Thursday, February 24, 2011

AT THE EDGE OF THE SKIN - CECILY BRENNAN AT THE MERMAID ARTS CENTRE

Well known artist Cecily Brennan is currently at the Mermaid Arts Centre here in Bray.  Brennan is well known to many of the artists in Bray who she taught in the Fine Arts Programme at the Dun Laoghaire Institute for Arts, Design and Technology.  Dont miss this very exciting exhibition.

Cecily Brennan has worked in many media, including painting, various forms of graphics and three-dimensional materials. At the edge of the skin, however, is the first survey exhibition that looks specifically at her work in video, which now amounts to a substantial proportion of her output. The trajectory of her development as an artist takes her closer and closer to the subject of individual tension and trauma and its at times painfully direct visualisation. While evident in other media, as in her iconic, stainless steel Bandaged Heart from 2001 and her tempera paintings of damaged bodies in Heat, the theme is most explicitly addressed in her videos. They have tended to move from the abstract manipulation of materials in a quasi-scientific idiom to the naked vulnerability of the human body and the human psyche in a series of stark, performative pieces including Unstrung, Balancing, Rubber Band, Melancholia and the startling Black Tears.

Strong, often disturbing stuff

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