SATURATION: the everyday transformed explores recent work created by a new generation of artists—Dragana Jurišić, Ruth Medjber, Eva O’Leary, Audrey Gillespie, Pádraig Spillane, Ayesha Ahmad, Vittoria Colonna, Conor Clinch, Hazel Coonagh, Megan Doherty, Michael Hanna, Cáit Fahey, and Niamh Swanton—who use photography to explore lives played out in front of them. Through the use of colour they create heightened moods, experiences and emotional states.
Transforming the artists’ everyday reality in different ways the artworks featured progress on a spectrum from heightened versions of what is still a recognisable realism to the fantastic, hyperreal and occasionally bizarre.
Embracing aspects of street, music and fashion photography with elements of the documentary tradition, the exhibition makes for a display that is light-hearted, if sometimes claustrophobic, celebratory but also conscious of the fragility, as well as the beauty, of human life. Inevitably it reflects, if often accidently, major changes in both society and technology—how photographs are taken, shared and consumed.
Whereas a preceding generation of photographic artists showed a bias towards landscape, or rather place, as subject matter, the artists here put humanity in all its colourful and gloriously messy complexity at the very centre of their practices. Their work, while sometimes no less political than that of their predecessors, foregrounds questions of personal identity through images that document an emerging—colourful—generation.
The exhibition is curated by William Laffan (independent curator) and Dawn Williams (curator, Crawford Art Gallery)
Crawford Art Gallery is a national cultural instiutition (Cork, Ireland) and is dedicated to contemporary and historical Irish and international visual art. It offers a vibrant and dynamic programme of temporary exhibitions which probe the future, contemplate the present and reveal the past to create engaging conversations across the timelines. Located in a significant heritage building in the heart of Cork city it is also home to a collection of national importance.
