Darklight Festival programme for VU Space

Melbourne

A programme of 6 contemporary artists working in Ireland has been specially curated for VU Space, Melbourne by festival director Nicky Gogan and features work from previous festivals as well as a number of works from the upcoming festival programme in June.

The selection focuses on artists who practice in both the art and film world, as increasingly we find the line blurring between these two disciplines. The exhibition aims to celebrate the variety of current practices prevailing in the creation of moving image work while representing new aesthetics, contemporary conscientiousness and an intimacy of vision that these processes allow. VU Space is part of the Mediated Art Department at Victoria University and the show will run for 1 month http://vuspace.vu.edu.au .

David Phillips and Paul Rowley
Microfiche: Diamond Trade

Artists David Phillips (Memphis, Tennessee 1970) and Paul Rowley (Dublin, Ireland 1971) have been working together collaboratively since 1998, primarily with film, video installation and sound.

In 2000, they won the Glen Dimplex Artists' Award, the Irish Museum of Modern Art's annual contemporary art prize, and seen as the Irish equivalent of the Tate's Turner prize. Their short video Suspension was awarded a Golden Spire at the 1999 San Francisco International Film Festival. In the same year they were the recipients of the New Langton Arts Bay Area Award for video.

Recent exhibitions include Re:mote at the Photographers' Gallery, London , Videonale at the Bonn Kunst Museum , and Bambi at the ICA in Philadelphia . Their work was recently selected by New Museum 's senior curator Dan Cameron to participate in the annual ev+a exhibition in Limerick , Ireland , this spring.

Recent fesitval screeings include the Impakt festival in Holland , special mention at the Zemos:98 festival in Sevilla, and retrospectives at the Darklight Digital Festival in Dublin and Prog:ME, the Rio de Janeiro festival of Media Arts.

Paul has been artist in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Florida , with Gillian Wearing, and a fellow at the Macdowell Artist Colony in New Hampshire . He has received awards from the Irish Arts Council for his work in 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001, in addition to bursaries in 2001 2003, and 2004, and a development grant from the Irish Film Board in 2002.

Microfiche: Diamond Trade. 2004.
Single channel colour video with sound. 5:00

On the night of the 27th of April, 1974, members of an armed IRA gang stole nineteen paintings from Russborough House worth a total of £8 million, including works by Gainsborough, Vermeer, and Velásquez. The gang demanded the return of Irish republican prisoners from England as well as £500,000 in ransom money. The authorities hit back by offering a £100,000 reward for information.

Ten days after the robbery, Gardaí recovered the paintings in a house in Co. Cork. A wealthy Englishwoman, Dr. Rose Dugdale, was charged and convicted. She was also convicted of involvement in an earlier IRA operation, a hijacked helicopter attack on an RUC station. Rose Dugdale received a total of 18 years in prison, and served 9 of them.

In this work, the genealogy of this event is traced using the now outdated library microfiche image archiving system. Shots from National news reports of the time were re-photographed from the internet, and edited together in a sequence of pairings that enable the viewer to piece together the event anew. Of interest here in this exercise in spectatorship is the series of exchanges that are presented.

The Beit family fortune which was initially used to buy these paintings was accumulated by Alfred Beit in partnership with Cecil Rhodes as the De Beers Consolidated Mines in South Africa , which in 1891 owned 90% of the world's diamond production. These profits were used to buy paintings, which were stolen from Russborough house a total of four times over the last thirty years. The sequence of exchanges is what is interesting here, where African diamonds become Western European art masterpieces, swapped for political prisoners, and later bargaining chips used by organized crime gangs in negotiations with the Irish state.

Brian Duggan
104 Stairs (2005)

Brian Duggan lives and works in Dublin (b.1971). He has had numerous exhibitions in Ireland and abroad and has received several awards from the Arts Council of Ireland. He graduated from Crawford College Cork 1995 and he recently finished his MA.Vis, (IADT), Dublin 2005. He is also the co-director and co-founder of Pallas Studios and Heights which has a history of independent projects since 1996, and has worked with over 150 young contemporary artists during this time.

Highlights within the past year have been 2 solo exhibitions, one with the Hugh Lane Gallery and one in Pallas Heights . Brian was also invited to co-Curate with Mark Cullen and exhibit 'Offside', Hugh Lane Gallery , (21 artists), Dublin . In 2004 he was on a three month residency with project304 in Bangkok and ChangMai , Thailand . He also recently spent time on a residency in the Tyrone Guthrie centre, and was selected on the 'Drawing on landscape' symposium by the Sculpture society of Ireland .

104 Stairs

Duggans work tests the physical limitations of the immediate environment that the artist finds around him. Duggan's practice usually begins with tightly planned scenarios which then come under pressure, and can, at times, begin to break down. Gravity is a recurring problem, and stress and pressure, a central reference. These moments of sometimes futile endeavor, evoke a recognisable but unfamiliar viewpoint that interrupts the expected.

