Untitled Drawing No. 1, Multicore Telephone Wire, 2008
Maggie Madden is participating in the ‘Preponderance of The Small’, an off-site project which forms part of The Douglas Hyde Gallery’s ongoing Gallery 3 initiative, which works with twenty-one younger artists working in Ireland. The project will run from September 25 through October 31, 2009.
Each artist will exhibit at one of twenty-one locations in and around Trinity College, creating a trail of artworks. This is intended to give the viewer the opportunity to look anew at more familiar locations, while also highlighting spaces that are often overlooked.
The title, which derives from a hexagram in the Chinese I-Ching, or Book of Changes, points to the great power and value of small things. In a rapidly changing culture, at a time when many of yesterday’s monumental gestures have proved to be empty, grandiose artistic statements seem superfluous. This exhibition is intended to question how we attribute value in today’s culture, and to suggest that it is in small things that we may find our way forward.
The exhibition will feature works in a broad range of media, including painting, drawing, installation and video. Many are formally linked through their employment of small elements (marks, gestures, objects) which are repeated or accumulated in order to form a whole that is somehow greater than the sum of its component parts. In each case, beyond the formal relationship of the works, the attitude or approach of each of the artists is key.
The artists, works and venues were selected by a Curatorial Collective composed of three members of The Douglas Hyde Gallery’s staff and three young Irish artists.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a map, designed by Paki Smith and Redman AKA, which will be available from the Gallery and each of the locations. The exhibition will have an online presence in the form of a blog which will be updated before and during the course of the exhibition; it can be visited at:
www.preponderanceofthesmall.blogspot.com
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The reference to Preponderance of the Small caught my eye on Google as I was preparing to do an I Ching reading for a man who had received that hexagram. How wonderful to be able to visit the exhibit at a distance – from Durango, Colorado, USA. Just wish I could view it up close, to savor the “small” things.