JAMES MERRIGAN

[Founder, co-editor & screen-printer at Small Night Projects] For 15 years James Merrigan has prompted and disseminated art criticism as a writer, editor, teacher and artist. He is a product of the financial crisis of 2008, born out of an absence of out-in-the-open critical, urgent and personal confrontations with art-making within an emerging network and attention economy. This 15-year project includes online and printed identities and entities: +billion-journal (2010-17), Fugitive Papers (2011-13), Madder Lake Editions (2016-20) and Small Night Projects (2019-2024). James was selected for the RHA Futures (2011) as an artist, and EVA International (2014) as a fugitive art critic. He was guest-editor of the “Sex” and “Death” issues of Visual Artists' News Sheet in 2016. In 2011 he was awarded the inaugural Critical Writing Award by Visual Artists Ireland and The LAB Dublin. As co-curator of Gorey School of Art’s Periphery Space for 7 years he has worked (alongside Emma Roche) with individual artists and collectives through exhibition-making and education, including Soul–Beating (2017), DESTROY ALL HEROES (2018), and peripheriesPOST (2023). In November 2019 at Pallas Projects Dublin he curated ARRANGEMENTS, the inaugural launch and exhibition of Small Night Projects, which continues to this day as a group of artist-editors in the screenprinting of art and text projects for launch and exhibition, including WEAREFETISHIST (Garter Lane Arts Centre, 2023), TONE (Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, 2022), TOLD (Royal Hibernian Academy, 2022), TEXT (Douglas Hyde Gallery, 2023), TALK (Hugh Lane Gallery, 2023) TNTNTNT (Librairie Yvon Lambert, Paris, 2024).  James tutors at Gorey School of Art and lectures in Psychoanalysis and Art at Trinity College Dublin.

ALAN PHELAN

[Co-editor at Small Night Projects] After completing an MFA in the US, Alan Phelan returned to Ireland in the mid-90s with a practice informed by conceptual photography that expanded into all media. His practice therefore includes exhibition making, both as artist and curator; critical writing in various art publications; public art projects; film making; and various attempts at participatory practice learned from the early heady days of relational aesthetics. His commitment to collaborative making found a good fit with Small Night Projects, where the exchanges between the artist editors provided a non-hierarchical and non-institutional space to commission text art from world renowned practitioners. He also continues to work as an archivist, which has shaped his relationship to truth, history and empire.

Phelan studied at DCU (1989) and RIT; New York (1994) under a Fulbright scholarship. He has had significant solo exhibitions at Casino Marino (2024); CCI Paris (2021); Void Derry (2020); RHA (2020); Dublin City Gallery; The Hugh Lane (2016) and the IMMA (2009). Gallery solos also include the Molesworth Gallery (2023); Oonagh Young Gallery (2015 and 2013); Golden Thread Belfast (2014); The Black Mariah Cork (2011) and Mother's Tankstation Dublin (2007). Group exhibitions/projects include: Self-Determination; IMMA (2023); MOE Communal (2023-24); TONE/TOLD/TEXT/TALK (2022-23); EcoShowBoat (2022-23); PhotoIreland Festival (2022 and 2021); CCA Derry (2021); Garage Rotterdam (2020); EVA International (2016); Bonn Kunstmuseum (2015); Treignac Projet (2014); Bozar Brussels (2013); Feinkost Berlin (2007); The Whitney Museum of American Art (2004). His work is included in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art; The Arts Council; Trinity College Dublin; Limerick City Gallery of Art; The National Self-Portrait Collection; the Office of Public Works; Dublin City Council; and several private collections. Residencies include Wilton Park Studios RHA/IPUT; NCAD Dublin; CCI Paris; HIAP Helsinki; URRA Argentina and FSAS Dublin. Recent awards include an Arts Council Bursary (2021 and 2017); Creative Ireland MCCCS (2019); and the Hotron Éigse Art Prize (2016). Public works include DCC/Sculpture Dublin, the O'Connell Plinth Commission, City Hall (2021-23); Dublin; Void Offsites Derry (2022); Kevin Street Library (2016); Fr Collins Park (2011); IMMA formal gardens (2009).

