A year out

In her studio space at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in nearby Long Island City, it soon became apparent that this is more than a brightly lit painting. Video footage is projected onto the canvass. The branches and leaves react to a mild breeze. Then a couple of birds fly by.
“Just a slight movement completely changes how you look at something,” O’Malley said.
The viewer is looking, but waiting too.
The artist had shot hours of film in Sunnyside, which she was editing down to a two-minute loop. There had been a clear sky that day, so its gray clouds are among the elements she painted onto the canvass.
The 29-year-old County Mayo native will show this and other works at an exhibition at Dublin’s Green on Red gallery when she returns home at summer’s end, having completed a year-long prestigious fellowship under the PS1 International Studio Program.
There are 13 participants from East Asia and Europe in the 2003-4 session, which is to be last of a program that began in 1976.
“Niamh fitted in extremely well,” said Josh Altman, PS1’s studio program coordinator. “She’s a great person to deal with. She’s highly educated. She gave tours and was a great resource for the museum.
Altman added: “She’s a very interesting artist. She spends a lot of time with her work, spending hours on the minutiae and the detail. That’s very refreshing nowadays.”
“It’s been great,” O’Malley said of her year in New York City.
“I feel privileged to have that amount of time to concentrate on my work and to focus and to meet people,” she said.
She’s one of a small elite group of Irish-based artists who can be said to be full-time. But typically it’s a precarious existence living from grant to grant and fellowship to fellowship.
So a residency that awarded a living wage, the use of an Irish government-owned apartment and a spacious PS1 studio in the cutting-edge museum, which is set against the Manhattan skyline, became a much coveted one.
Under the program, each country’s arts council, or equivalent body, submitted a short list of artists from which a PS1 jury in New York selected one
O’Malley, the eldest of six children of a primary school teacher and a farmer, can never remember wanting ever to do anything other than be an artist.
“That’s all I was ever going to do; that’s what I was good at.
“They always encouraged us,” she said of her parents who live a few miles from Crossmolina.
O’Malley’s sister Anne Marie sings with the band Grada, which is now on a world tour. One brother has just started film school in Dun Laoghaire; another is a landscape gardener.
“My father drove me to every art college in the country and I had to decide which one to go to,” she recalled.
Ultimately, Belfast was to be home base for a decade. After graduating from the University of Ulster, she worked for two years in an artist-run gallery, Catalyst Arts.
“Some very good work is going on there,” O’Malley said of the art scene in Belfast. (Northern Ireland was a participant along with the Republic in the PS1 program for many years, but pulled out more recently.)
Last year, at just 28, she completed her doctorate with the University of Ulster.
O’Malley also had a previous year-long fellowship at the British School in Rome.
“Rome has a very different energy than New York,” she said.
That residency took place in a communal and academic setting. In New York, she’s been free to come and go as she pleases. “There’s no obligation to be here,” O’Malley said. There is 24-hour access to the PS1 premises, and she works sometimes in her studio in the evening and on weekends.
“It’s been very busy, working hard and playing hard – a very intense year, as it should be in New York. It has that energy,” she said. “I didn’t want to hide away, spend all year in the studio, that would defeat the purpose.”
Despite its fine museums, Western Queens has not taken off as a center for artists as once predicted, but O’Malley relishes the atmosphere provided by Sunnyside’s extraordinary ethnic and racial mix.
“A lot of people have just arrived; there’s a sense of that on the trains,” she said.
O’Malley has spent a lot of her free time exploring the galleries of Chelsea, Soho and elsewhere.
And much of her social life has revolved around exhibition openings. “It’s part of the life that you go you meet people through that and have conversations through that,” she said.
The 13 foreign artists had their own opening to organize — “Visa for Thirteen,” which portrayed their experiences as foreigners in New York City.
“There was a very good rapport between the artists this year,” said Altman.
The artists – who were from O’Malley’s age through to their late 40s – worked together on several projects, including two newspapers.
O’Malley was intrigued by the art of her Taiwanese, Korean and Japanese colleagues. “You don’t get to see that work in Europe,” she said. But it was with the German and Italian artists that she formed particularly close friendships. The three are working on projects together and have plans to meet in Berlin soon.
The 13 raised the issue of the ending of the program in one of their papers. Reduced PS1 funding and support made it much less attractive to the participating governments and foundations and they all withdrew.
Altman said that PS1 is working on a new program. “We’re not exactly sure what the guidelines will be yet,” he said.
The 13 artists’ collective exhibition, which showed at PS1 through the month of May, was something new, in terms of exposure, for O’Malley.
“An audience for an opening could be up to 3-4,000 and the audience here weekly is 2,000,” she said.
“It’s a learned audience; they know what they’re looking at,” she said. “There’s no need for masses of explanation; they can take it on.”
O’Malley submission to the PS1 show also involved a video projection onto painted canvass.
She filmed hours of footage in Central Park that was, as she’s been doing with the Sunnyside work, distilled to a short two-minute loop.
She likes that it could be as easily St. Stephen’s Green or Phoenix Park in Dublin or Brooklyn’s Prospect Park or indeed anywhere.
For the work, O’Malley returned to a recurring theme – the interaction of people with landscape.
She’s written that the Central Park piece is about the “broader history of public leisure spaces.”
But O’Malley, who was preoccupied with her doctorate before she came to New York, has mixed feelings about theorizing. “In the visual arts, it’s contradictory in some ways to give a big spiel,” she said.
O’Malley wrote her thesis in Dublin, where her boyfriend lives. She had little opportunity then to explore a city she barely knows. “I have to get to know it, which is nice,” she said.
She’ll throw herself into work on the upcoming exhibition, and there’s a strong possibility of a six-week fellowship in Shanghai in early 2005.
These projects, though, will take place against the backdrop of a very special year.
“I love New York; it’s absolutely amazing,” O’Malley said. “I’d love to stay here.”