S H O W 5
Solo Show of Painting by Karl Somers | Toradh Gallery | Curated by Nicola Lane | June 2016
“Meath County Council Arts Office is delighted to present “SHOW 5” an exhibition of work by Meath based artist Karl Somers at the Toradh Gallery, Ashbourne Library & Cultural Centre, Ashbourne, Co. Meath. The exhibition was curated by Nicola Lane and will be opened at 7pm on Tuesday June 14th 2016 by Sean Hillen. All welcome.
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Somers tends to work fast, and on multiple paintings – anything from 5 to 10 paintings at any one time. He uses a playful, colourful approach to address darker themes, and influences include painters such as Camille Souter, Jean-Michel Basquiat, L S Lowry and Brian Maguire.
“The works in “SHOW 5” are largely inspired by the place of their making – where I live in Meath – the cherry tree under which much of the work was started, the surrounding wheat fields, the harvest skyline, and the fact that we live on the flight path to Dublin Airport. The paintings themselves are colour poems. The pallet and painting technique employed reflect these surroundings, responding to the seasons, which then get over-laid through use of underpainting and glazing, with cherry blossom pinks merging with wheaten golds to create an almost idealised reflection of the place – unreal, romanticised. As throughout all my work, there are recurrent themes of the city, and landscape structures such as pylons and telegraph poles. The frenetic activity of the airport, and its ever increasing workload, as another generation is displaced, has also seeped into the work. All this is transmuted through the candy coloured pallet, sweetening the bitter pill. Powerful icons have been transposed into playful motifs using pinks, oranges and muted whites.” Karl Somers 2016
T H E L A N D S T H A T N E V E R D I E
Solo Show of Painting by Karl Somers | Ballyroan Library | Curated by Nicola Lane | 1st to 30th July 2015
“New show of paintings by artist Karl Somers at the newly designed contemporary art space at Ballyroan Library in Rathfarnham.
Somers hails originally from the foothills of the Dublin Mountains, which have been the basis for a series of poems and paintings, dealing with the gradual encroachment of the city’s hinterlands on the landscape that formed him.
The poems feed into the paintings, creating a kind feedback loop, with each discipline informing the other throughout the process of making the work. This show consists mainly of abstract landscapes accompanied by an abstract of the poetry that helped to give rise to them.”
T R O V E
Dorothy Cross Selects from the National Collections | Garden Galleries | IMMA | December 2014 | Interpretation film of Nicola Lane interviewing the lending curators exhibited alongside exhibition
“In December 2014 the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) put on Trove, an exhibition in which Irish artist Dorothy Cross was invited to make a selection drawing on works and artifacts held in Ireland’s national collections. Cross wished for a minimal approach to the interpretation, and the decision was taken to film interviews with the curators as a measure towards providing some level of information about the exhibits, without encroaching on Cross’s desire for an immersive experience for visitors. IMMA invited me to conduct six filmed interviews with curators and conservators representing all of the organisations involved. These ten to twelve minute pieces were then shown on a monitor in the exhibition space with two sets of headphones and a large bench. The film was directed and edited by me, and the camera work and stills photography was by done by my partner & fellow artist Karl Somers. The organisations participating in the project were IMMA (Dublin), the Crawford Gallery (Cork), the National Library (Dublin), the National Gallery (Dublin), and the National Museum of Ireland (Dublin), including its two subsidiary departments: the Irish Folk-Life Museum (Roscommon) and the Natural History Museum (Dublin), AKA the Dead Zoo.”
9 9 : 1
Sion Hill Gallery | Bath | Curatorial Collaboration with Sightlines | 14th to 30th May 2014
99:1 was a curatorial collaboration with the Bristol based curating team Sightlines, consisting of Roz Bonnet and Sarah Knight. Together we curated a show with Wiltshire based artists Beth Biddiss and my partner, Irish based artist Karl Somers.
“An object belonging to a museum collection will generally have undergone a number of incarnations and travelled a winding path through various homes and ownerships before eventually reaching its prestigious final resting place. In so doing, the object has achieved ‘special’ status, whether for historical, archaeological, aesthetic or other reasons, and this sanctification, though ascribed rather than inherent, is unlikely to be reversed. Once in the museum collection, however, statistics say the object is unlikely to see the light of day again, as the majority of museums exhibit just a fraction of their collections at any given time.
Taking this disproportionate ratio as a point of departure, 99:1 attempts to raise questions around selection, hierarchy, and the authority of the museum; it also considers the implications that a life hidden from view may have for the perceived value of the non-displayed museum object.
MA Fine Art student Beth Biddiss’s ghostly re-imagining of an everyday object at once transcends the ordinary status of its original and, in the context of this exhibition, playfully challenges the museum’s traditional rejection of the replica or ‘copy’ in favour of the ‘authentic’ object. By contrast, Dublin-based artist, Karl Somers‘ satirical video and wall installation allude to the secret lives of ‘the other 99%’ of objects—those kept behind the scenes of an imaginary museum.”
Live link-up in Sion Hill, with Nicola Lane & Karl Somers on Skype, and Beth Biddiss, Sarah Knight & Roz Bonnet in the venue for the ‘meet the artists & curators’ session.
RECOLECT | Sound Piece | 99:1 | Beth Biddiss
Installation views, stills from Karl Somers’ video piece Curating Tomorrow, sample labels from Karl Somers’ installation Paper Curtain, and Paragon, a wax cast piece by Beth Biddiss.
Extracts from Karl Somers’ video piece ‘Curating Tomorrow’…
Nicola Lane 