LAURA FITZGERALD

[Co-editor at Small Night Projects] Laura is a visual artist working in drawing, painting, installation, video, text and audio. She is graduate of both the National College of Art & Design, Dublin and Royal College of Art, London. She is a recipient of the Visual Arts Bursary Award (Arts Council of Ireland) for 2023-24 and received the Golden Fleece award in 2020. Recent exhibitions include: Strange Weather, February 15th – April 20th 2024 at Ormston House, Limerick, Ireland, curated and produced by Niamh Brown; OTHER WORLDS, at the Regional Cultural Centre Letterkenny including artists

Richard Ashrowan, Barrie Cooke, Martin Gale, Tom Haran, Sandra Johnston, Vera Klute, Louis le Brocquy, Christine Mackey, Theresa McKenna, Aileen McKeogh, William McKeown, Maria McKinney, Miriam O’Connor, Tony O’Shea, Alan Phelan, Bennie Reilly, Nigel Rolfe and others; and This Rural, including Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Brian Mac Domhnaill, Caoimhe Kilfeather, Ciarán Óg Arnold, Patrick Hogan, Erica van Horn, Tom Keeley, Laura Fitzgerald, Michele Horrigan, Samuel Laurence Cunnane, Ruby Wallis, Katie Watchorn. The Mill, Lismore Co. Waterford, Ireland, curated by Miriam O’Connor and Paul McAree, 20 May - 16 July 2023. She completed a three-month residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, in Omaha, Nebraska, USA in January 2023. She is currently working towards a solo exhibition in Lismore Castle Arts in 2025.

CHRISTOPHER STEENSON

[Co-editor at Small Night Projects] Following time as a researcher and PhD candidate in psychology and movement science, Christopher Steenson (b.1992) began his artistic practice in 2017. With a practice that spans sound, lens-based media, text and digital systems, Steenson’s work seeks to bridge historical and speculative narratives as a method of interrogating the politics of time, environment and more-than-human-relations. His work manifests in various guises, ranging from site-specific and public sound works, to gallery installations, performances, and publications.

Steenson’s work has been presented at solo exhibitions, including: ‘Breath Variations’, Flat Time House, London, United Kingdom (2023); ‘Soft Rains Will Come’, VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow, Ireland (2022); TULCA Festival of Visual Arts: The World Was All Before Them (2022). He participated in several group exhibitions, including ‘mother tongue’, The MAC, Belfast, Northern Ireland (2024); ‘Apocalypse Anxieties’, Luan Gallery, Athlone, Ireland, ‘inching towards’, Freelands Foundation, London, United Kingdom (2024); ‘Penumbra’, LAVA, Mexico City, Mexico (2024); ‘Periodical Review 12: Practical Magic’, Pallas Projects/Studios, Dublin, Ireland (2022); Sonorities Sound Biennale, Belfast, Northern Ireland (2022); ‘Urgencies’, CCA Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland (2021).

In 2020, Steenson created On Chorus, a national public sound artwork that broadcast birdsong across Ireland by using Irish Rail/Iarnród Éireann’s network PA systems. This work now exists as an artist LP and won a 2021 Business to Arts Award. Steenson has participated on several residencies including: Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, USA (2023); Flat Time House, London, United Kingdom (2023); Interface, Connemara, Ireland (2022); Cow House Studios, Wexford, Ireland (2022); Sounding Paths, Syros, Greece (2019). He was part of the fourth and final cohort participating in the PS² Freelands Artist Programme (2022–2023). He lives and works between the north and south of Ireland.

DARRAN MCGLYNN

Darran McGlynn is an artist from Inishowen, Co. Donegal who lives in Galway where he is based at ArtSpace Studios. His multi-disciplinary practice incorporates sculpture, text, installation and printed media, often combining these elements together. Recent activity includes Leaves Ground, a solo exhibition at Roscommon Arts Centre in 2023. Recent publications include Mopus Operandi (2022), an 8-page text work printed in TOLD screen printed text art journal published by Small Night Projects, launched at the RHA, Dublin, 2022 and featured at the Dublin Art Book Fair.

Darran is interested in investigating the contemporary condition - contemporary Being - in the globalised landscape through the lenses of history, culture, psychology, philosophy and politics. He combines this with an interest in concepts of time, creating works that juxtapose the traditional and contemporary. Informed by conceptual art, minimalism, land art, classical, modernist and ready-made sculpture, his work brings together materials such as marble, steel, neon, animal skin and various printed media. There's an underlying characteristic humour in the work - a dark playfulness - informed by his own personal experiences merged with a deeper social and philosophical reflection that is somehow gentle and simultaneously quite savage. Darran likes to develop his exhibitions in a site-specific, installation based format but also produces unique standalone sculptures.

