About The Exhibition
The Exchange Gallery hosts a show of work in progress by the current DAS residents. Working with the digital methods in their individual practices, developed throughout the last four months at the Hill Street-based studios, the artists collectively play with aspects of collection, narrative, history and data. Together they explore the ways digital media can touch upon traditional settings and concerns.
The Artists
Ben Craig Dorothy Hunter Jonny McEwen Helouise O’Reilly Ciarán WoodBen Craig describes himself as a sculptor, but the things he makes are temporary and usually need the interaction of others to be realised. The things he makes are a conglomerate of media. They use the notion of familiarity in relation to childhood memories, living habits and aspects of pop culture to involve the viewer and allow them to reminisce.
Ben lives and works in Belfast and Berlin. He has a BA in Fine Art from the University of Ulster in Belfast and graduated (2008) and a Masters in Fine Art from the Bauhaus University, Weimar (2012).
Dorothy Hunter is a Belfast-based installation artist and writer. Dorothy’s work plays with the aging and relevance of records, both personal and public domain. Here her work focuses specifically on a removal of context, and on the loaded nature of a modern-day, open source archive.
Jonny McEwen come from a background in painting, but now works with video and code, producing code driven, digital works with a painterly aesthetic. The new work evolves in a generative way, simultaneously constructing and de-constructing. The code draws/constructs with infinite possibilities over video of landscape. There is a gentle interplay between the video and the code, between the possible and the impossible, between the past and the future, between the real and the imagined. In this new work Jonny has returned to landscape as a theme, as he examine the edges of the urban landscape.
Helouise O’Reilly’s work takes many forms including photography, video and object-making, which come together cohesively to create installations. The subjects within her work often emerge through the act of storytelling, which has become a process of uncovering the ‘unseen’. As a gatherer of stories she is constantly exploring and questioning notions of identity. Helouise’s role within this process is to act as a witness or simply a presence within the situations on which her work focuses. She creates images that document the experience of these encounters, to relay stories that would perhaps otherwise not be heard.
Ciarán Wood is an artist based in London who works predominately with video installation. His work originates in historical and personal video footage, using the medium to revisit and reposition events: questioning its function in recording a moment, and what happens when what is captured turns into fiction. His use of multi-channel video installation splits the narrative of histories and positions factual material alongside his own constructed story. Ciarán graduated from Goldsmiths in 2011.