User:Mother's tankstation/sandbox

mother’s tankstation is one of the foremost contemporary art galleries established in Dublin, Ireland in 2006, it opened a second gallery located in London in 2017.

Gallery History:
mother’s tankstation is the creation of artist and former academic Finola Jones, who inaugurated the primary Dublin venue in January 2006 with the first solo exhibition of Irish-trained, Swedish artist, Nina Canell. The gallery is housed in a former industrial building in the historic Liberties’ area of Dublin and the ephemeral, installational nature of the first show, cased within the informal, irregular architecture of a small, renovated sausage factory, have become identifying characteristics of the gallery’s experimental strategies and programming. mother’s tankstation has become recognised for its ability to uncover and nurture emerging or under-recognised artists and has curated numerous debutational and early invitational shows of artists who have subsequently come to international prominence, including, Uri Aran, Nina Canell, Alex de Corte, Jessie Homer French, Cui Jie, Hannah Levy, Haroon Mirza, Yuko Mohri, Yuri Pattison, amongst others. Noted for the research ethos of the gallery website and its emphasis on the contextualising importance of documentative text, mother’s tankstation is the first Irish gallery or museum to host solo exhibitions of Chinese artists.

mother’s tankstation added a second space in london in October 2017, initially called ‘mother’s tankstation project’ and located in a temporary space in Holborn Viaduct, exhibitions included the first solo shows of Liu Chuang and Mairead O’hEocha in London. It hosted gallery Edouard Malingue, Hong Kong and Shanghai, for Condo London 2018. In 2019, mother’s tankstation London, relocated to a more permanent ground floor location in the busy gallery corridor of Bethnal Green’s Three Colts Lane.

Gallery Name:
The Dublin headquarter gallery of mother’s tankstation is located on the historic Watling Street stretches from the Watling Street Bridge over the River Liffey (see Liffey Swim), to the world famous St James Gate, and at the south east corner of the Guinness factory site. A window at the rear of the building which is now the gallery, overlooked vast sheds (according to the Guinness Book of Records, the largest in Europe), originally constructed from decorative cast iron in the 19th Century, to house barrels of Porter when it was still casked in wood. Subsequently demolished in the early 2000’s, prior to the opening of the gallery, the view was then dominated by an arc of large Victorian iron lettering that spelt ‘TANKSTATION No.2’. and was adopted by the gallery in 2006 as part of its name, to memorialise the demolition of grand industrial revolution architecture, and celebrate the legacy of its location. The designation; ‘mother’s’, is derived from a popular, traditional restaurant and diner in New Orleans, famed (amongst other claimants) for the possible, inadvertent, invention of the ‘Po-boy’ - a meat sandwich made from ‘debris’, fallen meat scraps and juices, captured from larger expensive roasts during carving. The Po-boy became recognised as a dietary staple of the less-well-off (those who could not afford roast dinners), during the American depression of the 1920’s, and thus fused with the branding concept; ‘tankstation’, the combination of mother’s tankstation obliquely suggests shelter and sustenance.

Selected exhibitions:
Nina Canell, We Woke up with Energy, 2006 Mairead O’hEocha, Home Rules, 2008 Noel McKenna, Northland, 2008 Michael Snow, So is This, 2009 Atsushi Kaga, Bunny’s Darkness and other Stories, 2009 Uri Aran, Doctor Dog Sandwich, 2010 Haroon Mirza, Anthemoessa, 2010 Nevin Aladag, City Language, 2012 Alex de Corte, A Season in He’ll, 2012 Lee Kit, Please Wait, 2015 Cui Jie, Latter, Former, 2016 Maria Farrar, Straits, 2017 Liu Chuang, Special Economy Zone, 2018 Hannah Levy, Panic Hardware, 2018 Jessie Homer French, Paintings 1978-2018, 2019 Prudence Flint, The Visit, 2019 Yuko Mohri, slower than slowly, 2019 Yuri Pattison, to do, doing, done , 2019