From the catalogue:

Embracing The Formless Irregular
Conor McGrady

As founder and principal member of the avant-garde group Nurse With Wound,Steven Stapleton has produced a steady output of somic experimentation since the release of the seminal Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella in 1979. Followers of Nurse With Wound will be familiar sith Steven's graphic work through the album art he has created for the group and numerous others produced under the pseudonym Babs Santini. These works form part of an extensive body of work he has generated in collage, painting and assemblage, many of which have been brought together at GalleryX in the The Formless Irregular. Together they provide a rare opportunity to experience the scope of Steven's multidimensional approach to image making which complements and expands the process framing his sonic output.

Collages feature prominently in The Formless Irregular. The gallery is densely populated with imagery culled from nultiple sources and embraces a visual sensibility that flows from the surreal and macabre to the erotic and political. In reprocessing the early twentieth century avant-garde movements of Dada and Surrealism, these collages disrupt and subvert our hyper-mediated present. The digital is eschewed in favour of an analogue approach to art-making. Manually cutting and assembling appropriated images from books and magazines, Steven carefully composes hallucinatory dreamscapes. While some invoke a dystopian vision that is nightmarish and Kafkaesque, almost all are underpinned by an absurdist and irreverent sense of humour.

The Formless Irregular rewards the viewer with an unfolding flow of associations. Works such as the Fellini trilogy reprocess images from the historical trajectory of photography to reflect a vision of the world that is both seductive and chaotic, a theatre of the absurd. Echoing the rich visual texture of Fellini's films they constitute a visual stream of consciousness, where dancers merge with animals and musicians, and August Sander's Weimar era chef regards us in stoic silence. As with most of the works in the exhibition, there are few options from which to escape from the dense proliferation of images that occasionally open onto architectural vistas, both claustrophobic and all-encompasing.

In The Great Ecstacy Of The Basic Corrupt for example, industrial architecture is turned into a totalitarian edifice. Rows of uniformed personnel stand to attention, dwarfed by the maze-like geometry of the architecture, manifesting a disquieting alliance between the corporate and the militaristic. In Another Boy for Jesus architecture forms part of a suffocating, claustrophobic mindscape. Entrapment, anger and mortality are only just held at bay by an absurd and uneasy sense of humour.

Through the use of displacement and disruption the works in The Formless Irregular puncture the codes of control. In detaching and reconstituting fragments from previously existing narrative streams these images elude fixed meaning. Combined with an acute sense of play, chance, and association, they constitute a visionary antidote to the normalising drive of our image-saturated and advertising obsessed digital landscape. As such The Formless Irregular not only embodies Steven Stapleton's extensive creative output, but through playful subversion celebrates the liberating potential of image making.

Conor McGrady is an artist who lives and works in Co. Clare, Ireland.

From the postcard:

Steven Stapleton aka "Babs Santini" is one of the pioneers of the British industrial music scene.

Internationally recognised through his pioneering experiments in sound with avant-garde band Nurse With Wound, Steven is an acclaimed visual artist who has worked across multiple media. This show brings together his work in collage and assemblage in a dynamic gallery installation. As his first major solo exhibition here in Dublin, it provides a rare opportunity to experience Stapleton's multideimensional approach to visual art, which complements and expands his extensive body of work in sonic experimentation.