Visual Art and Sound Art Installation ...

Listening With The Sound Turned Off : Paintings, Drawings, Mixed Media and Sound Installations in Triskel Arts Centre on 4th July, 2008 @7 pm - Catalogue as 630kb pdf

This is the first exhibition in Cork by the artist in over ten years despite having had exhibitions in Japan, Germany and Canada within the past year.

The exhibition comprises of works based around sound and listening an area that has occupied the artist for many years. It will comprise of paintings, drawings and mixed media works incorporating sections entitled Soundscapes, Soundmarks, The Rematerialization of Sound as an Art Object, Found Sound and two sound installations Hello/Hello and No More/No More. The paintings and drawings have been created by the artist using sound as a basic ingredient with sound actually causing the works to be formed. These deal with memory, trace and impermanency an area the artist has pursued in his recent shows (Re)sounding Memories/Cleaning The House and (Re)sounding Memories/Watering The Plants in Germany, Canada and Japan. They were created in the artists old family home now used as his studio, where he was surrounded by the echoes, memories and traces of sounds that he grew up with. These in turn explore the shreds and fragments of collective memories. With the transience of time and the fallibility of memory these sounds still resonate in the space they first sounded.

These ideas are referenced in such works as No Curfew on Late Night Listening, Sound Pallet and the drawings using magnetic tape and the silver foil from discarded CD’s and such objects as recording heads from old reel to reel tape machines and the stylus from an old record player whilst cross referencing contemporary sound art with works like Sleeve Without a Record and Danger Music No xxvii and Home Made Gold Record.

Soundscapes - These works were created by the artist dipping a speaker cone in pigment and placing paper/canvas on top of the speaker, sound is then fed to the speaker causing it to vibrate and in turn leave a trace of pigment on the paper/canvas this in turn is coated with water from a dehumidifier taken from the air of the same room and the resulting images form the works in the exhibition Soundmarks - These are created in a similar manner to the paintings except graphite is used placed on a sheet of paper covered by a steel plate this is then place on top of a speaker and again sound is fed to the speaker causing it to vibrate which in turn causes the plate and paper to vibrate causing the graphite to leave a trace on the paper.

The Rematerialization of Sound as an Art Object - This series takes its name from the reworking of the title of Lucy Lippard’s seminal work on conceptualism The Dematerialization of the Art Object and questions the very nature of sound and listening.

Drawings are created using found cassette tapes and the silver from discarded CDs Objects and texts are used to question the nature of listening itself often referencing other seminal works yet standing alone as works in their own right.

Danny McCarthy studied at the National College of Art and Design. He has pioneered both performance art and sound art in Ireland and he continues to be a leading exponent exhibiting and performing at home and abroad including SPAN2 in London and at Hearing Place in Melbourne. His work is in the collections of the Arts Council Of Ireland, Crawford Municipal Gallery and Limerick City Gallery and numerous other public and private collections. In November 2007 he presented his sound and visual installation (Re)sounding Memories /Watering The Plants in Le Lieu Centre dArte Actualle Quebec, Canada. In 2004 he exhibited/performed in the prestigious TRACE

Gallery Cardiff with Wild Oats & Cornerstones. His work has appeared on numerous CDs and has been broadcast widely on both radio and television. He is a founding director of Triskel Arts Centre and of the National Sculpture Factory and is a director of Art Trail and the Sirius Arts Centre. He is the recipient of numerous awards and bursaries from both the Irish Arts Council and Dept. of Foreign Affairs and has represented Ireland abroad at various exhibitions. He is a First Prize winner in EV+A (selector Pierre Restany) More

recent exhibitions include his piece waTEr at the Bourges International Electro Acoustic Music Festival (France) and Sounding the Town (installation) and Wa(l)king the Dream (live sound performance with Viv Corringham) in the Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh. He has exhibited as part of the Trace Retrospective 2000-05 in Franklin Furnace, New York. He is co-editor (with Julie Forrester) of the book For Those Who Have Ears and as part of Cork 2005; European Capital of Culture he co-curated (with David Toop) Sound Out a major international exhibition of sound art.

In 2006 he curated a CD entitled Bend It Like Beckett for Sound Works/Art Trail Festival to commemorate the Beckett Centenary.

In2006 he founded The Quiet Club (with Mick O Shea) a floating membership sound( artand electronics) performance group and have presented works all over Ireland and also Europe, Japan and Canada. He recently presented his installation Another Gong For Mr.Beckett at the Factory Gallery Berlin and exhibited in Found Sound in the Takt Gallery Berlin.

His video Keepers of the Light was part of the international video art exhibition Who Are Your Friends in the Soap Gallery Japan (www.g-soap.jp) In 2007 he completed a tour to Japan where he presented a sound and visual installation (Re)sounding Memories/Cleaning The House in CAP House, Kobe plus other live sound performances including the prestigious Hyogo Perfectual Museum of Art (www.artm.pref.hyogo.jp).

Other recent shows include Then the Silence Increased (UK) and Art is not Mute (Sweden/Hungary). He exhibited from his series The Rematerialization of Sound as an Art Object in the Black Mariah Gallery, Cork as part of Art Trail 2007.

He also performed with The Quiet Club as part of Art Trail 2007, DEAF (Dublin Electronic Arts Festival) and the I & E festival. In 2008 The Quiet Club performed at the STATIC Gallery, Liverpool, as pert of its European Capital Of Culture celebrations. They also featured solo and with guests as part of The Quiet Music Festival. Their first CD Tesla will be released on the Alphasia Recordings Label in September.