An Evening of Irish Music and Storytelling

In conjunction with our current exhibition

Amid A Space Between: Irish Artists in America
the Gallery will host an evening of Irish music and storytelling

Thursday, March 22 from 5:30 - 7:30 p.m.

The Irish Storytelling Ensemble will present

short pieces that range from fairytales to accounts of

the Irish American experience in San Francisco’s Sunset district.

The event is free.

MUSIC: 5:30pm
Bobbi Nikles, Celtic Fiddle

STORIES: 6:00pm-7:00pm
Tim Ereneta, "The Man Who Had No Story"
Deirdre Kennedy, "You Must Be Irish"
Emlyn Guiney, "Red String" 
Elaine Magree, "Pilgrimage or, Why I'm not an Indian"
Ron Jones, "The Chair" & "The Insect Lady"



The Irish Storytelling Ensemble

Rebecca Fisher producer/curator/host for this storytelling event began her bay area work in the arts at The Julia Morgan Center for the Arts in 2000 as a theater teaching artist.  Today she continues to work with Sabrina Klein's Creative Education Consulting and is the Director of The Marsh's Theater Creations Camp. While working at the Julia Morgan, Rebecca co-created and continues to co-produce a monthly solo performance series Tell it on Tuesday. Now in it's seventh year, this well known series is at The Marsh Berkeley.  Her solo show "The Magnificence of the Disaster" was created as part of the 2007 Marsh's Performance Initiative and enjoyed a successful four month run at The Marsh. For more information please see http://www.rebeccamfisher.com/.

Bobbi Nikles is the founder and long-time director of Fiddlekids (www.fiddlekids.com/), a music camp specializing in teaching traditional fiddle music, dance and art to children. She is a versatile musician with a special interset in Appalachian, Celtic, and jazz fiddle styles. Bobbi currently performs with the Black Brothers Irish Band, Douce Ambiance, and Curlew and has performed with Melanie O'Reilly, Wake the Dead and many contradance bands.

Tim Ereneta is an award-winning storyteller who connects ancient stories to modern day life, as he shares classic and forgotten fairy tales with audiences at Fringe Festivals, museums, and theatres. Learn more at http://www.timereneta.com/.

Deirdre Kennedy is a veteran broadcaster whose radio stories appear on NPR, KQED, Newsweek.com and European networks.  Her latest solo piece is “Don’t Eat the Red Locusts,” a slightly hyperbolic account of her well-meaning  ethnomusicology trip to a war-torn African nation.  For more information please see http://www.deirdrekennedy.com/. 

Emlyn Guiney received her BA in Theatre Arts from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where she trained in physical theater and solo performance. She's performed with a variety of theater companies in the bay area, including Fools Fury, Ragged Wing Ensemble, Rapid Descent, and The Jewish Theatre.  Her one-woman show, Red String,was featured in the New Voices Festival at the Marsh in 2010.

Elaine Magree, a Californian native: sometimes a wave, sometimes a photon- because you can’t be in two places at once, or can you? Pilgrimage was developed with David Ford and is being directed by Rebecca Fisher.

Ron Jones lives on Stanyan Street with family, a garden, and stories to tell about growing up in the city. His books have been translated into television specials, feature film, and documentaries. This work has been honored with American Book of the Year, Emmy, Peabody, and Golden Globe awards. For information about coaching his granddaughter's basketball team, attempts as a jazz poet , and trying to write a musical see http://www.ronjoneswriter.com/.




This event will be hosted at the gallery.

SFMOMA Artists Gallery
Building A, Fort Mason Center
San Francisco, CA 94123
(415) 441-4777

We'll see you soon!

Amid A Space Between: Irish Artists in America

March 8-April 19, 2012

Opening Reception - Saturday, March 10, 1-3 p.m.
Storytelling Evening - Thursday, March 22, 5.30-7.30 p.m.

Helen O'Leary: Construct - Destruct

Helen O’Leary, a County Wexford native, recently completed a Guggenheim fellowship in Paris. Her desire is to make unconventional paintings that “stand up without the usual structures of support.” For her, making art involves, “looking at my own life, the history of Sean-nós (in the old way) singing, (Samuel) Beckett's pared-down language, and the currency of need found in most houses when I was growing up.”

Born into an agrarian working class family, Helen O’Leary has successfully incorporated the simple humility of common Irish life into her work. By weaving together language, music, and art O’Leary deconstructs the conventions of provincialism into an informal and personalized statement of her heritage.

O’Leary’s combine-like structures subvert the conventions of form and stability inherent in the narratives of history. Influenced by colloquial Sean-nós, a form of spoken word lyrically composed into ornamental verse recounting love and loss, O’Leary’s pieces whimsically communicate similar odes to her past collections. By deconstructing her previous works and then reassembling them into assemblages of panels, canvas, and wood O’Leary is able to recount her story using new forms. In essence, although the new form has lingering remnants of past stories it is altogether reborn.

Richard Mosse: A Lighter Shade of Photography

Limerick-born Richard Mosse, is a graduate of Yale and Goldsmiths College, London. His Infra series was featured at Dublin Contemporary 2011. The series comprises large-scale photos created using film that sees an invisible spectrum of light. Mosse uses this film, which renders greens in a range of vivid pinks, to photograph rebels – some of them mere children – fighting in the Congo. He describes his project as an attempt to make visible what can’t be seen – for example, how the lush equatorial jungle quickly “swallows up” traces of the violence.


Colonel Soleil's Boys, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2010


Photography, a not very well celebrated medium in Ireland, allows Richard Mosse to interrogate the delicate boundary between objective realism and phantasmal aestheticism in current events. Mosse’s most recent work Infra tarries alongside adolescent rebel militias through the war ravaged countryside of the Congo. Mosse remarks; “I arrived in the Congo I had crossed a threshold into fiction, into my own symbolic order” (Mosse, Aperture Magazine).

By negotiating a path through these politically charged landscapes, Mosse stares directly in the face of conflict leaving both sides of the story excavated. 

Written by Edgar B. Ramirez.
- Edgar B. Ramirez is a graduate student of Philosophy at San Francisco State University interested in topics centered on aesthetics, visual theory, and contemporary ethics. He is currently seeking to integrate his analytic background with the subjective field of art criticism and sensory perception.