ART CITIES:Belfast- Keith Wilson & Liam Crichton

The Metropolitan Arts Centre (MAC) is Belfast’s new arts venue, selecting, creating and mixing up art, theatre, dance and music, among the other spaces MAC hosts 3 Art Galleries, 2 Theatres, and 4 Offices for Resident Art Groups. The MAC has launched its new international art prize, offering artists worldwide the opportunity to exhibit at the MAC with a substantial prize of 20,000₤, one of the biggest contemporary art prizes in Ireland and one of the few major prizes in the UK.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Metropolitan Arts Centre Archive

Keith Wilson & Liam Crichton present their solo exhibitions exploring the possibilities of sculpture, installation, and object making in 2016. For “Calendar” Keith Wilson further develops his longstanding investigation into the cultural status of sculpture, considering how ideas develop in the private sphere of the artist’s studio and transform into a public presentation of work in a gallery. At the core of “Calendar” is a large-scale galvanised steel structure made up of multiple cubic units, organised in a series analogous to the familiar monthly grid arrangement used for wall planners and electronic diary systems. These units are then occupied by various objects, items, and ephemera that offer a view into the artist’s studio. This practice comprises an ongoing enquiry into the contingency of meaning specifically in relation to the public functioning of sculpture. The artist is interested in exploring the power relations inherent in everyday human interactions and his exhibitions are often dramatized by having to navigate your way around apparently authoritative pieces of highly ordered sculptural material. Liam Crichton’s “SLEEPER”, is newly commissioned work that responds specifically to the architectural space of our Sunken Gallery, transforming it into an immersive installation that takes its name from the psychoactive sedative Benzodiazepine. The work layers together concerns relating to classical Greco-Roman frieze sculpture, contemporary urban voids in the built environment, and ideas of philosophical consciousness through a rigorously considered process of abstraction and Minimalist aestheticism. Exploiting the sculptural qualities of industrial materials commonly associated with labour and construction this project will enact a kind of psychological emptying-out of the gallery, exploring ideas of social entropy, the void, and the sublime.

Info: The MAC (Metropolitan Arts Centre), 10 Exchange Street West, Belfast, Duration: Calendar: 12/8-16/10/16 & SLEEPER: 12/8-9/9/16, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-19:00, https://themaclive.com