She bites her tender mind
Kim Gordon; Courtyard Galleries, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, Dublin Until November 10th; imma.ie
Co-founder of Sonic Youth, multi-disciplinary artist Kim Gordon responds to IMMA's environment, placing her own paintings, drawings, sculptures, and an immersive video piece, making up a kind of Airbnb exhibition in the "urban lodgings" of the Courtyard Galleries. The title is from a fragment by Sappho. Gordon is in conversation with Sinéad Gleeson July 27th, 1pm-2.15pm. Tickets €8 via imma.ie.
and it was raining out of a low sky
Paul Hallahan and Lee Welch. Sternview Gallery, 26 Marlboro St, Cork
The second iteration of Hallahan and Welch's two-person project, with an element of dynamic interaction, featuring recent paintings. This time around the underlying ideas relate to the end of history, and Utopia. Hallahan's emphasis is on the nuts and bolts of the perceptual experience, Welch's on the everything-or-nothing analogue nature of being as opposed to digital streams of information.
Ann Quinn: Paintings
Custom House Gallery, The Quay, Westport, Co Mayo; August 1st–25th; customhousestudios.ie
Ann Quinn's realist paintings – of landscape, rural scenes, urban settings, with and without people – usually come with a dash of magic. The magic can be hard to pin down – it's in the form of an enhanced attention to detail, the focus on a moment in time, rather than the kind of hocus pocus that Derren Brown routinely dismantles. In any case, her intensity of vision and sense of the lyrical in the everyday make her work especially worth seeing.
The Stroker
Pilvi Takala. Temple Bar Gallery, 5-9 Temple Bar, Dublin Until September 7th; templebargallery.com
The show's title is the nickname Finnish artist Pilvi Takala acquired working incognito in a London co-working space, Second Home (they commissioned her). In her film, she impersonates a wellness consultant who approaches workers in the building to preach the virtues of physical contact in the workplace. An earlier film, The Trainee, sees her do absolutely nothing in another work context, to the consternation of her co-workers.
Flux In Flow
Alastair MacLennan & Sandra Corrigan Breathnach. Golden Thread Gallery, 84-94 Great Patrick St, Belfast; August 1st, 12noon – 8pm; gtgallery.co.uk
A pioneer of endurance performance art, Alastair MacLennan embarks on an eight-hour collaborative work with Sandra Corrigan Breathnach. Their starting point is a consideration of the human effort to measure time and how that process of measurement and management can "give us the illusion of a sense of control", despite an underlying awareness that "we are not in control, we are frail beings, unable to stop the flow . . ."
