NCAD Photography and Digital Imaging Exhibition
Works by NCAD CEAD Students: Nick Bayne, Frank Brennan, Rebecca Byrne, Brian Daly, Aileen Dempsey, Ross Ellis, Monika Fabijanczyk , Barbara Galvin, Aleksandra Kaluza, Jeannette Lowe, Hugh McCabe, Grant Munroe, Mark Morgan, Sharon Murphy, Juan Miguel Novoa, Fiona O’Donnell, Aoife O’Sullivan, Calin Ploscar, Louise Scott, Tom Scott, and Artur Sikora.
The Certificate in Photography and Digital Imaging (PDI) is a one-year part-time course at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD). The course covers both analogue and digital photography and focuses on developing the creative practice of the participants by means of a series of photographic projects. A critical approach to producing photographic work is encouraged, and there is a strong emphasis on situating photography within broader considerations of visual culture and contemporary artistic practice.
This exhibition showcases the work of the 2010 graduates. The work on show covers a broad variety of approcaches to the photographic medium: this includes digitally constructed images, analogue darkroom prints, photographic books, both colour and black & white work, and collage. It touches on genres such as portraiture, landscape, street photography, but often takes these genres in unexpected directions. Thematically, the subject matter represents a diverse range of contemporary concerns including urban decay, rural renewal, consumerism, gender identity, the built environment, fantasy and reality, and surveillance culture.
The staged photograph is a key strategy in contemporary photography and several contributors utilise this approach. Tom Scott’s work explores issues of global power politics, using large carefully staged colour photographs to highlight unequal power relationships both globally, and in more specific regional contexts such as the Middle East. Frank Brennan also uses the staged photograph as a means of exploring the psychology of escapism. Brian Daly’s work is a critique of contemporary consumerist culture, accomplished by means of subverting the advertising imagery employed by a well known home furnishings retailer.
A number of other contributors have chosen to explore the genre of portraiture. Grant Munroe’s work consists of a series of environmental portraits of a group of hill-walkers, Aileen Dempsey offers a new take on the family portrait, Aleksandra Kaluza employs portraiture to explore disturbing aspects of the supernatural, while Fiona O’Donnell’s portraits raise questions as to how we define our identities through gender. Religious and spiritual concerns rise to the surface in the work of both Mark Morgan and Juan Miguel Novoa. Novoa’s photographs identify Christian symbolism and iconography in a vairety of intriguing contexts, while Morgan’s work consists of a sequence of highly individualistic images using the recurring motif of angels as a meditation on lives cut tragically short.
The urban landscape is also a recurring theme of the exhibition. Artur Sikora’s black and white prints document decaying Modernist buildings of Dublin, while Calin Ploscar explores innovative ways of representation, using visual perception and semiotics. Monika Fabijanczyk explores the dividing line between landscape and seascape by capturing a sequence of coastal views around Dublin, and Jeannette Lowe offers a series of Hopper inspired views of Dublin city at night. Two different aspects of life in the city are explored by Nick Bayne and Ross Ellis, both by means of photographic collage. Ellis investigates the ubiquity of surveillance cameras by putting together an sinister assemblage of candid street shots, while Bayne comments on the anonymity of city life by producing a digitally constructed collage of anonymous pedestrians.
An urban farm, Dundrum’s Airfield, forms the subject of Sharon Murphy’s project, which incorporates elements of Airfield’s own archive of photographs, while Barbara Galvin ventures further from the city by documenting life on the peat bogs of the Midlands. Literature forms the inspiration for Aoife O’Sullivan’s work – she offers a photographic book based on a personalised interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Personal experiences are also the basis of Rebecca Byrne and Louise Scott’s photographs. Byrne used her camera to record the latter stages of her own pregnancy while Scott innovatively used photography as a means of exploring sight impairment. Finally, Hugh McCabe offers a series of large format extended time exposures taken at Dublin music venues: each photograph attempt at an instantaneous visual representation of an extended stretch of temporal experience.
Brian and Hugh are both 2010 graduates of NCAD’s Certificate in Photography and Digital Imaging.
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