Rhona Byrne.
It’s a roller coaster.
8th August to 6th September 2008
Four at Kerlin Gallery
119 Capel St,
Dublin 1,Dublin
Four is pleased to present ‘It’s a roller coaster.’ new work by Rhona Byrne hosted by Kerlin Gallery Dublin.
In Kerlin’s private viewing room, Byrne has built a full-scale section of a wooden roller coaster. The tracks cut through the space as though looping through the floor and re-emerging, before cutting through the back wall and disappearing off into the city. It offers a heady and vertiginous way out of the gallery, a kind-of nerve-racking adventure.
Byrne also presents the early results of a collaborative research project with renowned environmental and investigative psychologist, David Canter. This work is an exploration of the relationship between behaviour and experience and the built and natural environment. It considers the roles that design, function and memory play in our attachment of meaning to place. In a film of a discussion about meaning and space, Canter reflects, amongst other things, on how galleries operate in relation to his idea of ‘rules of place’.
Rhona Byrne makes objects; site-specific, gallery and context-based
installations; films; publications and collaborative event-based projects. These projects focus on the interplay between people and their surrounding environment at both macro and micro levels. Byrne’s work explores and engages with the multilayered surfaces and workings of the built environment and navigates intangible and transient layers of physical, mental and social space.
Recent solo exhibitions include; Nothing Happens, Gallery for One, Dublin, 2007; The Umbrella Project, The Lab, Dublin, 2006 (publication); Home, Axis Arts Centre, Ballymun, 2005 (publication). Selected group exhibitions include; Green Screen, ICA, Sydney, 2008; Architecture: the bridge, The Dock, Leitrim, 2008; Changing spaces, The Concourse, Dublin, 2007; Work, Haus der Architektur Graz, Austria, 2006; Locws International 3, Swansea, 2007; Here there and Otherwise, Dublin, 2005; Offside, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 2005.
Rhonacurrently an artist in residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Professor David Canter is an internationally renowned applied environmental psychologist, writer, social researcher, criminal and investigative psychologist. He began his career as an architectural psychologist in the early 1960s and has published widely on varied aspects of psychology and is best known for his theory of the Psychology of Place. He has consulted and lectured extensively on issues of environmental design, safety and energy efficient design and architectural psychology. www.davidcanter.com
The Kerlin Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Nicholas Byrne and Benedikt Hipp from August 8 until September 6, 2008.
Although both of these artists explore the traditions of drawing and painting in highly individual and very distinctive manners, it can be said that both bodies of work display an undeniable ability to investigate shape and form whilst demonstrating an intense love of the chosen medium and its possibilities for illusion, complexity, intricacy, darkness and humour.
