A record of the launch of Áine Macken's latest exhibition "SEEP" at the Pallas Contemporary Projects Gallery,Dublin

The culmination of a year-long project, this exhibition of Áine Macken’s work will present hundreds of small paintings of faces, each contorted, experiencing extremes of emotion – ecstasy, pleasure, torture, grief, terror and joy. Her practice is strongly informed by theoretical considerations of beauty, jouissance and the ethical implications of the pursuit of narcissism (heavily influenced by Rococo portraitures of ecstasy). Yet she is strongly affected by the materiality of the medium in which she works: wet paint, like the ideas of female subjectivity explored in Luce Irigaray’s early philosophy, is fluid, unstable, formless – it seeps, infects, infiltrates, resonates, stains and morphs into part of the object to which it attaches itself.

Áine has invited a number of artists including Michelle Considine, Catherine Harty and Gráinne Galvin, theoretician/philosopher Carolyne Quinn, creative writer/curator Emma Dwan O’Reilly and burlesque performer Miss Bella A Go Go to respond to these ideas of fluidity, femininity, sexuality and terror. These will include collaborative works, independent pieces taking theories of Áine’s work as points of departure, and a subversive burlesque performance by Miss Bella A Go Go on the opening night.

SEEP will contend with snapshots in contemporary attempts to survive, to become significant, to be documented, recorded, to become immortal.

with thanks to Marisa for her artistic advice and for her generous input in preparing the stylesheet for this gallery