Mark Cullen creates surreal installations that stem from his interest in science, space, technology, futurology, music and art. He attempts to slowdown the viewers engagement with art. He wants the viewer to become a participant within an immersive experience, to encourage a consideration of what it means to be a thinking embodied being, inside an artwork. What are the implications both physically and mentally? Ideas of place/site/space, embodiment, science/futurology/sci-fi and the imagination are explored in his work. The observers insertion in the work enacts a parallel insertion into a relationship with these ideas.

He is interested in transporting the viewer into a space where arts ability to stretch logic, time, material and experiential possibilities is apparent, and perhaps to entice the viewer into considerations of a cosmological nature.

Biography:
Mark Cullen was born in Dublin in 1972. Cullen works with various media. Works include MAIM XI for Irish Museum Modern Art, Temporary Portable Reservoirs at The Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin and Siege House, London, Cosmic Annihilator, an installation at Pallas Heights and Open EV+A (curated by Dan Cameron 2005) Limerick City Gallery. Recent works include Difference Engine, at Substation, Triskel, Blackflash at G126, Star Gazing at 52° North at Synaesthesia Sat, Workhouse Birr Arts Festival.

In 2005 he completed a Masters in Visual Arts Practices at DLIADT and was an award winner at EV+A 2005. In 2007 he attended a residency at El Levante in Rosario, Argentina. Cullen was curator of Darklight Digital Film Festival from 1999-2004. In 1995 with Brian Duggan he was the co-founding partner of Pallas Studios, Dublin. Pallas through their various guises and programmes have been key exponents of experimental art practice in Dublin.

www.pallasprojects.org
www.pallasheights.org
www.pallasstudios.org

He is also a director and curator of Pallas Contemporary Projects a space for experimental art in Dublin.

Sonia Shiel's work exerts a comical agency over the earnest notions it describes, combining sculptural and painted objects, paintings and videos - in small scale vignettes and larger, unashamedly faux installations. She regularly uses the idea of the artist and his pursuit beyond make-believe as her central muse, positioning him in apparently lawless environments: - the wild west, outer space, cartoon territories and anarchic streets. Facades form structural points, mechanisms and the make-up of stand-alone sculptures, as well as menacing the themes and narratives of her paintings and their protagonists.

Recent Biography
Sonia Shiel has had solo exhibitions at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, The Royal Hibernian Academy, Gallery I and II, Dublin, the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, FOUR, Dublin, Roscommon Arts Centre, and the Cable Factory, Helsinki. She has completed a number of international residencies, facilitated by the Helsinki International Artists Program Award, TBG&S, The Arts Council Travel and Mobility Award, Culture Ireland, the Tony O’Malley Award and the Ard Bia Residency among others. She has taken part in other international curatorial projects, particularly, as co-ordinator of House Projects.

Her work has been included in group shows at Pallas Contemporary Projects, Green on Red Gallery, Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Kerlin Gallery, Ard Bia Berlin and PREVIEW Berlin. Other projects have included “Rumble Rumble, Whats the Big Idea?” a series of installational works in Dublin city locations, following on from ‘More Rules than Road,’ her solo show at the RHA. Shiel’s work is held in many private and public collections, including the offices of Dublin Contemporary, a selection recently curated by Aoife Tunny.