126 Artist-Run Gallery in Galway City is delighted to present the public with Body, Bodies, Embodied, a duo show by artists Day Magee and Dónal Talbot featuring an intimate exploration of queer identity.
‘The body is a vessel …of sorts’ – so begins and ends a poem by Dónal Talbot which encapsulates some of what the two artists are achieving here, using the body as a medium to express different aspects of identity.
For Body, Bodies, Embodied, two young artists come together to represent a spectrum of intimate and extroverted expressions of the queer self.
Magee and Talbot take the concept of ‘body’ and imbue their musings and convictions into an exhibition that is both in conversation and in contrast with itself.
Talbot captures everyday life for queer individuals through photographic mediums and poetry, and Magee expresses narrativisations of queerness and disability through performance work, lens-based images, words, and mixed media with AI experimentation.
Their explorations firmly situate this show within the wider embrace of 126 Gallery’s 2023 Visual Arts Programme ‘Alchemical Vessels’.
The exhibit, curated by Mary McGraw and Méabh Noonan, will run at 126 Gallery until February 26, and is open to the public from 12pm – 6pm, Monday – Sunday.
The Artists
Day Magee is a performance-centred multimedia artist and writer based in Dublin, whose work has taken them across Ireland and abroad.
They have performed since 2011 as part of Livestock and the Dublin Live Art Festival, and graduated from Limerick School of Art and Design in Sculpture & Combined Media in 2021.
By their penultimate year they had exhibited as part of TULCA Festival here in Galway, and taken part group shows across Ireland and abroad,
They were also nominated for the Future Generation Art Prize 2020, its Irish partner platform Pallas Projects/ Studios, and shortlisted for the RDS Visual Arts Awards.
Magee’s work concerns the induction and enactment of temporality and subjectivity via bodily vectors, and the lived mythographies of selfhood – the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves as simultaneously lived out.
Dónal Talbot is an artist and photographer based in Dublin whose work is predominantly based in portraiture.
He uses its intimate qualities to showcase and empower the LGBTQ+ community through representation in art.
Often employing a soft lens, Talbot’s work hopes to capture his subjects in natural light with unedited backgrounds in the hopes of capturing a real and honest depiction of everyday life.
Talbot graduated from the National College of Art and Design in 2017, and has since been featured in i-D Magazine, The Face and exhibited in the Belfast Photo Festival.
His work was recently published in the photo book ‘New Queer Photography’, alongside a selection of 40 other international LGBTQ+ artists.
