Upcoming Exhibition - Empty Columns are a Place to Dream at Kolaj Live: Knoxville, Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA - 1st - 7th of November 2021

"Empty Columns are a Place to Dream" as part of Kolaj LIVE Knoxville.

Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee,

U.S.A

November 1-7, 2021

I am absolutely thrilled to hear that the "Empty Columns are a Place to Dream" project, which took place as part of the amazing Birr Vintage Week and Arts Festival has won the County Award at the Heritage Week Heritage Council's awards yesterday.

Co-ordinated by Caroline Conway, and curated by Ric Kasini Kadour, It was a real pleasure to take part in this project and a big congratulations to everyone involved.

I'm also blown away by the incredible news that the exhibition will travel to the Knoxville Museum of Art where it will be part of Kolaj LIVE Knoxville, from November 1-7, 2021.

This project featured local and international collage artists and their interpretations of the empty column in Emmet Square which was formerly the site of a statue to the Duke of Cumberland. Infamous for his brutal oppression of a Scottish uprising. The statue itself has long since been felled, leaving an empty void.

The artists in engaging with this curious absence sparked a timely and creative debate about the role of monuments, the values we uphold, the things we choose to forget, and how this is decided.

To find out more about the tremendous Kolaj Live festival in Knoxville visit:

https://www.kolajinstitute.org/kolaj-live-knoxville.html

To visit the "Empty Columns Project Archives" and view the work you can go to: https://emptycolumns.weebly.com/

New Work - "A Monument To Dreaming Together" for Empty Columns are a Place to Dream @ The 53rd Annual Birr Vintage Arts Week, from the 14th-20th of August 2021

"A Monument to Dreaming Together" (2021) - Digital Collage - Anthony D Kelly

My piece in response to the “Empty Columns Are a Place to Dream" project in Birr, Co. Offaly, Ireland, as part of the Birr Vintage Week & Arts Festival.

See my statement below:

“Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.” - James Baldwin

To dream is to embark on a ubiquitous and mystical human experience. We each engage in nightly expeditions into the vast wildness of our own inner expanse, embarking on nocturnal journeys through the uncharted hinterlands of the self. Contact with this emergent space often churns forth inspirational ideas, creative insights and integrative experiences, possessed of a form of deep intelligence that is unfamiliar in our waking lives. Recent sleep research has even implicated dreaming as an integral element in the mind’s inherent capacity to process and heal from traumatic events.

Dreaming is also synonymous with the ability to look beyond, and to envision new and better futures, both personal and collective. Indeed the simple statement of “I have a dream…” evokes the powerful words of Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, his speech itself an act of collective dreaming that opened new pathways for discourse and lived possibilities. Also in listening to the history of Birr, there is much evidence of the town as a powerful site for collective dreaming. For example, the famous Leviathan of Parsonstown; a literal device constructed for the purpose of seeing far beyond our own world, and peering into the unknown heavens. And the Cáin Adomnáin or Law of The Innocents that came about as a result of the Synod of Birr in 697AD. This agreement was a prototype for the Geneva Convention and the first such accord to protect innocents during wartime, envisioning and enacting a better future.

Our world today is one of many crises. Humanity is struggling, as a people we are deeply troubled, fractured, isolated, grief stricken and traumatised. This is why now, possibly more than ever, we need new sites and spaces to gather, heal and relearn the ancient art of dreaming together.

All works from this outstanding project will be published in a book from Kolaj Magazine to mark the exhibition this can be preordered here.

Upcoming Exhibition - Empty Columns are a Place to Dream @ The 53rd Annual Birr Vintage Arts Week, from the 14th-20th of August 2021

Various Sites in Birr Town Centre, Birr, County Offaly,

The 53rd Annual Birr Vintage Arts Week,

From the 14th-20th of August 2021

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“Empty Columns” Panel Discussion Tuesday 17th August at 7.30pm, Birr Theatre & Arts Centre

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I am absolutely thrilled to be taking part in The Empty Columns are a Place to Dream Project as part of The 53rd Annual Birr Vintage Arts Week this August. This project curated by Ric Kasini Kadour will feature the work of 20 international collage artists, responding to an empty column which sits at the centre of Parsons Square, Birr, County Offaly. Through this project we explore monuments at large as focal points for communities, ideas and intentions; and their sometimes oppressive, often contentious, and potentially constructive roles as we move forward into the future.

Ric writes: “Monuments are a particular type of public art that plays an important role in the psyche of a community. A stitch that binds geography to history, monuments express community values. They say, ‘This is who we are. This is what we want the future to remember.’ They commemorate the dead and recall the past. But unlike headstones, monuments are communal by design, collective expressions of grief and remembrance.”

For more on the project from Ric Kasini Kadour visit here.

For more on Birr Vintage Arts Week visit here.