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Visual Arts

SURVEYOR 2020

Open Call

Solstice Arts Centre presents our ninth SURVEYOR open exhibition, which serves to support, value, and encourage Meath artists in the development of their practices and creative careers. The exhibition presents an overview of contemporary visual arts practice throughout the county. Artists living in, or originally from, County Meath, were invited to submit works of all disciplines for inclusion in the open exhibition, selected by curator and art historian Catherine Marshall. 96 artists submitted 265 pieces of work for consideration in what is the largest open call exhibition in the northeast region. 

This year sees the continuation of the Solstice Visual Arts Award, with a value of €2,000, awarded to a work of distinction in any medium.

 

VIEW ONLINE EXHIBITION

 

Catherine Marshall

Catherine Marshall is an art historian and Joint-editor of Twentieth Century, Vol V. of the Royal Irish Academy’s five-volume, Art and Architecture of Ireland.  She lectured in the History of Art department of Trinity College Dublin, National College of Art and Design and was founding Head of Collections at IMMA from 1995 to 2007.

Marshall has curated exhibitions of contemporary Irish art and Outsider Art in Ireland, China, USA and Canada. She is currently Head of the Visual Arts Steering Committee for Bealtaine, and is a board member of the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny and KCAT. She is one of the founding editors of Comcol, the online journal of the Collections section of ICOM.

Solstice Visual Arts Award 2020

Emerging multimedia performance installation artist Sinéad Keogh has been announced as the overall winner of the 2020 Solstice Visual Arts Award as the ninth annual SURVEYOR exhibition opens online. The winning pieces are video works, titled Transcendental, Dracula (Love never dies), and In the Hours of Darkness.

Speaking on Sinead's work, curator Catherine Marshall said "It was a thrill to discover the video works of Sinead Keogh, this year's winner of the overall prize for outstanding artwork. Sinead Keogh's work delves deep beneath the familiar surfaces of our lives, making us re-connect with subliminal fears and darker forces, the very things that modern science and technology should have removed from our collective psyche but have never quite managed to do. In Dracula, Keogh reminds us of things beyond our control as the Covid 19 virus spreads invisibly around us, just like the cholera epidemic that was one of the sources for Bram Stoker's Dracula over a century ago. And Keogh does this with a maturity and attention to detail that makes the work utterly convincing, even as our rational minds question it. Add to that a wickedly clever sense of humour and a thorough knowledge of gothic cinema and art, and the cocktail is formidable."  

Sinéad Keogh is a multimedia performance installation artist with a MA in Fine Art from NCAD (National College of Art and Design) in Dublin. Through the use of synesthetic installation, Keogh balances ideologies of intensification of the senses leading to immersive and often emotional experiences communicated through dance, character performance and synched video to sound.

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