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Exhibition 2
The gallery has a number of exhibitions, but I mainly focused on the Amie Siegel exhibition and the exhibition from Christopher Mahon.
By Christopher Mahon.
VISUAL is pleased to present Sincere, or what you will, a solo exhibition by Irish artist Christopher Mahon.
Mahon works across a range of media including sculpture, painting, photography, installation and performance, and his practice is notable for the variety of disciplines and materials used. He has worked with actors and dancers to create site-responsive environments that combine the mundane and theatrical, and often incorporates found objects in the finished piece.
For several years Mahon has maintained a studio in Cairo, Egypt, basing much of his sculptural production on the techniques and capabilities of the small industrial workshops – the foundries, metal-, stone- and wood-working studios – that dot the city’s backstreets.
Mahon’s sculptures occupy the unstable space between lyricism and materiality, the concrete and ineffable. His materials reference the form and patina of everyday objects and their archaeological forebears. Figurative and decorative elements – carved stone arms, cast brass urns, found textiles – speak to both the historical context and daily domesticity. His material language embraces the mechanical detritus of the modern metropolis. Once functional objects now beyond repair, furniture so broken that no one will give it houseroom. The twisted fragments, nuts, bolts, cogs, pipes, of an obsolete infrastructure are repurposed or recreated so they can play their part as elements in a newly finished work.
Take BAI GAMAYKA, a key work in Sincere, or what you will. The seemingly meaningless set of brass sans-serif letters mounted on the wall reproduces the sign that hangs above one of Cairo’s few remaining downtown bars. The cursive flourish of the r fell off long ago and there is no soft g in colloquial Egyptian pronunciation. Bar Jamaica/BAI GAMAYKA hangs opposite The Sky so Blue, a scrawled handwritten phrase that has been recreated in outsized aluminium letters that hang floating in space; half-baked poetry facing off against a hard-bitten bar.
The exhibition’s title Sincere, or what you will foregrounds the artist’s interest in the ambiguous, the porous, the making things whole anew, if only temporarily. While it is now widely accepted that sincere derives from the Latin sincerus meaning clean, pure, sound, a common folk etymology has it that sincere is derived from the Latin sine, without, and cera, wax. The phrase was used to describe a perfect marble sculpture with no cracks needing to be filled with wax to trick unwary buyers. “or what you will” is drawn from the full title of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, a romantic comedy replete with love triangles and protagonists in disguise. The play was written to be performed on the twelfth night of Christmas or the feast of the Ephiphany, a holiday that shifts around the calendar depending on the Eastern or Western Christan tradition, and which now marks the boundary between an extended holiday period and the imminent return to work.
This exhibition, too, exists on the boundary between places and times both real and reimagined, where memories and materials can appear and dissolve and reappear anew.
Sincere, or what you will is co-curated by Benjamin Stafford (VISUAL) and Rachael Gilbourne (IMMA, RGKSKSRG). A text by Gilbourne, An Ode to Spring, from the End of Winter, to the Start of Summer, accompanies the exhibition and is available here and at the gallery.
Christopher Mahon is an Irish artist and the work for VISUAL was produced in his studio in Cairo. He attended the École Jacques Lecoq Movement Research Laboratory, Paris, holds an MA in Art and Research Collaboration from IADT and was a resident at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam 2018–2019. Mahon has exhibited in Ireland and internationally. Projects include Paris Art Book Fair, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2024), Aswan International Sculpture Symposium (2021), Rijksakademie Open Studios, Amsterdam (2019), Le Menagerie de Verre, Paris (2019), Townhouse Gallery, Cairo (2019), RGKSKSRG Cribs, Dublin (2019), Double Negative, ARKO Art Centre, Seoul (2018) and Active Archive, Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2018). Mahon’s work is held in private and public collections in Ireland, Europe and North America.
By Amie Siegel
VISUAL is pleased to present Asterisms, a solo exhibition by Amie Siegel. Siegel is an American artist who lives in Brooklyn, New York, and works across film, video, photography, sculpture, painting and installation.
