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Apply Within: Experience Essential

Apply Within: Experience Essential is a series of semi-improvised temporal interventions executed within the context of an active restaurant. Participating artists will respond to the site in a variety of media throughout the first week of the Galway Arts Festival.

Participating Artists:
Sven Anderson & economicthoughtprojects,
Jennie Guy,
Sarah Hurl,
Aine Ivers,
Bea McMahon,
Isabel Nolan,
Susan Thomson.

Viewer discretion is advised.

Curated by Jennie Guy

You are invited to dine in Ard Bia / Nimmos during the first week of the Galway Arts Festival and experience Apply Within: Experience Essential which is a series of semi-improvised temporal interventions executed within the context of an active restaurant. Participating artists Sven Anderson, economicthoughtprojects, Jennie Guy, Sarah Hurl, Áine Ivers, Bea McMahon, Isabel Nolan & Susan Thomson will respond to the site in a variety of media throughout the first week of the Galway Arts Festival.

A central idea of the exhibition is examining what happens when a populated social environment such as a restaurant is occupied by number of artworks; an alternate scenario is rendered and new interpretations or moments of the said social space are exposed via the interruptions that the artworks generate. The presence of the artworks in this context encourages speculation and renegotiates the relationships that exist between an exhibition and the social space within which it occurs.

Viewer discretion is advised.

Date: 13 - 19 July
Venue: Ard Bia / Nimmos, Spanish Arch, Long Walk, Galway

PROGRAMME

Sven Anderson

July 13th
Installation runs between 12 – 10PM
Performance with Russell Hart from 10:30 – 11:30PM

The interior sounds of a restaurant are traces of a series of functions executed within a clearly defined architectural and social space. Using carefully placed microphones and an array of PA speakers, these traces are shifted from the interior of the restaurant to its exterior, amplifying and projecting a mixture of private conversations, the clatter of food being prepared, and the intimate
sounds of eating itself outwards into the public space adjacent to the restaurant. This mediation partially displaces the restaurant within the context of its location, blurring its boundaries and forcing it to perform more actively within its surrounding environment.

Between 10:30 and 11:30PM, Sven Anderson and Russell Hart (economicthoughtprojects) will perform an improvised set within the structure of this intervention. Anderson will process the sounds of the restaurant occurring in realtime, while Hart will process a mixture of treated field recordings captured during the previous week within the restaurant (please see economicthoughprojects’ entry below).

Economicthoughtprojects

July 13th
Performance with Sven Anderson from 10:30 – 11:30PM

Russell Hart - has collected a series of field recordings from the
restaurant over the previous week leading up to the event. These
sounds will be used as the starting point for the development of a
series of tones/drones and textures that he will then manipulate
during the performance with Sven Anderson.

Jennie Guy - The Cardinal’s Pears or maybe The Abbots Snails

July 13th - 20th
Jennie Guy’s daily culinary intervention is in collaboration with Ard Bia Nimmos head chef Tahlia Casey. Every day Guy will insert an appropriated recipe from early papal reigns. Recipe’s such as Pope Gregory’s Old Fashioned Fruit Tart or Innocent III’s Pontifical Soup introduce us to indulgent, austere and aphrodisiac recipes brought to us over centuries. These recipes signify and compare contemporary life with distant culture, society and religion.

Sarah Hurl

July 13th - 20th

Peering out from their celluloid world two 19th century Silent artists awake to modern Ireland, inhibited by their theatrical genre they try to interact with the city (dwellers) as they must look for
work in the very foreign surroundings of a city restaurant. Sarah Hurl and fellow performer Martin Power are behind this double act of displaced silent movie stars.

Áine Ivers - plan B

July 13th - 20th
On July 18th, a performance will take place during the evening restaurant service.

‘Plan for this space; plan for tomorrow; plan for a river; plan for getting a grant…’ The neurotic artist inside artist Áine Ivers returns to the restaurant with excerpts from her extensive catering cv and
memories of many restaurant floor-plans in tow, and some of the fantastic plans for her life that she has imagined of late to serve to you on a plate…

Bea McMahon - The Cleaners [Kronecker]

July 13th - 20th

With characteristic wit and a disarming (domestic) economy of means Bea McMahon's The Cleaners [Kronecker], 2009, conjures a whole history of 'retinal art' stretching back through 1960's 'Op art' to the roto-reliefs of Marcel Duchamp, while simultaneously suggesting an idiosyncratically reconstituted 'Systems Art' that is entirely her own. Materials: Cloth, motors, aluminium, acetate.

Isabel Nolan

July 13th - 20th

Isabel Nolan will be painting the exterior gate of the restaurant.

Susan Thomson - The Pleasure of the Table

July 13th - 20th

Sifting through Roland Barthes’ texts on the look out for analyses of food. Food as metaphor for writing or for sex, the Atkins diet as symbolic castration, different types of chocolate in the Marquis de Sade, and the text as vegetable - namely an onion. Meet Roland Barthes the semiotician-fetishist cutting everything into bite-size morcels.

Further information please visit:

www.jennieguy.com
www.ardbia.com

Cormac O' Leary

An exhibition by Cormac O' Leary will be hung at the restaurant running from the beginning of July right thru the Galway Race Festival for a minimum of 6 weeks. We are very excited about Cormac showing during such an important time in the Galway calendar and envisage a most successful exhibition. He is a superb painter and comes from a most talented family in Sligo; his
father John O'Leary was an amazing artist with a magical sense for texture and colour.

His work is based on his immediate environment.

He is influenced by the seasonal changes in the landscape around him in the Irish northwest and occasional blasts of hot colour from the meditteranean. All these memories and atmospherics will go into the work.

He returns to places that somehow captivate him. These are often neglected areas of overgrown bog, wild woodlands, ruins in a coastal field, open ground near shadowy mountains. Certain shapes and buried patterns, lit up spaces, will attract his eye. He is also fascinated by interiors, doorways, lanes, and the sensual shapes of still-life or figure. He gathers sketches and drawings from places and return to the sudio. These are sifted through and studied. They will trigger ideas that lead to paintings.

Once the canvas is set up however, anything can happen. The paint itself will take over and transform the quickly sketched image. Soon he is launched on a journey with no exact destination. Colours will merge, recede and become hightened. Often the dreamt of painting is buried in layers of work. A finished painting confirms in him the mystery of creativity and the magic of the artistic process.

Summer Storm over Achill

Oil on Board
30 x 25 in