• Picture This: Your National Visual Arts Guide – Narrative

    Most exhibitions, in fact most artistic presentations be they albums, books or films, rely on and in most cases are defined by the strength of the narrative that exists or is absent from their presentation. They ensure an audience is guided through the work and suitably poked in the right direction when needed or left to surmise when required. While this idea of a structural narrative is almost universally present in outputs, it’s realisation and presence can be a diverse as the types of works it links and flows between. It can seen conjoining two distinct and seemingly opposing stories…

  • Picture This: Your National Visual Arts Guide – Ties

    Among its definitions by the Oxford English Dictionary, alongside ‘a strip of material worn round the collar‘ and ‘a game in which the scores are level’, ties is defined as ‘a thing that unites or links people’. It is this third definition that can be best used to describe the exhibitions, artworks and people that feature in this edition of The Thin Air’s Picture This. In Dublin we see the latest show by Willie Doherty which discusses the unified history of two separate places and how this, via the 1916 Rising and later republicanism, has now become part of the…