The Model to Show Ireland's Venice Biennale Representative Isabel Nolan

Written by Eoin Kearney Thursday, 08 December 2011 20:43

Sligo, Ireland.- The Model, Sligo's contemporary arts center, is pleased to present "Isabel Nolan: A Hole Into the Future", on view from December 10th through February 12th 2012. "A Hole Into the Future" will open on Saturday, December 10th at 6pm with a reception at The Model, preceded by a public talk with Isabel Nolan and The Model’s Director Séamus Kealy at 5pm as part of The Model Talks Series. The exhibition will feature sculpture, paintings and drawings, and as part of this project The Model has also commissioned a new work by Isabel Nolan, which will be erected outside The Model building. This steel sculpture will be a on long term display in the grounds of The Model and will be unveiled at the opening. This is Nolan’s first solo museum exhibition. Alongside the outdoor sculpture and the show is a new publication on the artist’s work from 2005 to the present. This book, Intimately Unrelated, was produced in collaboration with Le Musée d'Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne Métropole in France and includes essays on Nolan’s work with contributions from philosopher Graham Harman, critic, writer and academic Declan Long, Séamus Kealy and Isabel Nolan. Nolan is a Dublin-based artist, and was one of a small number of artists who represented Ireland at the 2005 Venice Biennale, she has previously exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Beijing Art Museum of the Imperial City, De Appel and SMART, in Amsterdam, Artspace, Auckland, Le Musée d'Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne Métropole and she is represented by Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

In Isabel Nolan’s work ideas are proposed and tested with the making and display of formally contingent objects. Through this activity Nolan considers how subjectivity is produced within transient horizons of meaning and expectation. These artworks take different forms, including sculptures, paintings, fabric hangings and text based works. With their complexity, beauty and brittle inscrutability they solicit our attention and call for explication. “The title of this exhibition comes from the Russian sci-fi novel ‘Roadside Picnic’ by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (1971). A mysterious and brief extraterrestrial visitation has resulted in the creation of a zone, a delimited area littered with artefacts and dangerous residual phenomena. This utterly compelling zone casts a terrible pall over the depressed town of Harmon. Objects from the area are gathered at great risk, to be studied and instrumentalised for human use. Nevertheless, these artefacts retain their essential alienness even when their attributes are exploited. In a moment of uncharacteristic and very possibly unwarranted optimism, one character, a Stalker, opines that the zone is a hole into the future, both a window and a potential short cut towards a better life for all. It is the resistant otherness of these objects that I find compelling and likewise the effect that this mysterious zone has, by virtue of its impenetrability to human understanding, in shaping both lives, and hypotheses about life in the broadest sense. The novel addresses a key thematic in art - the subjective nature of meaning and the perpetual reconstruction of identity (collective and individual) in relation to objects/other people/the world.” “As I see it an artwork can provide an opportunity to have an experience that can’t happen in many other places. Here, I would locate the contemplation of objects that actually perform a version of being without use; of having an intense unknowability, making a careful withdrawal or enacting a stubborn indifference to the warmth and pain with which you meet them.” Isabel Nolan, 2011

The Model, home of The Niland Collection, is one of Ireland’s leading contemporary arts centres. Built in 1862 as a Model School, the present building has been extended twice. The first extension was in 2000 when it was completely refurbished and extended by McCullough Mulvin Architects. The building was redeveloped again by architects Sheridan Woods in 2010, whose extension to The Model has increased the building by a third in size to create a world-class visitor centre. The building boasts a restaurant and coffee dock, a bookshop, a wonderful gallery circuit, a purpose built performance space, and a suite of impressive artist studios on the top floor with enviable views of Sligo town and County. This award-winning building is home to the impressive Niland Collection of art, one of the most notable collections in Ireland and featuring works by John and Jack B. Yeats, Estella Solomons, Paul Henry and Louis Le LeBrocquy among others. The Model's acclaimed contemporary art programme features several major exhibitions of noted national and international contemporary artists. The Model is known for experimental, urgent programming, including projects that have critically tackled issues of war and contemporary religion (Signals in the Dark: Art in the Shadow of War and Medium Religion) as well as projects that question the role of art and artists today (Reverse Pedagogy). The Model develops projects in collaboration with artists, and is itself a site of artistic production with artist/musician commissions and a full-time artist residency. Previous artists in The Model’s exhibitions have included Paul Chan, Anri Sala, Harun Farocki, Omer Fast, VALIE EXPORT, Gregor Schneider, Kendell Geers, Johan Grimonprez, Dorothy Cross, Andy Warhol, Gerard Byrne, Patrick Hall, Sean McSweeny, Mark Orange, Runa Islam, John Shinnors, Camille Souter, William Kentridge, Patti Smith and Barrie Cooke. The Model also hosts international artists, writers and musicians in its residency programme, recently including Boris Groys, Mark Garry and Jaki Irivine. The Model has a vibrant music programme which includes an eclectic mix of contemporary and classical music. The Model develops music projects that respond to the exhibition programme, while also producing The Sligo New Music Festival and supporting The Sligo Festival of Baroque Music. The Model’s international film programme is presented in partnership with the Irish Film Institute (IFI) and is produced with regional partners, including The Sligo Film Society and Cinema North West. Integral to all aspects of the Model’s programme is an extensive offering of educational opportunities for children and adults, including the ground breaking Young Model programme. Visit the center's website at ... http://themodel.ie

---

Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~