Present Haunts @ CIT

Present Haunts
Jackie Burke, Cat Gambel, Vicky Langan, Max Le Cain
Curated by Pádraig Spillane
James Barry Centre, Cork Institute of Technology
Opening Thursday October 5th, 5pm
Running October 5th - 17th
arts.cit.ie

Present Haunts features four 2017 graduates from the MA in Art & Process at CIT Crawford College of Art and Design. This exhibition explores shifting influences within our contemporary times. It considers our present flux through different modes: our witnessing of mass-media exclamations, experiences of contemporaneous influencers, and corporal moments in time.

Jackie Burke’s paintings translate digitally disseminated and mass-consumed images of power. Her works focus on the communication of political stagings and what aftereffects come from them. In searching from the present to the past, Cat Gambel’s clay and photographic works interrogate how to represent forgotten individuals from family archives. These works do not provoke reaction but reflection, wanting us to notice what is hidden in plain sight to bring understanding and reconciliation.

Vicky Langan and Max Le Cain, working singularly and collaboratively, seek to bring our attention to experience perceived through an intensely somatic perspective. Langan, whose practice transverses performance, sound art and film, presents her sound work Stacked, an intimate reorientating of domestic space. Le Cain, with both moving and still images, creates ambiguous filmic moments disclosing alternatives that reside in every moment. The works presented in Present Haunts look beyond the narratives that are sanctioned to us, seeking new and alternative ways to connect with each other in our current times. Langan and Le Cain will present a new performance during the exhibition.

Present Haunts is a new iteration of - slips, speaks - which was presented in May of this year at 12 Star Gallery, Europe House in Westminster. Present Haunts is a returnal to the institute and Cork city for the four artists and their art works.