Under the Feet of Shadows

CIACLA is a proud presenting partner of Under The Feet of Shadows which will open in MART Gallery Dublin on 14th September 2024, following this an iteration of the exhibition will come to Los Angeles in 2025 with the support of CIACLA.

Under the Feet of Shadows is a multimedia artwork developed by EL Putnam and Mike McCormack that creatively explores human-technological relations, speculating other futures in these times of extreme change and crisis. It tells a fictional origin myth of a data center in Kilalla, Ireland, where the cyborg Terra is called upon to negotiate between the spiritus of technology, the environment, and human society as an entangled ecology. The work merges science fiction with folklore, imagined and actual mythologies with histories of technology in Ireland.

This exhibition kindly supported by The Arts Council of Ireland, MART Gallery, and CIACLA.

EL Putnam is an artist-philosopher working in performance art, video, sound, and digital media. Her practice focuses on borders and entanglements, particularly the interplay of the corporeal with the machinic. Through her artistic practice, she is interested in exploring hidden histories and emotional experiences, testing the limits of their un-representability as she takes the familiar and makes it strange. In particular, she probes our gestural relationship to digital technology using wearable electronics in live performance, through the creation of responsive multimedia installations, and the crafting of short moving image and sound pieces. Treating art as inherently participatory, her work opens intersubjective spaces that offer multiple conceptual and aesthetic points of entry for the audience through alchemical diffractions of experience, cultivating new modes of embodiment. In addition to creating works that are rich in cultural and political meaning, including the biopolitics of motherhood in Ireland, she is interested in how aesthetic pleasure can be used as a critical strategy, or as a means of captivating audiences in order to expose them to provocative ideas. EL actively presents artworks and performances in the United States, Europe, and beyond, and has been a member of the Boston-based Mobius Artists Group since 2009. Originally from the United States, she is Assistant Professor in Digital Media at Maynooth University, Ireland and lives in Co. Westmeath, Ireland. http://www.elputnam.com