STRATA

S T R A T A

STRATA

Photography, Film and Video Works 2019 - 20

Works produced by Photography, Film and Video, Third and Fourth Year Students at Limerick School of Art and Design: Aoife Costello Arenijus Samoska Caoimhinn Ní Dhuinn Cormac Hughes Aaron Hassett Alexandria Martin Brosnan Ashling Duignan Craig Massey Megan Ahern Damon Frawley David Doyle Dylan Lawlor Rebecca Mc Grath Jamie Jellett Elsie van Dam Eimear Twomey Shane Vaughan Julie McLoughlin Shauna Lee Megan Byrne Kristina Matieskova Jamie Burke Sibéal Riordan in response to a publication assignment, Spring 2020.

Tutor – Dr. Martina Cleary Edited by: Shane Vaughan, Jamie Jellet, Julie McLoughlin, Sibéal Riordan, & Aoife Costello

In Susan Sontag’s much quoted text ‘On Photography’ the author asserts: Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph. Bringing this logic forward, expanding upon Sontag’s assertion, we can say that today everything in the world exists to end in a computer, in a digitized form online, part of that expanded noosphere domain.

The mass digitization of everything has been the projected Magnum Opus of this civilization, the great work in progress since arguably the 90’s fin-desiècle. Late 20th century media culture presented multiple emergent possibilities and threats that we are still deciphering in this accelerated technical and automated world.

The ongoing development of the digital camera, digital imaging technologies such as scanners, the smart phone, streaming technologies and imaging software such as Photoshop has also transformed the creation, use of, circulation and distribution of images on a profound and accelerated level for the artist and the audience. The digital camera, an apparatus, a tool that changes the meaning of the world or the collapse of meaning of the world.

As I write this from my apartment in lockdown Limerick during the Covid 19 outbreak, and in leu of the dramatic and profound shift brought about by this global pandemic (one we are still deciphering), one can’t help but see the acceleration of this mass project of digitization online. The dematerialization of the art object, enabled through the digital lens as it becomes a reproduction, a simulation. The digital camera as device becomes platform and audience simultaneously.

I take the opportunity, at this point to introduce a studio project of Photography Film and Video students, from years three and four of the Fine Art BA honours degree programme at LSAD. A magazine produced and designed in the second semester of 2020 by these twenty-two emerging artists, using an online publishing platform. The publication showcases the artwork of these artists, engaging the emergent concerns and voices of this generation. Presenting a variety of different artistic and media approaches, engaging with a myriad of intriguing themes, some traditional others firmly experimental, this publication’s contents straddles a diversity of thematics and artistic practices. Some have explored more well-trodden and traditional ideas, such as photographing landscape in its sublime state, nature and entropy, stilled life moments taken both outside and inside. Gothic approaches also appear, applied to capturing abandoned buildings, broken footpaths, dilapidated bridges, all to capture the eeriness that resides in the ruin.

There is also a reengagement with and reconsideration of the self-portrait, that representation of self. The well-established practice in photography of observing, examining and classifying human life through the lens.

Documenting activity daily, repeatedly, exhaustively or the hasty capture of a fleeting moment never to be repeated. More current or contemporary concerns are also interwoven in the contents. The Flaneur makes a welcome return, the wanderer’s lived experience with the urban environment. Or a stranger journeying in a strange land. Others recounting memories of childhood and innocence, where the camera is part of a therapeutic process.

There are pictures here that delve into memories that have been untampered with over time, all to excavate lived experience, that was once contrary but now needs urgent egress.

Staged photography is also central to several participants works, presenting lived, constructed, idealized, fantasized narratives dealing with identity and/ or gender. These explorations of personhood in intimate spaces like the bedroom or the bathroom, rehearsing or performing masquerade and reinvention. Femininity, androgyny and masculinity in different ways are embraced, re-examined, deconstructed and transformed, keeping in step with the zeitgeist.

With that said I commend the students of PFV at LSAD on this publication.

Each artist presenting different signatures of aesthetic authority in this publication that reflects the spirit of the times.

Forward by Breda Lynch, March 2020

Aoife Costello is interested in psychology and performance art.

Her intentions are to explore performance art by pushing and mirroring the body with small spaces and observe its translation in photography and video. Conceptual concerns for this would be to learn and engage with the difference between live performance and performance documented with media. When entering into the world of video she has been more focused with one’s self and the camera.

