MCAC is pleased to present a new body of project-based work from the Dublin-born, London-based artist, Joy Gerrard. The common theme of Gerrard’s current gallery work is a concern with space, site, politics and a visual response to the city as a site of transformation. She looks at ‘the crowd’ framed by urban space and seeks to address some fundamental questions about the changing political face of the city globally.
Both Gerrard’s public art and gallery-based works represent the complex multiplicity of human and societal relationships. Shifting between macro and micro perspectives, she offers abstract cityscapes and crowd scenes focussing on architecturally determined spatial relations, trajectories and human flows. These are juxtaposed with grander, relational images suggesting self-forming, interpenetrating nodes and networks. Both suggest the ecstasy of communication, exchange and empowerment. At the same time they present the dystopian potential of the same spaces and relations: the accumulation of risk, contestation, surveillance and control.
At MCAC, Gerrard will present a significant body of work made between 2007/9. This will include photography, film works, site-specific models and a series of drawings. The short films are exhibited on bespoke computer screens and show visualisations of the evolution and transformation of the crowd: the potent “crowding” of urban space and the inevitable “emptying out” which is its counterpoint.
Gerrard has exhibited extensively throughout Ireland, the United Kingdom and Europe and most recently, was submitted by Millennium Court Arts Centre for the AIB Award, Ireland’s most prestigious art prize, achieving short-listing. She has also just completed a major site-specific sculpture for the London School of Economics.
This MCAC exhibition presents new drawings alongside other strands of practice and will be the first time this extensive body of work is shown in Ireland.
An exhibition catalogue accompanies the work. Space, Fear and the Multitude is a 48 page, full colour, hardback catalogue, published 2009 with essay ‘A Crowd of Crowds’ by Fiona Kearney, Director, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork.
