Events Programme

Symbiote by Juliana Walters

From Fri 12-02-2010 to Sat 13-03-2010

Public Talk, Saturday 6th March at 3.30pm
Catherine Marshall, Co-editor of Volume 5 Royal Irish Academy’s Art & Architecture of Ireland Project, in conversation with artist Juliana Walters. Followed by wine reception.

All welcome to attend.

Wexford Arts Centre is delighted to host a solo show by artist Juliana Walters entitled Symbiote. Over the past eighteen months Walters has been developing a project entitled PLACE situated in Gorey, Co. Wexford; taking on a disused shop to create an intimate gallery/studio integrating a functioning shop. This came about through a need to find a new model to both live and sustain herself as an artist.

For her solo show, Walters is transporting the entire shop from Gorey to Wexford Arts Centre. The installation will be a fully interactive and operational space while in parallel the vacated shop space in Gorey will become a working studio, alongside a live video feed of the relocated shop in Wexford. This action while questioning the current economic climate and pressure ensued on the arts by commercial demands, forcibly and directly melds together two worlds which traditionally  and in their purist forms are held at arms length, that of art and fashion, art and commerce.

Prior to her art studies, Walters trained as a fashion designer and for ten years worked as a fashion stylist in Paris and London for publications including British Vogue, Italian Vogue and Allure Magazine. Her past work often reflected a leakage between these two careers. Her relocation to rural Wexford in 2004 threw up an ongoing internal polemic of how to reconcile these two differing existences. Often her work becomes a series of performative experiments which unfold as a result of her existential experiences, and hence act as a slippage between urban and rural, fashion and art, the real and the surreal. The personal narrative evident in her work is also about the connectivity drawn between the cities of Paris, London and Dublin. The nostalgic tone of amassing these ‘glamorous’ items, garments and objects from her travels into a concentrated space in Wexford to be viewed, experienced, shared and owned.

Thus, the transformation of the main gallery space into the ‘shop space’ articulates the directional pull enforced by the artists’ current economic, geographical and personal circumstances. She has constructed a survival mechanism, an experiment in self–sustaining strategies, through which she endeavors to find a utopian solution to maintain her ongoing art practice. Conceiving an intimate existence where one entity can feed off the other; a symbiotic relationship, where in this case ‘commerce’ breeds a potential ‘freedom’ to create to survive. And this symbiosis is articulated through the simultaneous ‘live video feed’ between the two spaces, Gorey and Wexford.

As with all experiments though, the projected video piece in the upper gallery titled Bread and Butter serves as a reminder that both PLACE and Symbiote represent an ‘open-ended’ process, an unresolved questioning of the current emergence of ‘the self-sustaining model’ - where the outcome has yet to be measured, quantified and/or indeed deemed viable. As with all experiments though, this is an ‘open-ended’ process, an unresolved situation where the outcome has yet to be measured, quantified and deemed viable?

Walters work has been exhibited both in Ireland and England, including Darklight Film Festival 2006, Domestic Distance Wexford Arts Centre 2007. Synaesthesia Sat, Birr Union Workhouse 2007, Surface Tension, Broadstone XL and Raheen Hospital. Belongings, Glasnevin Dublin, 2006. The Choices we choose, Studio 6, Temple Bar, Dublin. She has recieved awards both in England and Ireland including, The Wexford County Council Bursary, 2007, The Arts Council of Ireland Touring Experiment, 2007 and The Owen Roley Award, London, 2003.

Wexford Art Centre’s galleries are open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am-6pm and admission is free.

For further information about this exhibition or the artist, or to request images please contact: Catherine Bowe, Visual Arts Manager, tel: 053 9123764 or email catherine@wexfordartscentre.ie

For further information contact Wexford Arts Centre, Cornmarket, Wexford. Phone +353 (0)53 91 23764 Email:catherine@wexfordartscentre.ie Web: www.wexfordartscentre.ie