01 Aug 2009

FOUR Presents Sara Barker and Fiona Marron

FOUR presents two new shows:

In Gallery One, Fiona Marron For who knows what, curated by Carolina Hoffmann & Lee Welch. Marron presents a three-part single channel high-definition video installation. She explores and reflects on the emotional and physical effects of economic change, consumerism, and architecture in relation to function and human activity within commercial environments. 'There was truth in what they said', is an 11 minute long elegy to the rise and fall of our economic epoch. The video is a journey into the space of the former European Headquarters of the New York Exchange and its remains. 'Fend' and 'Plenty of Furniture' complete Marron's suspended metaphor. The first one confronts the viewer with a fencing bout in a vast empty space of empyrean light. The second, the only piece that remains filmed from a fixed position, shows a warehouse filled with office furniture.

For who knows what is the first in the LAUNCH 09 series of events. LAUNCH, now in its 4th edition, is an intitiative aimed at supporting young emerging Irish artists at an early stage of their professional practice, helping them to gain public exposure in a bid to further their career.

Fiona Marron graduated from Fine Art at Dublin Institute of Technology and now lives and works in Dublin. Recent exhibitions include 8≥20 at the Back Loft and Interim Dialogues at Broadstone. Other upcoming exhibitions include a group exhibition at Pallas Contemporary Projects and a solo exhibition at The Joinery. Marron will partake in her first residency, as part of the International project Reverse Pedagogy at the Model Arts & Niland Gallery in Sligo.

In Gallery Two, Sara Barker Plan Dreaming Deep, curated by Aoife Tunney

Barker will present a precarious sculptural grouping in the gallery, pushing material to a point of fragility and slightness of form. Her recent work centres on the room as an abstract notion on which to hang an interior state, taking on the attributes of a character- their 'aloneness and inhibition', in their own space. It is with her eye on literary conceptions of 'room' that she explores constructs of working and living space in relation to her own private process. The idea of a room is elaborated on as a metaphor for and a symbol of identity and liberation, restriction and conformity. It is a necessary space but with implicit cultural boundaries, and its own incumbent freedoms and limitations.