All roads lead to Neustern

description

My name is Donna Marie O'Donovan. I am an art historian, curator, and gallery worker based in Dublin. The project for which I am fundraising is a collaborative effort with Irish artist Gary Farrelly to establish a pop-up gallery space for my curatorial project Galerie Modonov, and to present the first Irish exhibition of Farrelly's work in his home country since 2007.

For the past five years, Gary has been living, working, and exhibiting in Paris, France and Dallas, Texas. Represented first by Galerie W in Paris and then awarded a place at CentralTrak's Artists' Residency at the University of Texas in Dallas, Farrelly's art practice has evolved considerably since it was last publicly exhibited in Ireland. It is our ambition to present an exhibition of Farrelly's new work this November, 2011 in Dublin city and we need your help to make it happen.

Our show, entitled All roads lead to Neustern, represents Farrelly's most ambitious project to date and it is one toward which the artist has worked for over 18 months on two continents in numerous locations. Begun in March 2010 while in Dallas, Texas, the centrepiece and overarching theme of the exhibition will be Farrelly's newly-completed large-scale cartographic masterwork Neustern – a portrait of the artist as autonomous coastal city-state. The work is a hand-fabricated map of an invented land mass, the scale of which is such that when forced to transport it, the artist must cut it into several pieces to be painstakingly reassembled and refinished in their new setting. It features over 1,000 streets, avenues, squares, parks, and wharfs, each diligently laid, articulated and named to form part of a vast integrated urban network that can also be read as a complex synaptic mapping of what the artist terms his “obsessions, fetishes and eccentricities”.
In addition to his cartographic representation of Neustern (“new star”), Farrelly has conceived an intricate phantasm of history, economy, politics, culture, ideology, mythology and society with which the city-state is invested. These aspects of Neustern also form subjects of Farrelly's artwork and these will be presented at the exhibition alongside the main map to accompany and augment its image.

The money we secure through Fund it will cover the costs of leasing a premises, framing and transporting the artworks, producing an exhibiton catalogue, and marketing the show. In gratitude for contributions, Farrelly has drawn up a unique series of rewards for donors modelled upon the system of aviation travel classes and entitled Diaspora Club.

We invite you to join and thank you for your support.