ART CITIES:Dublin-Patricia Cronin
Since the early-90’s, the conceptual artist Patricia Cronin has garnered international attention for her photographs, paintings and sculptures that address contemporary human rights issues of gender and sexuality. Slyly reinvigorating traditional images and forms with social justice themes, her critically acclaimed statue, “Memorial To A Marriage,” a 3 ton Carrara marble mortuary sculpture of her life partner and herself was made before gay marriage was legal in the U.S.A. and has been exhibited widely across the country and abroad.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: The LAB Gallery Archive
The “Shrine For Girls” is a series of site-specific sculptural installations in different cities around the world created by Patricia Cronin, reflecting on the global plight of exploited women and girls. Originally conceived for the 2015 Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy, the exhibition continues on an international tour including the United States, India, Ireland and Nigeria. “Shrine For Girls, Dublin”, is Patricia Cronin’s first solo exhibition in Ireland and is on presentation at The LAB Gallery in Dublin. Moving from the sacred altars and architecture of Venice’s 16th Century Chiesa di San Gallo to the secular urban gallery context of The LAB, Cronin gathers hundreds of articles of women’s and girls’ clothing from around the world to represent three specific tragedies. Brightly-colored saris symbolize two Indian cousins who were gang-raped and lynched in 2014; somber hijabs signify 276 Nigerian Chibok schoolgirls who were kidnapped by the terrorist group Boko Haram in 2014 (109 of which are still missing) and pale aprons symbolize those worn by “fallen women” in forced labour at the Magdalene Asylums and Laundries in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States to act as relics of these young martyrs. In this exhibition, Cronin presents the three original fabric sculptures, here piled on top of their shipping crates to also address human trafficking and act as a metaphor of who or what is valued in our culture. Small photographs of each tragedy accompany the sculpture and a new series of oil portrait paintings, exhibitied for the first time, place a human face on tragedy and draw our attention away from statistics to the magnitude of the individual loss and unrealized human potential.
Info: The LAB Gallery, Foley Street, Dublin, Duration: 16/6-20/8/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-17:00, www.dublincityartsoffice.ie
