SOMEPLACE SOMEWHERE
CORA CUMMINS
Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin
May 13th – 29th 2004
Someplace Somewhere is Cora Cummins’ third exhibition at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. The body of work presented in this show consists of twelve new etchings. They are a development of Residual View , works made for the artists June 2003 NCAD M.A. show at the Hugh Lane Gallery, that explored overlooked and unappreciated landscapes and sites within the city. (In December 2003 the artist also organised and curated Elsewhere from Here, at the Workroom, Dublin a group exhibition looking at the idea of ‘alternative’ spaces in the urban realm).
This show’s title Somewhere Someplace points to a play within the works between the idea of the evasive, arbitrary and ambiguous sites fused with an idea of specific and familiar places. The locations depicted in the works include roundabouts; traffic islands and other municipal planting; historical burial mounds; fleeting views of seascapes seen from the DART; urban wildflower meadows and cherry blossom trees in city parks.
Someplace Somewhere stresses the idea of the delicate, fragile and impermanent as possessing a persuasive, subversive power, offering zones of resistance to the apparently seamless, slick and vacuous nature of the contemporary ‘mediascape’ we are all expected to inhabit.
The works in Someplace Somewhere have a minimal quality and rely on pared down line to evoke the ‘passable’ places, we all negotiate and fleetingly engage with on daily basis as drivers, cyclists, pedestrians and inhabitants of towns and cities. Such everyday mental gymnastics in and around the everyday visual environment, are paid tribute to by Cora Cummins representations of seemingly insignificant instances of insight and awareness.
