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News of a great exhibition for Sligo appeared in my inbox today. A week long illustration based show, it features brilliant local artists like Wayne O’Connor and national heroes like Chris Judge, who’s exhibiting the first works from his Key Frames project. Here’s the official blurb, but get yourself along from July 17th as it’s only there for a week.
The Yeats Building in Sligo will play host to a week long exhibition entitled Through The Looking Glass. Drawing together the work of several Irish Artists from around the country, the exhibition will open on Sunday 17th July at 6pm. Each of the artists works in an illustrative style and come from backgrounds informed by Animation, Illustration and Street Art.
Chris Judge is a Dublin based illustrator and painter who was a guest speaker at this years Childrens Book Conference and recently took part in the ‘Unflattering Portraits’ promotion in Sligo.
Marian Noone is a Belfast based artist with a background in Animation, who is part of the Spoom Collective, a group who frequently collaborate on large scale street murals.
Wayne O Connor is a Sligo based artist who has been published in several fantasy and Science fiction games and draws influence from his interest in those genres.
James Gammell is a concept artist and illustrator from Limerick who has worked on various franchises including Judge Dredd.
Patrick O Callaghan is another Dublin Based animator who has worked with a variety of clients including Brown Bag Films.
Finally Daniel Bourke is another Dublin artist whose work was recently featured prominently in the international art magazine Imagine FX. Each of the artists work in a variety of mediums across both traditional and Digital formats so the show promises to an intriguing mix of pieces. All the work will be available for sale.
The show opens officially at 6pm on Sunday 17th July and wine and music are promised, so you’ve no excuse. It’s great to see this sort of thing being put on in Sligo, so fairplay to the organisers.
Had another great weekend at Body&Soul this year, with the musical highlights being Donal Dineen’s new project Parish (download/hear the live set here) and Lamb, who are old school faves from way back in the day. As always though, the real joy at Body and Soul is the arty surprises. It’s impossible to communicate the real childish joy you feel at that festival, and although the holistic side of things are not my bag, I do love all the arty and foody flourishes. The main tents are all well and good but there’s always a bevy of quirky alternatives dotted around the site. My favourite tent this year was tied between the Queens Go Wildside Banquet or Natasha’s Living Food Tent, the later was the perfect place to sneak into for a cuppa and some chocs accompanied by some lovely tunes while the rain came down.
Queen's go Wildside
Natasha's living food tent
My very favourite thing though was Aoife Banville‘s Camera Obscura installation Inside/Outside. Built inside a garden shed, you were literally inside the camera, as the shed acted as a pinhole camera reflecting the scene outside. You sat on beanbags against the wall with the pinhole, looking at a blank screen in the pitch dark, as you wait for the images to appear before your eyes. It’s hard to explain exactly how magical it is to see ghostly images start to appear out of nowhere as if suspended in the dark. My friend’s eyes are better in the dark (I’m clearly not eating enough carrots) so she was seeing things a good 60 seconds before me, cue much hilarious disclaiming of the “you must be able to see that” variety. Once things pop into view though it’s incredible. The image is inverted, so it started for me with the tips of the tree appearing at our feet. The sunlight was creating this dappled leaf effect across the flood, in a golden colour, almost like a moment from Avatar, or translucence. So beautiful and surprising. Then the white chair and table appeared and finally I could see upside down people as they walked by the hole outside. The while concept of a pinhole camera is magical enough, but seeing images appear like that was so gorgeous, and so transportative…oh, and so addictive. I could have sat there for 10 times longer than I did. I really hope the project gets re created for Electric Picnic or another festival like Gracelands art festival in Leitrim perhaps, everyone should have the opportunity to try this out.
Artist Aoife Banville outside her Camera Obscura
Last year the Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport launched an excellent initiative in the Cultural Technology Grant Scheme. The idea was to match creativity in technology with the cultural sector, thus creating new ways to promote culture and the arts in Ireland. The first batch of resulting projects are starting to come to light, and revealing some very useful and clever products. I blogged about Breaking Tunes a few weeks back – a good looking phone app that delivers music event and artist info and content from emerging irish music artists direct to your phone, and now another great app has been launched today in the form of Dublin’s Cultural Trail courtesy of Temple Bar Cultural Trust and a trio of Digital Hub enterprises.
Both a comprehensive website, and a compatible iphone app, the Trail aims to bring a number of Dublin’s leading cultural institutions to life with lovely photographs of each venue, historical information and some extremely high quality videos. It’s clearly aimed at visitors to Dublin, bringing to life as it does all of the venues both from the website and the app, though locals should find it useful too.
Both website and app have handy venue info; opening times, contact details and location maps that will come in handy for even regular users of the locations. The app uses it’s geo-location potential to show the venues in respect of your current location, and can even map your journey to them via google maps.
The website offers a little more with an event listing service for the venues and a special offers section, two things that would have been nice to see on the app as a way to keep it dynamic and current, but possibly not everything would fit? Or maybe they are to come on an upgrade? The site also has a clever little weather summary in the header.
The videos are great, and it’s so encouraging to see such high quality, contemporary looking product being created to promote Dublin abroad. It’s easy to see how the site will be of huge benefit to those planning trips to Ireland and may entice those who are still undecided about their trip, if promoted in the right way. I loved seeing the inclusion of contemporary cultural venues like Project, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios and the Graphic Studio Gallery, as I have a bit of a bugbear about so much tourism being heritage related, but it’s a pity then to see all three of these venues videos lumped together into one combined video rather than a separate one for each of them as with the other venues like IMMA or Chester Beatty. It may arguably work to push visitors from one to the other within the Temple Bar trio, but it’s not clearly spelled out when you start the video that you’re about to see three venues, so I initially thought the wrong video had loaded on the app.
It’d be great to see the videos becoming sharable, (especially the intro trailer) and specifically embedable, but tying the links back to the dublin cultural trail site, so that bloggers and others could better share the info about the trail, and about the great venues. At the moment there aren’t unique url’s for each of the videos either so you can’t provide a hyperlink to their exact page, whatever about embedding them,
Overall though, it’s a great initiative, and the potential for it is huge, not least of all to see irish culture and technology come together so forcefully. It’s so brilliant to see these sorts of things finally coming out of Ireland and I’m looking forward to seeing the other projects funded by the scheme come on stream over the coming weeks.