JAKI IRVINE

Jaki Irvine works with video installation, photography, music composition and writing. Her immersive video and sound installations tell stories through fragmented, elliptical and open-ended narratives informed by rigorous research. Irvine picks out evocative details from the landscape or cityscape, in particular honing in on Dublin and Mexico City, two cities that have shaped and informed her practice. Contested histories, sonic bricolage, the built environment, and the customs and communities of a city’s residents have all found their way into Irving’s deep-reaching and polyphonic work: songs that filter through a city’s streets, overheard conversations, the flap of a hummingbird’s wings are given equal gravitas. Her attention is often turned to the peripheral or the undervalued: recentring stories or figures written out of history, particularly female figures, or presenting an alternative approach to the present, making space for strangeness. Humans and nature become intertwined in her imaginative worldview, with plants, birds and creatures permeating her practice, and adding to the sense of the unknown and unknowable, and blurring the boundary between the real and the imagined. Jaki Irvine lives and works in Dublin and Mexico City, and is a regular artist advisor at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam.

CLAIRE FONTAINE

CLAIRE FONTAINE is a collective feminist conceptual artist founded by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill in Paris in 2004. Since 2017 she lives and works in Palermo. Her name is inspired by Duchamp’s iconic ready-made, the urinal entitled Fontaine, and a famous brand of French notebooks (Clairefontaine); it defines a space where the biographies of the artist is not directly connected to their artworks allowing their research to become a space of freedom and desubjectivisation. The use of appropriation and hijacking in her work stems from the same intention: not highlighting the excellence of the artist’s unique singularity but activating the forms and the forces within visual culture and underlining their political content. Claire Fontaine works in video, sculpture, painting and writing. 

The upcoming 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 will be entitled Foreigners Everywhere after a seminal series of works by Claire Fontaine. Adriano Pedrosa, the curator of the biennale, took inspiration from the artist’s ongoing series of neons, declaring in the press conference: “The backdrop for the work is a world rife with multifarious crisis and challenges around the movement and existence of people across countries, nations, territories and borders, which reflect the perils and pitfalls of language, translation, nationality, expressing differences and disparities conditioned by identity, race, gender, sexuality, freedom, and human development.”

GARDAR EIDE EINARSSON

Gardar Eide Einarsson (born 1976, Oslo) lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. He received his education from National Academy of Fine Art in Bergen, Norway, Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Whitney ISP, New York, and Cooper Union School of Architecture, New York. 

 "Gardar Eide Einarsson’s works commonly appear to be as motivated by humanism as they stem from cynicism. On the one hand, Einarsson’s artistic production has predominantly been addressing the utmost basic aspect of human condition: the concept of individual freedom and the various attempts at accomplishing that. On the other hand, these works present us with failed attempts. Even more so, they are mechanically measuring the distance between the ideals imagined and the results of fairly futile attempts. Adding to this cynicism is the very appearance of Einarsson’s works; muted, excerpted and always borne out of the same limited palette. While the viewer may recognize these objects as contingent – capable of conveying meaning – they are rarely apparently readable. The willing restraint of information gives these works the appearance of inept and provisional props – reenacting how things went wrong." 

ISOBEL WOHL

Isobel Wohl is a Brooklyn-based writer. A native New Yorker, she lived in London for seven years before returning to her home city. Her first novel, Cold New Climate, was published by Weatherglass Books in April 2021 to excellent reviews. Lamorna Ash, writing in the TLS, described the book as “exceptionally good” and Wohl’s writing as “beautifully delicate.” In the Guardian, Lara Feigel wrote, “We’re left asking with pleasure: what will Isobel Wohl do next?” Wohl is also the author of a short story collection, Winter Strangers (MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, 2019). Her essays have appeared in Emerge, The Irish Times,and LitHub. She is also a visual artist. She is currently working on her second novel.

MARK VERABIOFF

Prior to his move to Los Angeles in 2001, Mark Verabioff lived and worked for the greater part of a decade in New York, where he regularly performed “guerrilla actions” in public spaces, alongside screenings of seminal single-channel videotapes in galleries throughout the city. In large part, Verabioff’s activities were aligned with the artist’s own brand of “cultural insurgency,” which he has continued to develop in his practice as an antagonism toward the dominant structures of power that continue to flourish in the field of contemporary art. Identifying with a generation of socially minded artists who came to maturity in the 1990s amid racial and gender politics, activism and art around the AIDS crisis, and a widespread distrust of institutions, Verabioff often reuses materials and sources from art history and popular culture to provoke a response through the lens of feminist discourse.

Verabioff’s installation envelops the gallery in a large vinyl wall decal over which new paintings and collages have been installed. Pulled from iconic advertising campaigns from magazines and books of commercial photography, these works are referred to by the artist as “page tears.” The sources for the three distinct projects represented include What Becomes a Legend Most: The Blackglama Story, a chronicle of the famous advertisements that were introduced in 1968 to promote Blackglama furs; Scavullo Men, a coffee table book on the photographs of iconic men taken by Francesco Scavullo; and selections from a recent photo shoot with Nick Jonas that originally appeared in Flauntmagazine. Pairing these materials with slogans and phrases culled from the history of feminist art, Verabioff attempts to reinhabit some of the strategies that were made famous by such figures as Hannah Wilke, Barbara Kruger, and the Guerrilla Girls, who are all referenced throughout his work. Verabioff’s practice considers the legacy of art history’s most notable women to engage in a conversation about a male-centered art world and the production of culture at large.