Istvan Laszlo
CARDIOID (2006)

Istvan Laszlo (b.1981/ Romania ) lives and works in Dublin (IRL) and Targu Mures ( RO). He started exhibiting installations in 2001 since when he had participated at numerous national and international exhibitions. He graduated from University of Art and Design, Cluj (RO)

2003 at the sculpture department and had interventions in public space with hyper realistic sculptures and media characters. This work process directed him to new media works. He is  Co-founder and member of the Supernova art group. Supernova is a group-project, the group's target is to experiment with economic strategies, following the camouflaging of art in the common goods. In the past years he had a solo exhibition and participated in group exhibitions in Casino Luxembourg / Institute of Contemporary Art , Dunaujvaros/Biennale de Paris/ Brukenthal Museum , Sibiu / Protokoll,Cluj / University of Architecture , Bucharest etc.

Since 2003 he is living in Dublin where he continued studying  digital media and started producing  video art, focusing on the clash between personal and global consciousness and the relationship between our intimate sphere, media and technology.

CARDIOID

Cardioid is a visionary animation, the subject of this piece is loosing our most important part, symbolised by the heart . The body rises up from the darkness and slowly opens. The movements reflect pain. The chest splits open and the heart leaves the body. The heart disappears and the body falls back in to the darkness.

Dog Media
The Day it Rained Sweets (2006)

Dogmedia Productions are an independent media production collective formed in 2003.

Working primarily in digital format, Dogmedia have made numerous productions to date including documentaries, short fiction films, radio work, sketch comedy,

animations and model making and are also involved in live music/visual performances with two Dublin -based groups.

THE DAY IT RAINED SWEETS

Imagine you're 6 and sweets just fell out of the sky before your eyes. Well that's what 'Davy the Bear' and his chums did for the children of St. Canices BNS school during their little break on a Wednesday morning. However, Davy and Co. run into a spot of bother with the strong-arm of the Law.

Theresa Mayer
72DPI and the real world at the rainbow (2005)

Theresa Mayer was born in Dusseldorf , Germany in 1980.
After successfully finishing four years of Graphic Design in Germany , she moved to Dublin in 2003 to commence the BA in Animation at Dun Laoghaire Institute, Art, Design and Technology.

Theresa's work is influenced by many aspects of contemporary culture. Strong shapes and a limited color palette usually form her layout and compositions, with a lot of last year's work being influenced by the German photographer Andreas Gursky. "72 DPI and the rest of the world at the end of the rainbow" is inspired by Gursky's series of Rhein Photographs and the art of early computer games like Tetris. Pixel and sound are working together as one unit, creating scenes that merge smoothly from one to another.

Currently Theresa is working on a collaborative animation project, interpreting a poem by Scotsman Ivor Cutler. The starting point of this project was to remove the animators from the computer and to work straight under the camera with pencil, watercolor and charcoal. The final stages will see the hand generated material brought back into the computer for compositing and additional animation.

Thereas experiments with different styles and techniques of animation, which opens up new avenues of creativity and also keeps her updated of what other artist are doing by constantly browsing the internet and libraries for new forms of communication.

72DPI and the real world at the rainbow (2005)

We are in 72dpi, our lives are dominated by square pixels. Giving birth to a square child or just simple raindrops can be extremely sore. Legend has it that the only possible way to cross over to the real world would be a magic rainbow.

6.
Saoirse Higgins
Doom Machine , video (2005)
Artist Statement/background:

I am a digital media artist from Dublin , Ireland . I am currently working as a researcher in Interface - a new research centre for art and technology, which is situated in the University of Ulster in Belfast . My main research area is 'Art in Contested spaces'. One aspect comes from the situation in Northern Ireland (interface means something different than computer interface here- it is the flash areas between catholic and protestant communities- interface zone). I am not only looking at this but also all types of contested spaces for example: man versus nature, human versus machine, nature and machine, local/global/glocal view.

Through my art projects, I explore the links between technology and our vision of the world. Usually my work incorporate physical interfaces with a mixture of sound, video, 3D and electronics. My work has been shown at events and galleries such as Montreal Film and New Media festival, Transmediale, Exit Art and Location One Gallery , New York .

Doom Machine

The video loop piece I am showing here is a reaction to panic culture, the state of fear and paranoia in the world, and most particularly in the States. It is part of a larger interactive piece called 'The Doom machine' examining people's gut instinct on how the world is doing. I began this piece just before the war started in Iraq . The video that loops on the screen shows 'man' running away from pending doom. His shadow hints at the saying of being so scared that you are scared of your own shadow.