LCGA Exhibitions

Behind Smoke & Mirrors Residency & Exhibition

Aideen Barry, Artist on Residency, Picture

Artist in Residence

Aideen BARRY

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Aideen Barry is a Visual Artist, working in the mediums of performance, film, musical composition, drawings and animation. She recently was awarded funding from the Arts Council of Ireland’s Projects: New Work Award towards the creation of a new work filmed in Zero Gravity.

In September 2008 Barry took part in the collaboration project SOUND DESIGN FOR FUTURE FILMS, shown at Moderna Museet, Sweden, which will travel to The Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio . Aideen will represent Ireland at FRA GIL in Barcelona, Spain in May 2008. Recent residencies include Kennedy Space Centre, NASA; Banff Centre in Canada and Convoy in Iceland . 2009 solo exhibitions at Galway Arts Centre, Mermaid Arts Centre and at The Butler Gallery in Kilkenny, culminating with the launch of a printed project on her work. 2009 group exhibitions include Crawford Art Gallery (Terror & The Sublime), The Dock Leitrim (The Kindness of Strangers), The Royal Hibernian Academy (Futures) and The Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff, Canada . Curatorial projects include co-curating TULCA: City of Strangers 2007, co-curating Terms & Conditions at the Mermaid Arts Centre Bray. She also curated Subversion and the Domestic: House Projects, which was published into a book on 7-curated projects in Ireland, New York and London .

Aideen’s current work deals with the notion of the “Uncanny”, informed by recent diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder1. Her new work is sited in investigations into Hysterical behavior and the uncanny repetitive gesture or Tourette. With a play on perspective she creates films and performances based on investigations into optical illusions, endurance performance and the challenges presented to us in our everyday reality. Film and animation works reference the subverted female characters in texts from Irish literary figures such as Bram Stoker and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu aligned with theories of philosophers who are preoccupied with the notion of unnatural human behavior, playing with the blur between what is imagined and what is perceived to be; “the contemporary Gothic”. These issues are explored in a playful manner often using humour to entice the viewer. Her work oscillates between the intensely personal to the quotidian, often simultaneously, through use of the domestic re-arranged in an uncanny fashion. This interest in the search for the Gothic of the now has provoked interest into the evolution of the uncanny in a futuristic environment. For Aideen the contemporary gothic can be seen in everyday of Celtic Tiger Ireland. In the housing estates and shopping centers of stepford zombieness4 and now in the grip of hysterical post boom, recession Ireland . Recent work is concerned with the mutation of the Irish housewife into half cleaning and mechanical device and half human. Playing with the Shellyisque, idea of the domestic monster, one we have created ourselves with our obsessive behavior and the altering of our DNA through the abuse of cleaning chemicals. Aideen’s practice has evolved into an eclectic mix of media, film, performance, photography, music, sound art, Textiles, drawings, and animation.

www.aideenbarry.com


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