LOCKJAW: Lauren Conway, Lana May Fleming, and Luke van Gelderen. Curated by Shaista Sosrowardoyo.

Preview: Friday, 6 October 2023, 6 pm-8 pm

Exhibition run: 7-27 October 2023

Excerpt from exhibition text, Shaista Sosrowardoyo.

Artists Lauren Conway, Lana May Fleming, and Luke van Gelderen in this exhibition,  LOCKJAW explores the emotional dimensions of performing identities in a reality where truth is ever-mutating. Delving into feelings of loneliness, desire, disembodiment, and dissonance, this exhibition focuses on how the information age influences our tangible realities and - by extension - the spaces, bodies, and networks that we inhabit. Working across a diverse range of disciplines including video, new media, sculpture, drawing and painting, all three artists present heightened effigies of ourselves.


Lauren Conway delves into the intricacies of the cognitive and emotional dissonance that arises between the built environment, education and the percolation of interests, ideas and ephemera that is produced because of and also in spite of these spaces. In response to these concepts a sequestering of the artist's individual interests has taken place in the pursuit of understanding another. In this case her younger brother, a burgeoning film student at St. John's Central College Cork. In A tacit channel (2023), viewers encounter a vacant library bathed in shades of blue-green, and filled with unidentifiable volumes. Conway's portrayal of this space, intended for sharing, exchanging, and absorbing knowledge, becomes strikingly poignant due to its haunting absence of occupants or indeed any legible content. In Portrait of my brother: Mask (2023) and Portrait of my brother: Shirt (2023), Conway utilises spaces and objects to delve into the interior world of her younger brother. These works reflect a preoccupation with the profound challenges of accessing the core selves, beliefs, interests, and identities of others. The works lead us to question whether our essence can be expressed through possessing external objects and inhabiting certain spaces, or whether the amalgamation of these things obstruct the revelation of our truest selves.


This exhibition is kindly supported by The Arts Council of Ireland, Ranelagh Arts, Angelica Network, Fingal Arts, and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. Special thanks also go to the Douglas Hyde Gallery, our technician Eoghan McIntyre, our painter Richard Murphy, Dianne Murphy, Ava Chapman, Damon Conway, and Oisín Tozer for their invaluable help.