The L Shape at the Dock, Carrick on Shannon

Runs September 15 – November 3

The L Shape is an exhibition featuring work by artists Jenny Brady and Sarah Browne, at the centre of which are two single channel moving image works; a new presentation of Brady’s Going to the Mountain (2015) and Browne’s The Invisible Limb (2014), showing for the first time in a gallery context in Ireland.

Going to the Mountain consists of three formal studies of pre-verbal babies. With a score developed in collaboration with Andrew Fogarty and featuring improvised percussion by David Lacey, the video considers how the pre-verbal child might represent a site of embodied knowledge by depicting the complexities of their gesture, rhythm and movement through a process of defamiliarization.

Similarly concerned with a sense of closeness and dissociation, The Invisible Limb is a film letter addressed to Charlotte Posenenske, a deceased German artist known for the rigour of her artistic oeuvre and her withdrawal from art practice in favour of sociology in 1968. Intercut with archival footage is newly filmed material of Cynthia Moran, an Irish stone carver born in the same year as Posenenske, who continues to make work in Ireland and Madrid. Written in English and translated into a German voice, The Invisible Limb corresponds with two women who make sculptures in order to consider the magic of apparently costless production and reproduction.

A nod to the physical relationship between The Dock’s two gallery spaces, The L Shape is conceived as an exhibition that foregrounds the point at which two distinct artistic practices meet and suggests that this intersection offers a possibility for momentum in relation to critical thought and understanding. The exhibition title also refers to the shape of a periscope, an instrument for observation that, like both Going to the Mountain and The Invisible Limb plays with and redirects the reflective properties of the mirror, an object frequently used as a metaphor for cinema. The L Shape then is interested in the relationship between the visible and what remains out of view.

Embracing the transformation of The Dock’s two main galleries into proto-cinema spaces, The L Shape will be accompanied and framed by a number of screening events that will feature films that consider a range of themes, ideas and concerns that arise in Brady and Browne’s work.