This September we have two new artists joining the studio – Vera Ryklova as a full time member, and Dennis as our short term let until the end of 2021.
Dennis Harvey
Dennis is an Irish filmmaker who is based between Dublin and Stockholm.
He makes work about movement, identity and the city. He is a member of Noncitizen, a film collective which tries to hand over the means of making films to those who rarely get to tell their own stories. Dennis has directed a number of short films which have screened at film and art festivals in Ireland, Sweden and the USA, and has released work with Fallow Media, the QFT Player and the Irish Times. He is currently directing two feature films: Kinopolitics, an essay about the personal politics of movement, and Celtic Utopia, a documentary about contemporary Irish identity, told through a new wave of folk and trad musicians and archive material.
Vera Ryklova
Vera Ryklova is a Dublin based artist who works in lens-based media. Vera‘s practice explores the concept of the self and the events that impact its social construction. Her own lived experience is her source and her own body is her medium. Both she deliberately uses to intimate women’s reality to the public eye. Vera performs to the lens and produces photographic and video self-portraits using the form of the series. Self-portraiture is not necessarily a genre she has focused on, it is rather the method she employs to explores her subject.
The key concept of Vera’s practice is confrontation. The camera has a function of a distancing device she utilises to experience a state of catharsis. Her work is particularly concerned with emotional conflict that results from the clash between two realities. One reality is designed and dominated by socially constructed expectations, roles and practices, while the other is desired and formed through the concept and perception of one self. Vera’s work is multilayed. It mixes research with elements of her past and present that then undergo a specific creative process. This together builds a subject for the viewers to explore, and invites their life experiences to impact the reading of her work.
In 2020 Vera was one of five selected Irish Talents representing PhotoIreland at Futures Photography. In 2017 she won the #hotronartworks Prize for work by a recent graduate and in 2016 she was shortlisted for the Hennessy Portrait Prize at the National Gallery of Ireland.
Currently she has a solo exhibition at Custom House Studios and Gallery (Westport). Previously she presented two solo shows: in 2021 at Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich (Belfast) and in 2018 at Triskel Cork. She has also exhibited in several group exhibitions held in Ireland and the UK, including the Filia Feminist Conference (London, Manchaster). Vera’s work was featured in Over Journal and Source Photographic Review and it is included in the art collections of Trinity College Dublin and Arts Council Ireland.
Originally from the Czech Republic, Vera was brought to Ireland on a journey of personal discovery and since 2007 she has been living and working here. She recently completed IADT ARC MFA (2021), and in 2015 she graduated from IADT’s BA (hons) Photography degree.
Ormond Art Studios 