inscribe the body of the work; humorous markings of a failed utopian ideal. Pneutopia II seeks and finds an architectural mooring in the arched line of the ceiling of the gallery, placing itself firmly in play with Crawford Art Gallery as building.

Bill Albertini walks his cluster of crumpled papers, titled Crumple 2014, on stands onto the gallery floor. These 3D models emerge from the 3D printer with unintended molten parts, the machine is curiously unable to read the individually complex forms submitted to it for making. Bill’s video works, Cutchogue Rock, 2014, and Basement Work, Corner Placement, 2013, are temporal shifts, shaving time into coloured separations. They establish an artificial landscape, a truly other sensate place. His fourth piece, Manhattan Monopoles, in slow motion, is a tableau of urban living.
/ Maud Cotter