Artwork produced by Senior Lecturer in Fine and Applied Art Dr Donal Moloney will be showcased in Manchester and London.
Artwork produced by Senior Lecturer in Fine and Applied Art Dr Donal Moloney will be showcased in Manchester and London.
Dr Moloney’s work will feature in the Beautiful Monsters exhibition at the Portico Library, Manchester and Surfaced: Surface and Materiality in the Screen Environment at Thames-Side Studios Gallery, London.
Beautiful Monsters runs from 18th May – 30th June 2018, with a free preview and performance on Thursday 17th May, 6 – 8pm.
The exhibit description states: “The fantastical creatures illustrated in the 16th-century encyclopedia Historiae Animalium have influenced countless writers and scholars through the centuries, and form the starting point for The Portico Library’s next exhibition, Beautiful Monsters. The book’s author, Conrad Gessner, included actual and mythological animals side-by-side, including many labelled ‘monsters’, with no distinction between the real and the imaginary. Six international exhibitors have responded to this and other volumes in The Portico Library’s collection with new works incorporating drawing, painting, textiles, robotics and artists’ books, considering where the idea of the monstrous sits within themes of history, mythology and 21st century life.”
Dr Moloney’s work will also feature in the Surfaced: Surface and Materiality in the Screen Environment exhibition, which runs from 19th – 27th May 2018. The display will explore the change in people’s relationship with screens.
The description states: “Our relationship with the screen and the interface isn’t simply a visual one, it has changed from being a tool that we used at our leisure, to a necessary conduit for social interaction, pavlovian in its schema and invisible in its ubiquity, the screen is the threshold of our dematerialized condition. Painting takes its place in the world alongside and within this dominant way of seeing, reconfiguring our relationship and understanding to what is ‘real’ and tactile. Does this environment create an underlying pressure for artists to make work that is more screenable, quicker to apprehend, less concerned with scale and depth? Or, does it reinvigorate the ‘real’ and the haptic? Can we view work with the same engagement as before, can we still ‘look’ at it in the same way? The artists selected here aren’t necessarily directly concerned with digital dialogues or dematerialisation, however they all have a vested interest in surface and materiality. This exhibition attempts to draw attention to this interest and contextualize it within these broader ideas.”