Arenijus Samoska works with nature and ecology of space. Concerned with our

ability to coexist within the natural world, Samoska looks to water as a source of inspiration and mental acuity. Showing us the natural world from the perspective of water, his work is a journey of time, health, freshness and existence.

Caoimhinn Ní Dhuinn creates videos that are

based on their experiences they have when they can not sleep.

Since there has been no formal insomnia diagnosis, a difficulty with sleeping is what they have, and they let that difficulty influence the work that is created. The focus is put on the random and sometimes comical actions that they do in the late hours of the night in order to tire themselves out. The goal when creating these videos is to give a new perspective on insomnia, a humorous take on an issue that so many of us have to deal with in some shape or form.

They are hugely influenced by the mania of Jeff Wall's photograph “Insomnia” and the use of colour and shadow in the photographs by Boris Eldagsen and the films by Nicolas Winding Refn.

Cormac Hughes

works

with

various

mediums;

video,

photographic, music and both live and recorded performance. His work plays with the idea of earning the attention of viewers which

leads to mis-measured humour and anxiety, and leads to the abandoning/ignoring of 'artistic responsibilities'. As a means to deny

experiencing failure, 'failure' is adopted, performed and ridiculed. This underlying fear of failure runs through his work. Recently, he has incorporated fluxus ideas, documenting actions on video. This has allowed him to not only treat creative practise as exercise routine, but

also helped blur the lines between 'finished works' ready for display and actions, that support and provide context but also to sustain himself on things that do and don't 'matter'.

Aaron Hassett is generally concerned with the strange and unfamiliar aspects of the world. This body of work is intended to construct a documentation of Limerick City’s urban landscape from the perspective of a fictional visitor to the city. The visitor journeys and interacts with the inhabitants of this strange land. The subject of these photographic compositions are distinctive features of the urban landscape, such as derelict sites and monuments.

Alexandria Martin Brosnan

explores narratives of her experience with memory, as well as themes of psychology, psychogeography and mental health.

Through her artistic practice she uses analogue photographic processes as well as sound and poetry.

Elephant Cove is a series of black & white 35mm images taken in Kilkee, Co. Clare, where Alexandria and her family stayed every summer. The work responds to themes of childhood and the past by exploring the place of her memories and the feeling of anxiety brought on by growing up and losing one’s childhood innocence.

The series impels the viewer to be aware of changes in their lives and to revisit spaces of memory.

Ashling Duignan is a visual artist

who takes a psychological approach to themes such as identity, memory, place, and time through the medium of photography and videography.

She uses tense psychological narratives to explore the relationship between the internal aspects of human nature and the interpersonal relationship with the external environment.

Her work investigates what may exist beneath the surface of things through physical presence in obscure and ominous settings.

The ideas expressed in her work are informed and shaped by Jungian theory, literature, mythology and spirituality.

Craig Massey explores the concept of the Jungian

'Shadow' and how it relates to the ideas of the split personality.

The Shadow in Massey's work evokes the darker spaces of the subconscious where the unknown lurks at the edges of the visual fields of perception.

The lineage of the heirloom sited in the domestic is the starting point of a journey into the story of the characters.

Megan Ahern

deals with themes of religion, working people, landscapes, and the body. Her most recent project called 'Anonymous Beauty' is about capturing the natural body that is deemed "unacceptable" in society.

Damon Frawley works with issues surrounding perception, selfhood, archetypes

and the internal world. He strives to capture the ephemeral and fleeting and, in the words of Barbara Ess, “that which cannot be photographed�. He explores symbolism and metaphor and utilises the lens with a distinct sense of subjectivity in line with the malleable nature of our own perceptions.

This work is an exploration of the Jungian process of individuation, the confrontation of the conscious mind with the unconscious, repressed Self. It examines the conflict between the archetypes of persona, shadow, anima and Self.

David Doyle works with Irish culture.

In his latest piece, Doyle explores notions of being trapped.

Using a 1920’s dilapidated farmhouse, Doyle contrasts shots of the land against the house.

A shirtless man grapples against the farm, the house, and the culture surrounding him, to explore what it means to be vulnerable throughout history.

Dylan Lawlor is a lens-based media artist who works

primarily with digital image manipulation and non-narrative video.

With inspiration coming from Cecily Brennan, Shana Moultan, and Wolfgang Tilmans, Lawlor’s work is a union of documentary and surrealist photography.

Lawlor draws inspiration from the weird and the wacky. She listens and watches, intuitively responding to the every day.

