Living Arts Project: Ramsgrange Community School

Saturday 30th March, 3 pm at Wexford Arts Centre

Opened by Artist & Filmmaker Els Dietvorst

The Living Arts Project is an artist-in-residence scheme for primary schools in County Wexford. The aim of this project is to provide children with an understanding and appreciation of contemporary visual art. The Living Arts Project exhibition represents a selection of work produced by the participating primary schools.

Additionally, supported by the Creative Ireland Programme, artists Els Dietvorst and Cow House Co-Director Frank Abruzzese worked with pupils from Ramsgrange Community School. The residency, developed with Art Teacher Aoife Power, included workshops on drawing, printmaking, and photography. Included in the exhibition is People Who, a new work by Frank Abruzzese which was made in collaboration with the students over the course of several weeks.

Abruzzese writes about his work “We all find ways to categorise one another. We gravitate to people we think might share something in common with ourselves. We hesitate to interact with people that we assume might operate under different ideologies. Family, appearance, gender, religion, socioeconomic status among others do their work to shape our social groups and how we might view ourselves. As Richard Ayoade states, ‘You need the participation of others to be yourself.’

In addition to these social systems, virtual platforms such as Instagram and information service providers such as Google rely on algorithms to classify their users for profit and growth. These emergent systems have a profound impact on how we view ourselves and dictate much of the information and news we are exposed to online.

For this project, along with the participation of 6th-year students at Ramsgrange Community School, I created a series of composite portraits based on the ways we view and understand each other.”

The exhibition will run in the upper and lower galleries of Wexford Arts Centre from Monday 1 April to Saturday 4 May 2019, and gallery hours are Monday to Friday from 10am-5pm, and Saturday from 10am-4pm.