Engage

Aisling McCoy, Alberto Maserin, Andrew Rankin, Denis O’Shea, Jan McCullough, Jill Quigley & Ruby Wallis

ENGAGE is a new collaboration between the Futures programme from Belfast Exposed and Gallery of Photography. It highlights the sustained support provided by both organisations for photographic artists living and working across the island of Ireland. In their formal and conceptual inventiveness, the seven featured artists reflect the diversity of contemporary Irish photography. Wide-ranging in subject matter and approach, each body of work in the exhibition is the result of a considered process of engagement and demonstrates a real willingness to push the medium in exciting new directions.

Aisling McCoy’s ‘THF’ is a timely study of the Nazi-designed Tempelhof airport in Berlin, now used as a refugee centre, among other things. The work is a meditation on the physical and psychological aspects of this charged space, somewhere between arrival and departure, past and future.

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Alberto Maserin’s Interferences series is a thoughtful observation of the uncomfortable relationship between a US military installation and the idyllic Italian countryside that surrounds it.

Andrew Rankin’s Close to You explores the breathless world of celebrity fixation in a compelling interpretation of internet-fuelled fantasies of intimacy.

Denis O’Shea’s Things Found in Books documents the strange synchronicities between bookmarks inadvertently left in library books. His images reveal the mysterious interplay between private and public domains.

Jan McCullough’s Home Instruction Manual charts the artist’s eccentric compliance with home-making advice given by self-styled experts she encountered in Internet chatrooms. With wry humour, this performative work questions the notion of a ‘perfect’ home.

Situated at the intersection of photography and land art, Jill Quigley’s Rural Fluorescent is a playful reflection on the use of high-vis materials in rural Ireland.

Drawing on Lauren Elkin’s re-evaluation of women as wanderers, Ruby Wallis spent a period of time walking with her mother. The resulting work, Contact II, is a quietly compelling look at tactile qualities in an attempt to reach beyond the limits of the visual.