Castleknock artist Aoife is all set to amaze at Draíocht party

A NEW video, sound and sculptural installation by a talented local artist is being launched at Draíocht on Friday night (July 7) with a super creative party.

The launch party for LIMITLESS – Draíocht@Night – will provide a platform for young and emerging visual artists, contemporary dance, music, spectacle, fashion and lots more.

LIMITLESS is created by Castleknock’s Aoife Dunne,  and she’s certainly no stranger to digital media.

At the age of just 13, the award-winning artist produced a short video piece that was selected to be shown at the Beijing Film Festival in 2008.

Less than 10 years later, Aoife has amassed an impressive portfolio of artistic, musical and fashion experience, as well as a Degree in Fine Art Media from NCAD (2016), that culminated in her latest work LIMITLESS.

LIMITLESS is Aoife’s graduate work and it’s already met with wide acclaim after being shown at the RDS Dublin when Aoife received the RDS Monster Truck Studio Award.

It’s also been seen at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver.

And now Aoife has specially adapted and developed LIMITLESS for the site-specific context of Draíocht’s Ground Floor Gallery.

Preoccupied with notions of human perfection, imperfection and fear of inadequacy, Aoife’s work interrogates the contemporary obsessional drive to continuously recreate oneself in a never-ending cycle of self-construction, driven by self-critique and self-doubt.

The work moves fluidly between physical and digital worlds with deliberate childlike playfulness and absurdity.

It’s been described as a large, colourful, chaotic and vivid exhibition that fuses the two-dimensional moving image with the three-dimensional arrangement of objects in a space, drawing the viewer into a game-like digital environment.

“I have always been interested in the complex relationships that exist between the viewer, the artist and the context in which the work is made and exhibited,” Aoife explains.

“In the early stages of developing LIMITLESS, I knew that I wanted to create an interactive piece that would potentially allow audiences to see themselves within the work – inviting them to participate in the installation, yet ultimately giving them no control over what was happening.

“Working within the fashion industry over the past six years has heavily influenced my treatment of the human body as a medium.

“I use costume as a vehicle to explore, express and define notions of identity in a consumer society.

“I like to distract the audience with visually striking sculptural elements that probe the fuzzy boundary between abstraction and decoration.

“The viewer is invited to immerse themselves in this space, enabling them to form a relationship with the video, while highlighting the ongoing dialogue between identity and technology and the fusion of our physical and digital selves.”

Curator in Residence for Draíocht, Sharon Murphy, is co-curating LIMITLESS.

“Aoife’s practice as an early career artist embodies many of the principles central to the new visual arts programme at Draíocht,” she says.

“Her work fits perfectly within the ambition to make Draíocht a really dynamic hub for visual culture and a platform for a new generation of artists whose crossover practices extend and enrich contemporary arts and invite new audiences to engage.” 

You can register for the free launch party at eventbrite.ie or call Draíocht’s Box Office on 01-8852622.