In this illustrated talk Brigid McLeer discusses her recent projects that explore how 'we’ as subjects of the political can appear in the context of current global, and local, forces intended to ensure our disappearance in political terms.

These projects include N scale, The Triumph of Crowds and a new work entitled The Regent’s Street.

In particular the talk will examine how Brigid is using artistic and performance strategies to produce spaces, images, objects and events in which artistic-political participation is invited without it being limited by the imperatives of identity, representation and instrumentality that tend to be associated with projects in which art and politics co-exist.

This talk is supported by Arts Council England and the British Council.

Artist Talk

Withholding ‘us’: Art, Politics and the Problem of Appearance
Brigid McLeer

October 9th, 2018, 19.00-21.00
Sàn Art in Collaboration with Salon Saigon
Language: English and Vietnamese

RSVP: info@salonsaigon.com

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Brigid McLeer is an Irish artist based in London. She trained in Fine Art at the National College of Art and Design Dublin, University of Ulster at Belfast and Slade School of Art in London. She is interested in ideas around contingent subjectivity and the public-political and works in various media/modes including video, durational performance (live and to camera) photography, drawing and writing. Her work has been shown in galleries, public sites, as online projects and on the page. Recently Brigid has begun to produce more collective and participatory performance events, often underpinned by a written script. Her performance lecture The Triumph of Crowds was selected as winner of the Leslie Scalapino award for innovative women performance writers in 2016, and was performed with a cast of ten at Downtown Art, New York in December 2017, directed by Fiona Templeton.

Her current project N scale will be performed at various locations in the UK throughout 2019/20 and is the basis of her research trip to Thailand and Vietnam.

Previous solo exhibitions include One + One, Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda and Wexford Arts Centre, Ireland; Horizontal Ontologies, Art Currents Institute, New York; Isoli [cont.], Lanchester Gallery Projects, Coventry; and Vexations, Site Gallery Sheffield, UK. Group exhibitions include Diagrams, curated by Niamh McDonnell, Pallas Projects, Dublin and QSS Gallery, Belfast; Platform, In the Making, Site Gallery, ‘L’Ulitma Cena’, Reffetorio di San Michele, Pescia, Italy; Beyond Fontana, curated by Stephanie Moran, Studio 1.1, London; and Unspeaking Engagements, curated by Steve Dutton and Brian Curtin, Chulalongkorn University Gallery, Bangkok and LGP Coventry.

Brigid has also published critical and art writing in international journals including, Performance Research, Circa, Building Material (Art and Architecture) and Visible Language and image-text based work in poetry/art journals such as Chain and Coil. Her essay Returning in the House of Democracy was recently published in the book The Creative Critic: writing as/about practice, edited by Dr. Emily Orley and Katja Hilevaara (Routledge 2018).

She is currently studying for a PhD (Fine Art) at the Royal College of Art, London.

www.brigidmcleer.com

n-scale.org

The Triumph of Crowds (trailer): https://vimeo.com/250402550

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