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ARTSDESK NEW, NOW, NEXT This fresh instalment of
RHA’s Futures is replete with diversity words Amelia O’Mahony-Brady Some 17 years ago, the RHA recognised a serious dearth of exhibiting spaces in Dublin for emerging artists; a perennial issue that, they acknowledged, encompassed their own Ely Place premises. This self-awareness ended up spawning the inauguration of Futures in 2001 – an illuminating programme that plucked six or seven artists in the earliest stages of their career, with not a scrap of facsimile work between them. “[Curator Ruth Carroll and I] wanted to create something that would build a relationship with [emerging artists] as, back in the ‘90s, the RHA didn’t have the format nor the relevancy for them,” Director Patrick T. Murphy recalls. Nearly two decades later – yet with similarly-barren showcasing options for Dublin’s early career artists – Futures’ driving force remains more imperative than ever. The programme’s inceptive ethos, exhibiting artists with the ability to contrast and coalesce with one another, equally prevails. This winter’s showcase marks the second episode – meaning the second year – of Futures’ third series, having run the first from 2001-2005 and the second from 2011-2015. “We stop it every now and then… 2019 will be the last [Futures] for a couple of years,” says Murphy. “We’re not enslaved to putting it on every year, and so it doesn’t affect standards.” The six, ever-eclectic artists on show this year – Bassam Al-Sabah, Cecilia Danell, Laura Fitzgerald, Joanne Reid, Jennifer Mehigan and Marcel Vidal – have been whittled down after 18 months roaming across Ireland, during which Carroll and Murphy made numerous visits to studios, group shows and a variety of artist-driven initiatives. Murphy believes that “it’s always about truffling out these people. There are some great shows going on in the Dock, in Leitrim, or in the Solstice, in Navan, or Skibbereen…There are a lot more emerging artists being shown outside of Dublin than in Dublin, so you have to travel these days to find out what’s going on.” At the risk of stating the obvious, as far as their creative ethos and employment of ideas is concerned, no two artists are remotely the same in this showcase. Al-Sabah’s multi-dimensional installation work, delving into arresting themes of war, resistance and perseverance, sit comfortably (if contrastingly) alongside Danell’s purposefully-imperfect Swedish landscapes, wherein she stretches the parameters of paint as a medium. Reid and Vidal may have a mutual focus on material culture, but their findings manifest in thoroughly different ways; with Reid’s striking yet delicate exploration of an object’s life cycle far removed from Vidal’s “volatile assemblages” built, in part, from castor wheels and hardware materials. Fitzgerald tackles a myriad of 70