Brochure Issue number two - By Niall Moore for A&G, 2008.
Publication featuring my painting 'Appendage #3'
Download a PDF version at: www.aandgltd.com
More info at: www.brochure2.wordpress.com
Degree show Critic's choice - Review by Michaële Cutaya.
Circa 125 - Contemporary visual culture in Ireland. Autumn 2008 issue, page 62.
'Is this Utopia?' Cecilia Danell, Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology Degree show 2008.
It probably was the title that did it: in these days of atrophied imagination, in which fears stand in for political program, the very mention of Utopias is enough to suggest times when a better future was still being dreamt.
The initial impression of Cecilia Danell's show is one of a brightly coloured playfulness. The show is suffused with 1960s imagery, from the geometric designs of the wallpaper covering the installation room to the photographed retro objects, which are part of the artist's collection. It is however more pointedly to modernist architecture that Danell's work refers through painting and animation.
In a five-minute animated short, Is this Utopia, a curvilinear-patterned world is the set for a series of arrangements of urbanistic elements, the construction and deconstruction of buildings using Lego blocks - themselves a legacy of that 1960s optimism that the world is ours to be built in endless colourful possibilities. The alienating effects of such planning are pointed to by having round Maltesers-looking creatures attempting to inhabit this cubic world.
The top-down thinking underlying modern urbanism is furthered alluded to in a series of one-metre-square paintings. In the luridly idealistic colours of an advertisement are represented views of Stockholm's suburbs which are disrupted by prominent areas of splashed and dripped paint. The featureless spaces left in the painting seem to suggest the ultimate unfathomability of the inhabitants.
Alternatively, these vacant and uncertain shapes superimposed over the representation of places which were inspired by modernist utopias, could be left to be filled by future ones.
Michaële Cutaya is an
artist and writer living
in Galway.
The card that won the 2005 GMIT Christmas Card competition:
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