‘SCOPING WORLDS’ - Exhibition Opening Friday October 15th 4pm-8pm at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, New Line, Manorhamilton, Co Leitrim

SCOPING WORLDS brings together three distinct projects that share a concern for the relationship between vision, technology and social history.

The projects, entitled ‘Studio Games’, ‘Seeing Across Boundaries’ and ‘On/Off States’ variously employ perception, observation, instrumentation and interpretive response in exploring the social histories of the ‘border’ and ‘rural’ landscapes of Cavan and Leitrim mediated through the lens of past and contemporary visual technologies.

Some of the works parody known factors that have shaped how we see, map, construct and control the world, functioning either as ‘field research’, ’scientific analysis’ or ‘surveillance installations’. Others use metaphor and the imaginary to play with our common sense notions of reality and time and by simulating the use of technology within the making of historical geographies.

All the works re-focus and re-frame the landscape through a critical awareness of the limits to how we see and this double take, in terms of real and imaginary mappings and projections, serves to remind us of the subtle powers employed within our visual worlds and the often hidden political and aesthetic values that underpin their construction.

The Projects and Artists included in SCOPING WORLDS are:

'Studio Games' by Yukie Hori (Artist in Residence LSC, 2010) 
Hori examines the limitation of photographic reproduction  through a continuous  displacement between reality and photography: In producing works for specific sites Hori takes photos of the location and displays these, often to scale, in the same place they were taken. These subtle and shifting optical games are an attempt by the artist to engage the viewer in a new way of perceiving their surrounding and to look afresh at the everyday. Visit the website of this project.

'On/Off States' by Elaine Reynolds (Artist in Residence LSC, 2010) 
Reynolds addresses the questionable futures of countless un-finished, un-inhabited houses, the so-called 'Ghost Estates’ of post -Celtic Tiger Ireland. In one such location lights were installed within the concrete shell of a house. These lights were electronically programmed on and off in a sequence that signifies the S.O.S pattern in Morse code. This gesture relies on the use of opposing ‘On/Off states’ that form the basis of many familiar coding systems. This relationship is explored further in the use of binary code inscriptions and even in consultation of the supposedly prophetic Hexagrams of the I Ching. A range of dichotomies emerge in relation to these contradictory sites - on/ off, light/ dark, positive/ negative, presence/ absence, ambition/ reality.

'Seeing Across Boundaries' is a project that aims to foster an appreciation of both cultural identities and geographical histories traversing the Border areas and to further define them within a broader artistic and technological history.
Work has culminated for this exhibition through a series of master classes led by Canadian artist, Sylvia Grace Borda, and Scottish curator and sculptor, J. Keith Donnelly, Artists from the Border areas, Co. Leitrim, Cavan, Monaghan and Louth were brought together through these classes in which each artist had an opportunity to re-examine the art of observation in the context of the Border areas between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.  Artists were introduced to the camera obscura, as well as stereo and macro photography, photogrammetry, and cartographic drawing as alternative ways of recording and observing. 

Seeing Across Boundaries is an exhibition of over 30 artworks in different media including textile, collage, stereoscopy, drawing, camera obscura techniques, performance, photograms, video and sculpture.

Artists : Yvonne Cullivan, Harriet Sarah Jane Browne, Kim Doherty, Tom Hyde, J. Keith Donnelly, Christine Mackey, Carmel O’Callaghan, Bernard McCabe, Gerard Reilly, Celia Richard, Olivia Johnston Murphy, Sally O’Dowd.

SCOPING WORLDS is curated by Sylvia Grace Borda and Sean O’Reilly

Project supported by PEACE III Programme managed for the Special EU Programmes Body by the County Cavan PEACE III Peace and Reconciliation Partnership