Kathy Prendergast
Or
April 10–June 13, 2015
Crawford Art Gallery
Emmet Place
Cork
Ireland
T+ 353 21 4805042
info [at] crawfordartgallery.ie
Crawford Art Gallery presents a major solo exhibition of recent work by Kathy Prendergast. Always rooted in the physical world—reinforced by her use of low-tech materials and by the way in which her work is often painstakingly hand-made—Prendergast creates work at the intersection between the material and the conceptual.
In response to her invitation to exhibit in Cork, Prendergast has created site-specific installations for the ornate Gibson Bequest display cabinet, in the historic Gibson Galleries and also for the large upstairs gallery extension. Questions, Questions is a 15-metre-long installation for which Prendergast has used text as the core element in her work for the first time. Made up of nearly 100 questions—many of them specially written in response to an invitation from the artist—this work presents a number of timely provocations that encourage the viewer to reflect upon our place in society.
Her transformation and re-arrangement of familiar everyday things, and her use of objects such as glass domes that are lodged in our collective memory as a Victorian afterlife, serve to underline the fragility of our certainties. They are also a kind of mute provocation, asking us to consider what is there, what has been taken away and what is left. Re-presentation and erasure have been themes in Prendergast’s practice from the start. Maps offer a condensed sense of place and ownership, setting out territory, enabling access that is invariably available to coloniser, not the colonised. Prendergast’s cartographic interventions, in this exhibition The World in 12 Pieces, have a peculiar tenderness and a narrative heft that take on issues of gender, diasporas and colonisation coolly and without sentimentality.
Two of the key works in the Gibson galleries are primarily made using mass-produced objects—something of a departure for Prendergast, who has been known for using or depicting very personal or intimate objects within her work. But what connects these new works with her longer-term preoccupations is the importance that is placed on the processes of making. Prendergast has altered and evolved their cheap materiality by low-tech and painstaking alterations. One of these works is an arrangement of 27 desk globes of varying sizes on a large base, supported by trestle legs. The entire work has been hand painted matte black using a kind of paint that appears to absorb the light and gives the objects the impression of a mass and density that belies their actual weight. Titled Eclipse, this work directly communicates a number of inherent ambiguities.
Invited curator Ingrid Swenson, Director of PEER, London, has commented: “As the title of her exhibition suggests, Or is about thinking as well as looking. Prendergast’s new works revisits and extends many of her longer term preoccupations, encouraging us to see the universal in the specific, and to reflect closely upon the everyday.”
Public talk:
Thursday 23 April, 6pm
Kathy Prendergast and curator Ingrid Swenson will be in conversation, prior to the launch of the publication to accompany the exhibition.
Catalogue
Kathy Prendergast OR
With contributions from Tanya Harrod (independent design historian and author); Ingrid Swenson (director, PEER, London) and Peter Murray (director, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork)
Published by Crawford Art Gallery
ISBN: 978-1-874756-23-1
Press contact: dawnwilliams [at] crawfordartgallery.ie
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Prendergast represented Ireland at the 1995 Venice Biennale, where she was awarded the Premio 2000 Best Young Artist Award for the presentation of her City Drawings (ongoing since 1992). She has exhibited widely in venues including the Sydney Biennale, the ICA (London), Tate Britain (London), The Drawing Center (New York), PEER (London), Douglas Hyde Gallery (Dublin) and Berardo Museum (Lisbon). She is represented in the collections of Tate, the Government Art Collection (of Great Britain), the collections of Arts Council England and the Arts Council of Ireland, the Albright-Knox Museum, New York, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and numerous private collections internationally.