Asterisms is both a moving-image work and a sculptural installation, its uniquely star-shaped wall of overlapping images built to a scale the artist proposed in response to the architecture of VISUAL’s Main Gallery. An asterism is a loose collection of stars that form a pattern, similar to but smaller than a constellation. This notion of disparate elements combining to form a complete image is key to both Asterisms itself, and to Siegel’s practice in general, in which deep research produces artworks that address cultural, political and social questions.
The setting and context of Asterisms is the United Arab Emirates, a place that has modernized at a rapid pace, built on wealth originally derived from ownership of natural resources. Throughout Siegel’s cinematic work the viewer encounters images of factories, labour, commerce, leisure, technology, humans, and animals. These elements are interwoven in the artist’s careful montage and in the various cinematically-scaled geometries that build and layer over time, both in their accumulation of meaning but also as the images dynamically overlap and connect on the star-shaped wall. Horses play a role in the work, and are seen stabled in luxurious accommodation, in sharp contrast with the conditions in which migrant labourers live and work. Horse’s flanks echo the shape of sand dunes and seem to merge with the landscape. The material of that same desert landscape – sand – is everywhere; kicked up into dust by hooves, encroaching on buildings, filling the doorways and windows and almost totally burying houses. Sand is dumped onto artificial islands, to arrest their rapid erosion back into the sea.
These artificial islands comprise a development designed to mimic a map of the world when viewed from above. Despite having once been a flagship project of the Emirate of Dubai, they are no longer promoted by the government. They hide in plain sight, simultaneously visible and invisible. In one of the later shots in Asterisms, the camera zooms out from a party on one of the islands, where a crowd drinks and dances by a swimming pool. As the partygoers recede into the distance, the lights of the sole inhabited island in a sea of dark ones makes them appear as distant and alone as a star hanging in a night sky.
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On show in VISUAL’s Digital Gallery is Siegel’s RM, a series of photographs of radioactive minerals. This group of works allude to Asterisms both in their constellation-like display, individually illuminated in a darkened space, and their own almost astral representations, glowing gently in dark matter. Many of the minerals Siegel photographed are pseudomorphs, or “false forms”, an occurrence where one mineral’s substance is entirely replaced by another while retaining its outward physical appearance. In each of these differently scaled works, the inherent danger of the radioactive material contrasts with their jewel-like colours and forms, their true nature disguised.
Alongside these works Siegel presents Listening to the Universe (2014), a work-on-paper and act of montage derived from the artist's collection of science and space museum postcards, presenting the vacuum of sound that is outer space, and our continual efforts to listen, or know, our sphere and beyond.
Asterisms is a commission of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil and VIA Art Fund. Additional support by KTLO, Los Angeles.
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Amie Siegel (b. 1974, Chicago, IL) is a visual artist working variously with film, video, photography, sound, performance and installation. She is known for her layered, meticulously constructed works that trace and perform the undercurrents of systems of value, cultural ownership and image-making.
Recent solo exhibitions include Panorama, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2023); Bloodlines, Scottish National Museum Gallery of Modern Art (2022); The Silence, ArkDes, Stockholm (2022); Medium Cool, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2019); In Focus: Amie Siegel – Provenance, Tate St. Ives (2018); Winter, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2017); Strata, South London Gallery (2017); Double Negative, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2016); Ricochet, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2016) and Imitation of Life, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (2016). She has participated in the 34th São Paulo Bienal; 12th Gwangju Biennial; Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh; Glasgow International, Scotland; 5th Auckland Triennial, New Zealand; and the Whitney Biennial, among numerous other group exhibitions.
Siegel’s work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Art Institute of Chicago; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand; MAK-Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum, New York and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Her films have screened at the Cannes, Berlin, Toronto, Rotterdam and New York film festivals. She has been a fellow of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm and Guggenheim Foundation, a Fulton Fellow at The Film Study Center at Harvard University and a Smithsonian Artist Fellow. Siegel has received numerous grants and awards including from the Sundance Institute, Princess Grace Foundation, ICA Boston (Foster Prize), Creative Capital, Anonymous Was a Woman and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York. In 2023 she was an Artist-in-Residence at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT.