A new audio exhibition has been installed in Limerick City Gallery of Art counting down to when the gallery re-opens the public on Monday 29 June.
The Blurry Clock has been installed at the main entrance to the building and is a collaboration with the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick.
The clock will sound for two minutes, every hour on the hour between 10am and 6pm daily as it counts down to when the doors of the Carnegie Building re-open to the public following the Covid-19 lockdown.
The sounds for the work were created by the staff and students of the MA in Composition and Creative Music Practice and the PhD in Arts Practice at the Academy.
From next week, visitors to the gallery will once again be able to view and explore many of the fascinating pieces from the Permanent Collection, which have been behind closed doors since March.
New procedures and guidelines are being implemented to comply with Covid-19 instructions post lockdown, so visitors are asked to be patient as these guidelines bed in.
Meanwhile the first major exhibition for Limerick City Gallery of Art (LCGA) will be an exhibition of work from this year’s graduate class of LIT Limerick School of Art and Design.
Limerick City Gallery of Art will host a selected exhibition from the 2020 Degree Show allowing graduates the opportunity to share and celebrate their work with the public, something they didn’t get a chance to do when colleges went into lockdown in March.
The exhibition will run for 12 days from Wednesday 15 July.
Director/ Curator of LCGA Una McCarthy said: “We are really looking forward to being able to welcome visitors new and old back to Limerick City Gallery of Art. It has been a challenging three months, but our staff, just like everyone in society, have risen to the challenge.”
“Despite the gallery being closed to the public since March, a lot of work has gone on behind the scenes. We ran a series of successful web-based educational programmes, and staff are continuing to develop exciting online programmes over the summer months.”
“We have been collaborating with our colleagues in Limerick Museum and the Hunt Museum on the Three Muses project and this will continue.”
“But it will be exciting to have the doors of the Carnegie Building re-open to invite people inside to experience the wonder of art for themselves.”
Elsewhere during the lockdown Niamh Schmidtke, recipient of the LCGA Graduate Award 2020 for her work, Plane No 7, which was purchased by LCGA for its Permanent Collection has been awarded an artist’s residency as part of the European Investment Bank artists’ programme.
While work is advancing on the 39th edition of EVA International in the autumn, and the exhibition As Kingfishers Catch Fire – Animals and Imagination, curated by Austin McQuinn will open on 26 November 2020.
And one of the jewels of the gallery’s Permanent Collection, The Mushroom Book, is on extended loan to Somerset House, London for its exhibition Mushrooms: The Art, Design and Future of Fungi. There are only two copies of this book in public collections, one housed in LCGA and the second in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) in New York!
This work along with other significant works were donated by Jim Sheehy to the Permanent Collection of LCGA.
