Artist
Leon Nevill Gallagher
Leon is a contemporary Irish lens-based artist, living in Berlin. His practice lies in conceptualising the space between people and communicative technology, creating documents reflecting on the emotional and physical shift occurring as the surface of our communicational needs reposition themselves. Leon refers to his work as a hybrid ‘documentary’ form, drawing from fact and fiction to realise a reality that exists in-between.
Cargo
Online life is both an extension of traditional social interactions and a radical departure from it. It is a place where we seek out stories, people, and knowledge – but it’s also a place that distorts and limits those interactions.
Cargo explores the non-place that exists between people and online communication. A space where the subtleties of body language, touch and sound are lost or at the very least compressed. This ongoing body of work focuses on the unseen, playing with memory, imaginary data and visual documentation. Exploring the spaces in between friends and partners, where online communication becomes the third party and mediator in the dialogue of a relationship.
Around the time of beginning this body of work, myself and my girlfriend were no longer living near each other. A natural thread within this project emerged visualising the feeling arising as we uphold relationships through a sterile looking glass, distorting the sense for what is human and what is digital.
Recent graduate Berta Mars presents her latest work The Loudest Silence – a nostalgic look back at the artist’s childhood memories while also reflecting on a slower way of life exemplified in the represented place. While the topic may not be loudly political, it remains current. The jury praised Mars’ composition in the images, but also the “raw emotional intensity” of them.
Leon Nevill Gallagher explores the lacuna that exists between people influenced by our relationship with the online. Informed by his experience of temporary separation from his girlfriend, he proposes a narrative by visualising the emotions around the spaces created between loved ones in times of distance and reliance on online communication.
Debbie Castro conveys memory loss through the family story of her father and his dementia through the sensitive and considerate editing and narration of his personal family photographs and archives. Her work talks about mental health, especially in the case of the project Age is a Privilege, Unless You Forget!, which reflects on her personal experience of the effects of Alzheimer's on a loved one.
Similar to Castro’s work, Sarah Navan’s ongoing project Care in Progress serves as a cathartic practice to understand a mental state of being – in this case examining her own experience with bipolar disorder. With Care in Progress, she shifts the lens back onto herself and her everyday life as she learns to live anew following her diagnosis.
Also using his everyday life but with a very different approach is Chris Finnegan with his project The Grammar of Home. At times collaborating with his child to present ideas around the definition of a ‘home’, Finnegan critically interrogates ideas of home-making, childhood and the domestic sublime.