ÉILIS KIRBY: Uninvited Guests
17 April - 11 May 2024
The white cube’s dominance, which was once revolutionary, has come to feel more static as time moves on. Brian O’Doherty in his book ‘Inside the White Cube,’ investigates, perhaps for the first time, what the highly controlled context of the modernist art gallery does to the art object. It can be off-putting to modern audiences, by elevating art above its earthly origins and alienating uninitiated visitors.
Alternatively postROOM Gallery has evolved specifically in opposition. It is a space for social and thoughtful interaction. We use white for our walls and sometimes other colours, but it is a positive decision to have other domestic objects in the same room and for the architecture of the place to have a strong presence for the work to chime with. Things have changed - there are all sorts of new kinds of work everywhere and the methods for showing are changing too. Not only that, but the status of the home has changed and become a live/work space.
How is art integrated into its space or context? How does it make new relationships, dynamics and tensions? How does it affect our emotional and intellectual responses to the work?
To Éilis Kirby – EAK enterprises, we have given a rare and free opportunity to do “something funny, wrong and unusual”. In order to comply with this remit, she has occupied, and inhabited the space finding niches within which to fit and to accommodate. In doing this, we hope to reveal other things that already are existing alongside, beneath, unseen, in the margins, and on the edges. Employing spontaneity, improvisation and responsiveness to the location, her intention is to surprise, unsettle, disrupt and inspire; and to provide temporary refuge and shelter for a host of oddities. She has found ways, and things, with which to infiltrate and populate postROOM, alongside its usual occupants, with texts, images, objects, film and events. The outcome is an intuitive, playful, provocative and spontaneous collaboration with things, designed to pose questions, provoke creativity and suggest possibilities.
