Joseph Fogarty
Recent exhibitions include Inherited Possibility – solo exhibition at Studio 12, Backwater Artist Group Cork, A Different View – solo exhibition at GOMA Waterford (Oct 19 – Nov 10, 2018), RDS Visual Art Awards – group exhibition curated by Amanda Coogan at Royal Dublin Society (Oct 22 – Oct 29, 2018), First View – group exhibition, Garter Lane Arts Centre, Waterford (2017). In January 2020, Joseph began the MA in Art + Process at CIT Crawford College of Art & Design. His exhibition at the Backwater was informed by a residency and research exchange carried out at Backwater in October 2019. The 2019 residency and subsequent exhibition in 2020 was part of an exchange with GOMA as part of Backwater Artists Group 30th Anniversary programme.
My work is an ongoing interrogation of the cognitive processes, involving the physical and the visual, through which we construct meaning. I am interested in exploring the idea that the viewers experience of the object is determined by their physical relationship to it, and subsequently how the bodily experience influences the perceptual experience, and how both symbiotically enhance the viewer/object relationship. In particular my investigations centre on the experience generated by this relationship within a three-dimensional structure; the way the viewer can become the ‘activation ‘ that allows mediation between the physical and the visual. Enabling the viewer to move within and around a three-dimensional structure facilitates this exploration of the physiological process by which we become aware of our presence in relation to the object. Through my research into art movements of the 1960s and 70s I am influenced by Minimalism and Conceptualism. In particular the artist Robert Morris and his association with Gestalt theory, also his idea of the viewer occupying the same space as well as forming a relationship with the work.
Joseph Fogarty