In the last year Lawlor’s art has gone from documenting the weird to making it.

Rebecca Mc Grath explores ideas of addiction and its effects.

In her latest video she highlights different forms of addictions, from smoking, to substance abuse. Through her videos she brings the question of a humanity that can be lost to the stigma of addictions. The self-isolation of the character is a common issue experienced by those who need help with their illness but cannot reach out due to fear or lack of empathy that exists in our society.

Rebecca is influenced by the work of Chris Arnade whose haunting portraits portray the real faces of addiction, and the work of Richard Billingham who displays the harsh reality of alcohol abuse which takes place behind closed doors.

Jamie Jellett

explores perspectives on reality. His images are depictions of unusual terrains that reveal themselves to be anything but what they are.

Through constructed environments that can be traversed only through the lens, we enter into a micro-macrocosm. The journey through the microworld is one of cultivating awareness in the viewer of the unseen but aesthetically complex environment that surrounds us.

Elsie van Dam

centres her work around feelings of melancholy and the liminal spaces of emotional states, investigating the unusual moments of sonder that we often experience as humans.

Her art serves as a means to encapsulate the instability of dissonance in the form of visual imagery.

Eimear Twomey

investigates the otherworldly, exploring old stories of those close to her with their own personal experiences. She focuses on Irish folklore, through the death of loved ones, ghost stories and old legends.

Horror and natural phenomena of the land are the pivotal themes in her work. She fabricates haunting works of art by manipulating the body and using minimal objects to create a poetic exhibit of horror-fiction, in an endeavour to manifest the beauty of the unpredictable land we inhabit.

Shane Vaughan uses 'selfhood' as a vessel for creation, investigating issues of age and the body.

In 'The Little Red Train', Vaughan constructs dissociative montage to distort narrative logic as a means of exploring Time and dream-space.

His latest work 'This Mortal Flesh' is a mise en scène which is grapples with ageing, compulsion, and chronic pain.

Julie McLoughlin depicts the process of grounding oneself in the natural world by immersing oneself in the detail.

Sub-saturate is a series capturing macro-images of highly saturated plants made in response to visions the artist sees as a result of being disassociated from the concrete world and oversaturated by the abstract, digital world.

Here the emphasis is on texture and pattern to evoke a sense of grounding in the natural world.

Shauna Lee. Sometimes we feel disconnected from who we are.

If on occasion we look inward, we can feel a sense of emptiness and fear. Not knowing what to do with it, we try to fill that emptiness with some external source of gratification. We get so used to asking others about who we are and become unable to see reality for ourselves. The emptiness is important because it tells us that we are disconnected from who we are. These portraits highlight my visualization of the disconnection of emptiness we harbor within ourselves. Our identities cannot be found but emerge from within our experiences and courage.

Megan Byrne uses photography and videography to document landscape through the theme of memory, psychology, and mental health.

Her latest video piece ‘Despair of Lonesomeness’ subtly deals with the mind's process of self-challenging thoughts and how lonesomeness can affect this mindset.

Furthering this, her body of photographic work ‘Elusive’ challenges the topic of mental health, bringing this elusive topic to the fore.

The artist’s work is rooted in the strange and unknown areas of our psychology and emotions.

Kristina

Matieskova

investigates abandonment and escapism. This collection represents escaping reality when times are difficult, walking around the forest helps to lessen the stress of everyday life.

When taking a forest walk, there are treasures that can be found. Some are overgrown with plants, like nature is reclaiming back the space that was taken over by people. The way the plants grow grabs the attention of the viewer, charmed by mystery.

Jamie Burke explores the mysteries of

the unknown in uninhabited spaces through the mediums of photography and video.

He creates suggestive narratives in his work that are unsettling in order to build tension in the viewer. An unrecognised presence in the location creates an atmosphere that hints at dark aspects of the psyche.

The occurrence of these uncanny events taking place are open to interpretation.

Therefore the aspects of what comes within the space is obscure.

SibĂŠal Riordan explores themes of trauma, healing

and the materiality of the body through experimental video, sound and photography. In her most recent work, she performs constructed rituals as a means of healing the mind and body. She sees nature as a nurturing force and aims to reconnect with it through these performances, thus reconnecting with herself.

She uses the body as material, and chooses to document performative ritual to camera using analogue techniques because of their tactile and archival nature.

Limited Edition Zine © students of Photography, Film & Video, LSAD - Spring 2020.

Cover Image by Julie McLoughlin