The Dock is hosting new three individual exhibitions

The Dock hosts three individual exhibitions showing the work of Banbha McCann, Fionna Murray, and Andy Parsons. Each artist presents paintings reflecting intimacy, memory, and joy in remembered, imagined, and constructed spaces.

Through her work, Dublin-based Banbha McCann explores questions of material reality, the emotional charge of spaces and things, and how these concerns overlap and combine in our environment.

The Picture Show series explores how intimacy is often depicted in cinema. Taking imagery from the film 'To Catch a Thief', where, to avoid censorship, Hitchcock cuts away from a romantic embrace between Cary Grant and Grace Kelly to a firework display. While signifying a chemical reaction/attraction, the fireworks also hint at a more intimate private act. Banbha McCann's paintings repeat motifs from the film as she explores our emotive response to imagery and symbolism and unravels the real from the stage.

Banbha is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Creative Ireland, and Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council. Her works are in many collections, including the OPW and the Arts Council of Ireland.

London-born Fionna Murray studied at Chelsea College of Art before moving to Ireland and graduating with an MFA at the University of Ulster in 1997. Living and working in Galway, she has exhibited widely throughout Ireland, the UK, and Europe.

London-born Fionna Murra work

Fionna's work refers to urban parks as in-between places of respite within the wider complexity of the city. Using imagery drawn from observation and memory, from film, books and music, she creates a fragmentary world where the idea of the park as an open space of play and spontaneity is laid parallel to the idea of painting as a place of artifice and possibility. 

Addressing past and present, intimacy and distance, she questions the differences between what is real and what is painted through these humorous yet melancholic images.

As a widely collected artist, Fionna is a member of Artspace Studios, Galway and lectures in painting at the School of Design and Creative Arts, Atlantic Technological University, Galway.

Through 'The Dancers', Sligo-based artist Andy Parsons explores the universality of music and dance and the idea of joy, using imagery based on nightclubbing and the Northern Soul scene.

Sligo-based artist Andy Parsons ‘Nightclub 4’ work

Originally released in the 1960s, the music known as Northern Soul did not enjoy commercial success immediately but subsequently became popular in clubs in Northern England as part of an underground scene in the 1970s and '80s and has become a worldwide phenomenon.

A working-class movement, Northern Soul has much in common with the rave scene of the late '80s and early '90s. Music and dance are often central to people's stories about their lives and are recounted as moments of pure joy. 

The sense that as music and dance evolve, they still retain their universal importance as part of our emotional lives and identity is something that Parsons explores in his work.

In addition to the exhibitions and in association with The Dancers, two other events are also taking place at The Dock: on October 13 at 8pm, the event will include a tour of the Andy exhibition given by the artist, followed by the showing of Northern Soul, a documentary about the music and the era. 

On Friday, October 27, The Dock invites the audience to a Northern Soul dance night. DJ Carl Brennan will play unstoppable '60s soul music in the Gallery. The events are supported through the Night-Time Economy After Hours at the Museum scheme. While admission is free, advance booking is advisable for these events.

Exhibitions are open until December 02 from Tuesday to Saturday, 10am-5pm. Admission is free of charge.

For further information about these three exhibitions and the associated events, please check out www.thedock.ie.