Jennie Guy
Apply Within: Experience Essential
Date: 13 – 19 July 2009
Venue: Ard Bia / Nimmos, Spanish Arch, Long Walk, Galway
Artists: Sven Anderson, economicthoughtprojects, Jennie Guy, Sarah Hurl, Aine Ivers, Bea McMahon, Isabel Nolan, and Susan Thomson.
Download a zip archive of high resolution images (photographs taken by Sarah Hurl and Jennie Guy).
You are invited to dine in Ard Bia / Nimmos during the first week of the Galway Arts Festival and experience Apply Within: Experience Essential which is a series of semi-improvised temporal interventions executed within the context of an active restaurant. Participating artists Sven Anderson, economicthoughtprojects, Jennie Guy, Sarah Hurl, Aine Ivers, Bea McMahon, Isabel Nolan & Susan Thomson will respond to the site in a variety of media throughout the first week of the Galway Arts Festival.
A central idea of the exhibition is examining what happens when a populated social environment such as a restaurant is occupied by a number of artworks; an alternate scenario is rendered and new interpretations or moments of the said social space are exposed via the interruptions that the artworks generate. The presence of the artworks in this context encourages speculation and renegotiates the relationships that exist between an exhibition and the social space within which it occurs.
Sven Anderson
The interior sounds of a restaurant are traces of a series of functions executed within a clearly defined architectural and social space. Using carefully placed microphones and an array of PA speakers, these traces are shifted from the interior of the restaurant to its exterior, amplifying and projecting a mixture of private conversations, the clatter of food being prepared, and the intimate sounds of eating itself outwards into the public space adjacent to the restaurant. This mediation partially displaces the restaurant within the context of its location, blurring its boundaries and forcing it to perform more actively within its surrounding environment.
Sven Anderson and Russell Hart (economicthoughtprojects) performed an improvised set within the structure of this intervention. Anderson will process the sounds of the restaurant occurring in realtime, while Hart will process a mixture of treated field recordings captured during the previous week within the restaurant (please see economicthoughprojects’ entry below).
economicthoughtprojects
Russell Hart – has collected a series of field recordings from the restaurant over the previous week leading up to the event. These sounds will be used as the starting point for the development of a series of tones/drones and textures that he will then manipulate during the performance with Sven Anderson.
Jennie Guy – The Cardinal’s Pears or maybe The Abbots Snails
Jennie Guy’s daily culinary intervention is in collaboration with Ard Bia Nimmos head chef Tahlia Casey. Every day Guy will insert an appropriated recipe from early papal reigns. Recipe’s such as Pope Gregory’s Old Fashioned Fruit Tart or Innocent III’s Pontifical Soup introduce us to indulgent, austere and aphrodisiac recipes brought to us over centuries. These recipes signify and compare contemporary life with distant culture, society and religion.
Visit the project page for The Cardinal’s Pears or maybe The Abbots Snails here.
Sarah Hurl
Peering out from their celluloid world two 19th century Silent artists awake to modern Ireland, inhibited by their theatrical genre they try to interact with the city (dwellers) as they must look for work in the very foreign surroundings of a city restaurant. Sarah Hurl and fellow performer Martin Power are behind this double act of displaced silent movie stars.
Aine Ivers – plan B
‘Plan for this space; plan for tomorrow; plan for a river; plan for getting a grant…’ The neurotic artist inside artist Aine Ivers returns to the restaurant with excerpts from her extensive catering cv and memories of many restaurant floor-plans in tow, and some of the fantastic plans for her life that she has imagined of late to serve to you on a plate…
Bea McMahon – The Cleaners [Kronecker]
With characteristic wit and a disarming (domestic) economy of means Bea McMahon’s The Cleaners [Kronecker], 2009, conjures a whole history of ‘retinal art’ stretching back through 1960’s ‘Op art’ to the roto-reliefs of Marcel Duchamp, while simultaneously suggesting an idiosyncratically reconstituted ‘Systems Art’ that is entirely her own. Materials: Cloth, motors, aluminium, acetate.
Isabel Nolan
Isabel Nolan will be painting the exterior gate of the restaurant.
Susan Thomson – The Pleasure of the Table
Sifting through Roland Barthes’ texts on the look out for analyses of food. Food as metaphor for writing or for sex, the Atkins diet as symbolic castration, different types of chocolate in the Marquis de Sade, and the text as vegetable – namely an onion. Meet Roland Barthes the semiotician-fetishist cutting everything into bite-size morcels.