Gallery 3 Screenings Dennis McNulty We Dream in Actions
24 September – 8 October 2020
We Dream in Actions (2019) Looping colour HD video with stereo audio. Duration 12:36.
Ideal viewing conditions: Watch full screen and listen on headphones or through good speakers.
Video courtesy of the artist.
We are delighted to present the fifth screening in this series by artist Dennis McNulty.
Working across diverse media, McNulty explores the embodied experience of space and time, often within the built environment. His work is informed by his background in electronic music, his training as a structural engineer, and studies in psychoacoustics (sound perception); frequently employing custom built hardware and software to produce audio visual works, sculptural installations and performances.
We Dream in Actions (2019) begins within a physical space, the National Stadium in Dublin on Saturday 7th September 2019 at Club Comfort’s Comfort Carnival, a day long celebration of island wide communities centred on art, DIY culture, and dance. Kate Butler's introduction references McNulty’s work in the electronic duo Decal, in particular their release of the first Irish electronica album in 1994. Rather than addressing the audience directly as expected, McNulty plays a sound recording of one of his explorations on the capabilities of a sequencer for a time machine, accompanying the spoken text with live music. The mode of address echos online YouTube tutorials and homemade demos (home made pedagogy), creating a secondary quasi-pedagogical and self-reflective space. Finally, We Dream in Actions returns to the space in which it began, a room at the National Stadium, where a chorus of applause, shout outs and whoops combine to create a certain crescendo. This journey from room, to a recording played within a room, to a space for reflection, to the room again, plays out alongside the image of a gridded plane that transforms into a spinning torus (a doughnut shaped three dimensional object) which goes some way to explain the idea of the infinite plane, unfolding and refolding again and again.
We Dream in Actions brings you through these divergent spaces, through spatial and temporal distortions, beats shaping our consciousness, and with allusions to states of flow, almost in a loop. But the beginning and the closing moments, with the applause and cheers of the gathered audiences, vibrate with those familiar sounds from shared community spaces, spaces which, in the current time, we lament and hope to share again.
Dennis McNulty works across a variety of media on both sides of the computer screen to produce large-scale physical objects, media assemblages and live work. McNulty has participated in numerous international exhibitions and festivals including the Liverpool Biennial (2016), LIAF (Lofoten, Norway, 2015), Performa (New York, 2011) and Encuentro de Medellin (Colombia, 2009). He represented Ireland at the São Paulo Bienal in 2004 and his work is held in the collections of IMMA and The Arts Council of Ireland among others.
Recent projects include We Dream in Actions at Comfort Carnival, Dublin Fringe (2019); Configuration Space, AEMI at Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2018); TTOPOLOGY at Grazer Kunstverein, Graz and VISUAL, Carlow (2018); and anginging at Assembly Point, London (2018). Everything is Somewhere Else, a publication assembled and guest-edited by McNulty was published by Paper Visual Art earlier this year. McNulty is Artist in Residence at CONNECT, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Future Networks and Communications.