FIONA BANNER AKA THE VANITY PRESS

Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press (b. 1966, Merseyside) explores gender, language, interpretation and publishing through a range of mediums, including drawing, sculpture, performance and the moving image. The struggle between language and its limitations is central to Banner’s conceptual approach. With an interest in how conflict is mythologised through popular culture, her early work took the form of ‘wordscapes’ or ‘still films’, blow-by-blow accounts in her own words of feature films, from war movies to pornos, from intimate scenes to historical events. These works evolved into solid single blocks of text, often the same shape and size as a cinema screen. Banner later turned her attention to the idea of the art-historical nude, observing a life model and transcribing, in words, the pose and form. Her repurposing of military aircraft is another key element in her work. She often transforms these imposing machines to brutal, sensual and comedic ends, using parts of military aircraft in her installations, or granting them a kind of living presence. In her film Pranayama Organ (2021) two decoy military aircraft slowly inflate on a desolate beach. The film then transitions into a ritualistic performance acted out by two people dressed as fighter planes, one of which is the artist, as human and automaton perform a darkly comical ritual of courtship and combat. 

In 1997 Banner started her own publishing imprint The Vanity Press, with her monumental The Nam. She has since published many works, as books, sculptural objects or performances. In 2009 she issued herself an ISBN number and registered herself as a publication under her own name.

JACK PIERSON

Jack Pierson works in several different mediums, including sculpture, photography and video, and is known for word signage installations, drawings, and artist's books. He explores the emotional undercurrents of everyday life, from the intimacy of romantic attachment to the distant idolization of others. In his well-known appropriation of vintage texts, Pierson references traditional American motifs (roadside ephemera, small town stores) and thus a lost era of cultural symbolism; his resulting word sculptures are imbued with both nostalgia and disillusionment. Informed in part by his artistic emergence in the era of AIDS, Pierson’s work is moored by melancholy and introspection, yet his images are often buoyed by a celebratory aura of seduction and glamour. Using friends as models, he has consistently engaged star culture, whether the stars are from the screen, stage, or art world. Sometimes infused with a sly sense of humor, Pierson’s work is inherently autobiographical; his fixation with fame affirms the tendency to yearn for an ideal, allowing for the viewer’s identification with his imagery. Fuelled by the poignancy of emotional experience and by the sensations of memory, obsession and absence, Pierson’s subject is ultimately, as he states, “hope.”

Jack Pierson was born in 1960 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in 1984. He lives and works in New York. Pierson has had recent solo exhibitions at the CAC Malaga, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and the Aspen Art Museum. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other museums worldwide. Pierson is represented by Cheim & Read, New York.

LAURE PROUVOST

Language – in its broadest sense – permeates the video, sound, installation and performance work of Laure Prouvost. Known for her immersive and mixed-media installations that combine film and installation in humorous and idiosyncratic ways, Prouvost’s work addresses miscommunication and ideas becoming lost in translation. Playing with language as a tool for the imagination, Prouvost is interested in confounding linear narratives and expected associations among words, images and meaning. She combines existing and imagined personal memories with artistic and literary references to create complex film installations that muddy the distinction between fiction and reality. At once seductive and jarring, her approach to filmmaking employs layered storytelling, quick edits, montage and wordplay and is composed of a rich, tactile assortment of images, sounds, spoken and written phrases. The videos are often shown within immersive environments which comprise found objects, sculptures, painting and drawings, signs, furniture and architectural assemblages, that are rendered complicit within the overarching narrative of the installation. 

Laure Prouvost was born in Lille, France (1978) and is currently based in Brussels. She received her BFA from Central St Martins, London in 2002 and studied towards her MFA at Goldsmiths College, London. She also took part in the LUX Associate Programme. Prouvost won the MaxMara Art Prize for Women in 2011 and was the recipient of the Turner Prize in 2013. 

PAUL ROY

Paul Roy is a visual artist originally from Dublin, now living in Westmeath. He Received a first-class honours MA in Art in the Contemporary World in 2020, and has a background in painting, printmaking and animation. His current work reflects on how the onset of serious illness can impact upon an arts practice, altering both the subject matter and the physical approach to the processes of making art. This includes how his own personal experience of long-term ill health has informed every aspect of my creative process.