HALF – review

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HALF at The Mart in Rathmines is an assemblage of 19 NCAD students, exploring their visual art practices under the theme HALF. Each artist sought to interrogate what this theme encompasses for them. In particular they reflected on how this fell at the halfway point of their year, at the halfway point of their degree through a display of collaborative works featuring sculpture, print, installation and metalwork.

Grace Kristensen focused on the clear lines and forms within geometric shapes, intrigued by the beauty of their simplicity and fundamental position within nature. However she later found these to be too “contrived” because “one only has to look at the simplest object and look again to see the limitless shapes and form”. Therefore her six screen prints on plain paper were created by scrunching up her initial geometric shapes into balls. She then photographed these broken forms and superimposed these images into print templates. Consequently the audience shares a sense of release with the artist where behind the restricted processes of art and shape, we understand the “infinite possibilities” behind her subtle forms and colours.

Deterioration was a popular theme, probed in Chloe Nagle’s investigative piece focusing on how broken or “inauthentic” products are evaluated with a “lower” aesthetic status by humans. Nagle collected metal pieces from industrial wastelands around Dublin which moved through “iterative cycle of surface, documentation, replication, interference and creation to probe the nature of change”. Between these processes of change and destruction, the object becomes “devoid” of any aesthetic. However, Nagle reflects on the importance of her artistic process as it reimburses these materials and landscape with form and meaning; these are the “spaces that appear to be poised between destruction and reparation”.

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This was further explored through the commercialisation of modern art in an office installation. An audience-artist contract was signed and pinned to the wall outlining how the audience could post a sheet of ideas into a post box and then “monitor” the artists process through a fisheye keyhole. Working to order introduces the idea that art is a supply and demand model between buyer and seller, losing its element of pleasure and freedom. Similar to the restriction of the geometric shapes, modern life has become oppressive on individuals and the process of art making. This provided a poignant message behind the exhibition falling at the mid-point in their studies.

HALF not only explores the halfway point in these students paths, but the halfway point society is existing between. We thrive in the freedom and expression of modern life, but share a nostalgia for the past’s simplicity. Its physical setting in a converted fire station halfway up the Rathmines Road further reinforced the exhibition’s theme that art can remodel the limitations or boundaries modern life imposes on us.

HALF runs until January 31 at The MART, 190a Rathmines Road, Rathmines, Dublin 6.

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