PERIPHERIES 2016

PERIPHERIES Centre for Creative Development, Gorey School of Art

Curated by Richard Carr

Kindly Supported by:

The ordinary practitioners of the city live 'down below', below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk – an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban 'text' they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other's arms. (De Certeau, 1984)

PERIPHERIES Centre for Creative Development is pleased to host PERIPHERIES 2016, an exciting exhibition bringing the work of Elaine Byrne, Ulrich Vogl as well as Oisin Byrne and Patrick Hough together. In 2005, Cork was the European City of Culture and during this time 'Gatherings' hosted a talk by Sarat Maharaj from the RCA London who spoke at length about the production of culture on the periphery and how it resulted in unique centres of excellence that evolved outside of the accepted cultural capitals. Reverting back to this notion, PERIPHERIES 2016 builds upon this while taking it as a point of departure, presenting a re-enquiry into notions of the centre | periphery binary.

Michel De Certeau in his seminal chapter Walking in the City describes the creation of space as more than a geographical plan strategically designed and implemented by planning authorities and urban designers. Rather it’s an invisible system containing its own internal logic(s), built below the thresholds at which visibility begins and constructed through the temporal subjectivities of pedestrians as they move from one place to the next. Working on this premise, PERIPHERIES 2016 showcases 3 existing works by 4 artists: Endless Resistance; a large scale installation by Elaine Byrne, Film 40 Minutes by Ulrich Vogl and a video piece entitled SEEK ZERO's by Oisin Byrne and Patrick Hough.

While each of the works deal with subtleties specific to their own concerns they have been imaginatively brought together centered around notions of the peripheral. Not however from the perspective of visual phenomenology but rather through the internal systems and lives of these marked out or delineated spaces. Whether it’s through the spatial investigations of Elaine Byrne’s Endless Resistance, proposing a reconciliation of nature and architecture while seeking alternative starting points from which to build. Points that look at the built environment as an extension of the human psyche, a lived rather than observed space. Ulrich Vogl’s installation Film 40 Minutes, underpinned by strong conceptual concerns, has at its core an elementary investigation of internal systems, both human and technological. Utilising a precise economy of materials Vogl focuses on drawing amalgamations of various temporal line segments that transcends both spatial and territorial boundaries through the combination of both the physical and phenomenological.

The unsheltered buildings of the Ball Alley in Oisin Byrne’s and Patrick Hough’s video piece; SEEK ZERO’s; a home away from home, occupied by various transient families, a home of various ‘texts’; a playground, a forbidden space, a nocturnal loci of teenage transgression. An internal system regulated primarily by time, all furthered by Oisin and Patrick through their subtle, cyclical performer-less performance. Combining these three works has generated its own internal logic, a suggestion of the lived rather than observed peripheral, inviting you to enter its space, become its walker and write your ‘text’.