Nightbloom Chokehold by Jennifer Mehigan

Nightbloom Chokehold

2 December 2022 - 5 March 2023 Opening Night: Thursday 1 December, 6pm - 8pm.  The Douglas Hyde is delighted to present a commissioned solo exhibition by artist Jennifer Mehigan in Gallery 2.  In Nightbloom Chokehold Jennifer Mehigan explores flatness, alluding to surveillance, the screen as frame and persistent image economies. Through the use of Artificial Intelligence, 3D software and poetry, she has created sculptures and digital paintings that occupy the gallery space and explore the limitations of the digital realm focusing on how it misunderstands and misrepresents queerness and femininity.  Based on ongoing research into women post-Famine who rendered themselves invisible and unknowable, Nightbloom Chokehold juxtaposes legible images (familiar flying horses and AI generated family portraits) in sculptural form alongside illegible images created by inserting poetry and perfume descriptions into text-to-image generators. Mehigan’s mining the digital realm and the use of existing archives results in strange visual patterns that unfurl and simultaneously restrict.  Default software interfaces, the pervasiveness of ‘supremacy culture,’ and materials from agricultural fields rub up against the assumptions and mistranslations of AI’s visual cortex, cultivating intimacy between women, animals, plants, and the senses. This exhibition is part of the ongoing series of solo exhibitions under the title The Artist’s Eye which asks those exhibiting in Gallery 1 to invite an artist of influence to present work in Gallery 2. In this instalment Bassam Al-Sabah has invited artist and frequent collaborator Jennifer Mehigan Jennifer Mehigan is an artist and researcher. Her work spans multiple disciplines, merging 3D modelling, sculpture, film-making, painting, scent, text, parties, floristry and flower farming. She lives between Limerick and Belfast.