On Wednesday, 4 March, the Abject Fantastic Exhibiton by Tanya O'Keeffe, Eveleen Murphy and Amanda Rice
at the James Barry Exhibition Centre, CIT Bishopstown Campus was formally opened by special guest speaker,
Mags Geaney.

The exhibition will run from 4 - 13 March 2009.
Amanda, Eveleen and Tanya graduated from the CIT Crawford College of Art and Design in June 2008 and were awarded studio bursaries from the Backwater Artists Group, Cork. Their show, ‘The Abject Fantastic’ shows their fondness for the found object and image. Once removed from its original context the found object is de-functionalised and therefore takes on a new meaning. All three artists have combined many disparate elements, often discarded and disused, striving to create a new and unusual reality.

Tanya O’Keeffe
Tanyaok2001@yahoo.co.uk

My work is concerned with the boundaries in and around relationships. I am interested in how, through relating with others, we meet, merge, mirror and exchange, parts of ourselves.

Amanda Rice
ricama_reicas@yahoo.ie

My work is a culmination of observational drawings of banal manmade structures, found images from children’s books and a re-assemblage of found objects. The work takes on a childlike sensibility with the use of crude marker pens, simplification of forms and use of cut outs elating the mundane within the urban environment to a naïve and childish eminence.

Eveleen Murphy
eveleen_murphy@yahoo.ie

I blend together the imaginary and the real, to create a fantasy. Using patterns and found images, I tell stories of experiences both my own and those of others. I am dealing with today's culture, where nothing is permanent. By using random images that appear of no importance other then their aesthetic appeal, my intention is to create a narrative. Even creating such beautiful fantasies, each have an impending doom, the happy couple and the lion, the pretty house with the hearts leaving. My work is not negative but it is playful and playing with the idea of stereotypical feminine needs.