Hi my name is Ian

I hope this finds you all well. As requested, here's a brief introduction...

The grandchild of Italian and Scottish/English immigrants, I was raised in the US - Richmond, VA by way of parents from Wisconsin and Connecticut. Identifying in some ways as an itinerant intellectual, I decided at 18 to move to Dublin, Ireland - not to reconnect with roots or Irish heritage (of which I had none) but rather to have a lived educational experience as part of one of the most dramatic socio-economic periods in recent history - the rise & fall of the Celtic Tiger.

My undergraduate degree was in Archaeology and Ancient History at Trinity College Dublin augmented with a healthy amount of student theatre and photo-journalism, and as I decided to embark on a PhD career studying the power of the past in contemporary socio-political discourses, I also was fortunate to pick up a part-time job as an invigilator and installer at the Douglas Hyde Gallery.

While I interrogated the role of cultural objects in Irish psycho-social discourse, I received a practical crash course in contemporary art theory and practice with some of the world's most renowned contemporary artists. As I shared my misgivings about the reductive and authoritarian role of museums, archaeologists and curators, artists whose work I was installing introduced me to Duchamp and the Dadaists and the Surrealists. I became fascinated with how modern art could produce decisive criticism of essentialist and positivist interpretations of objects/images, while over the 20th century archaeology and anthropology seemed to have developed a disciplinary structure immune to these critiques. Simply put, while art became subjective, conceptual and post-object, social sciences became increasingly object-oriented and Cartesian.

Both art and archaeology deal in things, relationality, process and mediation, and through my PhD, I began to research the roots of this schism, exploring both a shared history in the predisciplinary work of early antiquarians and the impact of technological process on the development of distinct disciplines with distinct intellectual agendas and trajectories.

During the deinstallation of the artist Kathy Prendergast's work 'A Dream of Discipline' (1989/2006) which consisted of a pile of white chalk obfuscating its internal architecture of a wooden plinth to effect the appearance of an archaeological cairn, something clicked. I was fascinated by the exacting, painstaking methods deployed to construct precise architectures and placements to execute abstract artistic gestures and statements, and I wondered whether archaeological process was no less constructed and affected. I wanted to locate my practice at this point of intersection - of contemporary creativity, mediation of constructions of relationality, materiality and temporality. Thus began a career in curation...

Since 2006, I have been working as a curator and a researcher. I've been fortunate to work in a number of scenarios from galleries to museums to sculpture parks to site-specific and site-responsive projects in Ireland, UK and the United States. Broadly interested in the creative mediation and recalibration of contemporary temporal and social relations through the activation of historical contexts and deposits, I have strived to open 'heritage' spaces or spaces with perceived 'stopped time' to artistic activation and intervention.

Currently I ama fellow at Brown University in Public Art and Cultural Heritage, and I am working on a series of collaborative projects between Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design. Intellectualy, I am working on articulating a theme within contemporary artistic practice (site-responsive arts practice in particular) which I am describing as contemporary antiquarianism.

Some notable projects:
2011 - Dennis McNulty @ Brown University
2010 - Nigel Rolfe @ Sculpture in the Parklands
         - Roadscore @ Brown University
2009 - Clanbrassil Street 'Zines by Sean Lynch
         - The Home Project by Ursula Rani Sarma
         - One & Other
         - Camera Obscura with National College of Art & Design
2008 - The You That Is In It @ Irish Museum of Modern Art
         - Chronoscope with the Green On Red Gallery
         - Glass House Stone @ UCD
         - Abhar agus Meon Exhibition Series
2006-present - IRAC