RANELAGH ARTS

What's Happening

SINK A solo show
by
Monika Crowley

Ranelagh Arts are delighted to host SINK, an exhibition by Monika Crowley showcasing our gallery space at No 6. SINK is a conceptually and visually rich body of work employing a variety of methodologies and materials across installation, silkscreen works on paper, monotype prints on tea-towels, oil paintings on canvas and board, and video. Crowley is a member of the Graphic Print Studio and in 2022 has exhibited in group shows there, at the Crawford Gallery, Cork, and curated several exhibitions for Ranelagh Arts at No 6 as creative director of their visual arts program. This is her first solo presentation in 2022.

Crowley describes her practice as ‘exploring the trauma of change and identity crisis, utilising mundane objects in a symbolic, transformative manner’. In one sense, the objects depicted in ‘Sink’ couldn’t be more quotidian or mundane. They are the functional objects we handle on a daily basis, often while our minds are elsewhere.  While ‘kitchen sink’ has attained the status of a genre within drama, we tend not to think of the objects themselves as art. Yet in Crowley’s work, these domestic objects – cups and glasses; pots and pans; cutlery and scouring pads – are placed center stage. There is a symbolism to the objects she depicts and, in representing the daily and cyclical (even Sisyphean) task of feeding, cleaning, and nurturing, she alludes to domesticity and all of its messy, joyful, fraught, intense, life-affirming, mundane, profound and necessary qualities.

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In celebrating the domestic, further symbolism is at play: that of the dualism of the mother and the artist/maker. Ultimately, it’s a conflict that the artist makes look easy. In referring to it as a ‘labour of love’, it’s one which, on one level, she cherishes while also refusing to idealise. These moments are viewed through the representation of it’s aftermath – the detritus of a meal, the washing up. Under each painting, the date, memory, and moment are recorded as a diary entry, inscribed on the panels that may reveal themselves through the passage of time. Above the paintings hangs a series of monoprints on tea towel canvases. Each towel a record of a kitchen utensil that has been given the significance of a religious artifact, hung high on a washing line like prayer flags above the gallery space. There is a complexity, hidden within these so-called ‘mundane’ objects – which become less so, transformed in Crowley’s hands, these pieces are more than still-lifes, rather they are ‘life stills’.

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Please join us for the opening at Ranelagh Arts on Thursday 17th November from 5-8pm, the exhibition runs until the 24th of November.

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We would like to invite curators to submit applications to be part of our 2023 programme. We are committed to creating opportunities for emerging curators and are offering two slots in our busy 2023 calendar. Successful applicants will be facilitated in bringing their vision to reality for our community and membership. Email your expression of interest to art.ranelagharts@gmail.com.

The Gallery at Ranelagh Arts will be also available for hire in the downtime between programmed events in 2023. Artists or collectives can email art.ranelagharts@gmail.com with proposals for exhibitions in 2023 and we will let you know in the new year prices and the slots available

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Supported by Dublin City Council and the Arts Council Of Ireland

Festival 2022

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