dirty – wow – sun
9th MAY – 1st JUNE 2024
Opening Thursday 9th of May
Reception from 6pm
The term dirty — wow — sun* is an emerging multi-lingual neologism used as an alternative for ‘The Anthropocene.’ Attributing an enhanced vibrancy to pollution, it describes hyper-saturated sunsets – as moments of our own making, and emblems of our own undoing. In her exhibition, dirty — wow — sun, Shiel presents a new body of work, that explores living’s implicit relationship with the dark side. In one of her ‘living autobiographies’ – Things I don’t want to know,’ Deborah Levy describes writing about being a writer as ‘a plume of dream stuck to a mountain’ – it’s hard enough, she explains, to know what it is to write, but to know what it is to be a subject also, seems a step too far, and is yet – irresistible. These self-reflexive paintings, lapelled, gabled, hinged, and winged, in arrangements of wooden parts, appear to build into themselves – their own shadows, as if intrinsically bound together in a shared agency with light.
Sonia Shiel is an Irish artist, born and based in Dublin. Recent exhibitions include Medusa in Pieces at VISUAL, Carlow, curated by Benjamin Stafford; Supernatural Bureau at Kunstverein Aughrim, which included a series of performance events at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, with theatre director Anne Bogart, writer Elvia Wilk, and gaming theorist Benjamin Hanussek, curated by Kate Strain; and I am what you’ve come to see, at Void, Derry, curated by Mary Cremin. She has received a number of competitive awards and has participated on several prestigious international residencies. Her work is supported by the Arts Council, and she is a resident artist at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, where she will launch a new publication in November 2024.
*Coined by The Bureau of Linguistical Reality, a participatory artwork facilitated by artists Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante which collaborates with the public to create new words for feelings and experiences for which no words yet exist. The original ‘chuco헐sol’ is composed of El Salvadorian slang, Korean and Spanish.
At the Kevin Kavanagh
Starts: 9th May 2024 at 6:00pm
Ends: 1st June 2024
