Roleplay, Solo Show Norway
Irish Art was started in 2009 by John Fitzgerald in order to promote and exhibit Irish and Irish based visual artists. He has worked with artists such as Charles Cullen (Aosdána), Rita Duffy, Eamonn O`Doherty, Brian Bourke (HRHA, Aosdána), Michael O'Sullivan and Michael Cullen (RHA, Aosdána) Jay Murphy, Rosie mcGurran and Ger Sweeney. Past exhibitions include Europe’s Edge Ireland- The Artist and the Island, Out of the West, and RE- JOYCE.Irish Art is pleased to announce an exhibition called Roleplay/ Rollespille by Jennifer Cunningham, at Galleri Sonne in Drøbak, Oslo from 24.10.12 until 14.11.12.
Henriette Sonne is the director at Gallery Sonne in Norway. She is an artist herself and her work is conceptual, dealing with objects and issues from our everyday life. Her current series is about consumerism . She has exhibited at many different Contemporary exhibitions, including SNAB Louvre (at the Louvre in Paris), ARTexpo New York, Florence Biennale for Contemporary art.
Artist Statement.
Children are much closer to the unconscious than are adults; fantasy and reality are less clearly separated for them.
The sociology of Childhood: Essential readings by Chris JenksChildhood and leaving it, is about the move from the imaginary to social spaces and learning how to perform in the latter.Jennifer uses the media of painting, print and film to explore the inner psychological struggle of her subjects. Central to her work is an ongoing exploration of identity, liminal space and personal subjectivity.Significant in these processes is a creation of an anxious narrative which foregrounds issues of longing and belonging to the contemporary world and the loss of innocence and youth.The attraction of childhood is it is often seen as a time of security, protected by the parents and in particular, with the love of the mother. It is a time without the complex responsibilities of adulthood, things which are often at odds with the creative mindset, so it can therefore be seen that it would have a particular attraction to such an individual seeking peace.Here lies the basis of Sehnsucht; a resistance to change, a desire to return to an ideal place which doesn't exist, to avoid the harsh realities of the world.
Having no literal translation in English, the word 'sehnsucht' evokes a distant yearning in all of us: the common experiences that we share and the common spaces through which we live. This is explored further in the series of small paintings titled Haus der kleinen Sehnsucht (House of the Little Longing) invoking the familar motif of the house to explore emotional connections between physical environment and human beings.
I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you - the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence... the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something which has never actually appeared in our experience.
C S Lewis
The places we have known do not only belong to the world of space in which we situate them for the sake of simplicity. They were but a thin slice between contiguous impression which formed our lives back then; the memory of a certain image is but the regret of a certain instant. and the houses, the roads, the avenues are fleeting, alas! ah the years.