CineSalon is pleased to announce the third CineSalon Online Artist: Aisling O Connell. Each year, CineSalon Online streams programmes of film works by six featured artists. Each programme is available to view free and worldwide for two months. This complete retrospective programme of O Connell’s films is online until June 1st 2025.

Aisling is a Cork City based artist, working mainly with film, performance, text and paint. The existence of her uncompromisingly raw outsider work, which not only conjures a personal universe but forges an equally personal film language to express it with haunting force, was a major inspiration behind starting CineSalon. If even one artist of her calibre and autonomy is working in Cork, it makes a Cork-based platform for celebrating such work necessary. We are therefore especially delighted to be sharing her work not only with local viewers but with online audiences worldwide.

In her words:

In 2015 I saw Patrick Jolley’s film The Door Ajar in The Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.

At the time, I was living alone with my children, an outsider to the gallery space. I had no context to explain this experience, it stayed wrapped up silently in that glorious encounter.

The film and the gallery had an inaccessibility and a recognition that committed me to the development of my own visual language.

However saturated with mothering, small relationships, small spaces and domesticity the work can get, the feeling of being an outsider within these experiences is greater.

I hope this peripheral view lends itself to the experimental nature of my work and processes.

I am interested in an active, working, moving image. The editing process is physical and spontaneous, and often there is an urgency to the whole thing.

I am very interested in the notion of the encounter, the body in protest, the body in reconciliation and the body rooted in material.

My work is often a personal interpretation of marginalisation, social isolation and compulsive behaviours.

I am currently working on two longer film pieces, Angel and FutureKing, which I hope will encompass all these things that are important to the work.

Identity (2018)

Early attempts at filmed performance or action using an overhead projector.

Beach (2018), House (2018), Bluebeards Breakfast (2018)

Excerpts of performance-based work, fuelled by violent misogyny, also claiming at the time to be loosely inspired by Angela Carter, The Twits (Roald Dahl), the absurd and the tragic.

The Last Indulgence (2018)

Should have been called the first indulgence. An exploration of material-based editing with paint and a projector. 

Shoot (2018), Which Side Are You On Boys (2018)

Excerpts of performance-based work, rooted in the idea of protest and radicalism, or a futile attempt at.

The gun has gone to ground (2019)

An exploration of mythology, masculinity and materiality, inspired by Valie Export’s Genital Panic, Joseph Beuys and Mircea Eliade’s The Forge and The Crucible.

Legislator (2019)

My first successful spell.

Sodomy Sunday (2019)

A film for anyone who has ever experienced a Sodomy Sunday, which can sometimes last for weeks, months or years without mercy.

Wheel (2020)

Made objects, which had many iterations including reproductive systems, capitalist systems, life and death.

No Small Spoons (2020)

A reflection on social isolation, social rejection and addiction.

Water or Milk (2020)

Part origin story, part view from a room, that nightmarish quality that permeates a ‘home’ from within.

The Heartbreak Diet (2022)

For all the proper pieces of shit out there, The Heartbreak Diet. The idea of your home capital, your intrinsic worth and all your shitty consequence. A personal excavation of worth, value, production and work in the home and in relationships. An attempt at elaborating on the idea of ‘home capital’. A description of an unsettling, habitual attempt at existing within a traditional family unit, the borders always frayed and always exhausted. The protagonist’s participation in The Heartbreak Diet is a completely personal compulsion. This somehow gives way to a lawless, cunning and deeply consequential state of affairs, a real appetite for destruction. It could feel like anything from a tearing in the heart, or a means to an end. Something about a smallness, and what is produced from this.

Chase (2023)

Chase began as a mediation on whether or not to euthanise an aggressive dog, but ended up as another POV, this time rooted in pre- and post-partum depression and psychosis.

121 (collaboration with Maximilian Le Cain, 2020)

A collaborative piece, where rogue footage was expelled and exchanged between myself and Maximilian Le Cain.

CineSalon is thrilled to announce the second CineSalon Online Artist: Joey Huertas, an experimental film artist responsible for creating a unique breed of personal cinema, live performance, spoken word and short stories that he calls Docufessional. He is inspired by the diarist aesthetics of confessional poets, and works reclusively alone handwriting, shooting, editing and scoring all of his work. His cinematic expression takes many forms, including stories arranged by imagined biographies of fictitious persons, subconscious diaries, collections of found anonymous photographs, sound recordings, drawings and text decompositions. This programme showcases many facets of his work, not only films but also spoken word and live performance. Critics have cited his work as representing a new form of transgressive fictional biography. Joey describes his work as psychological autopsies of clinical fiction. Joey is also a clinical forensic social worker. His official website is janepublic.com

Each year, CineSalon Online streams programmes of film works by six featured artists. Each programme is available to view free and worldwide for two months. The following programme will be available to stream until March 15th 2025:

GIRLSTORIES An Afterschool Special (2015)

The GIRLSTORIES case-study trilogy reveals a diversity of problems adolescent females have in society when faced with misunderstood mental health issues. The 1980s Afterschool Special Television Series helped kids come to terms with difficult problems. Two decades later, these problems are now explored in an experimental and avant-garde setting. The film is a trilogy of shorts and is narrated in ASL, American Sign Language and is close captioned for the hearing impaired.

D-Blok Snag (1995)

A 16mm land art film that examines the poverty of a residential block in the South Bronx.

Episode (1996)

An optically printed 16mm film that explores the relationship of inherited mental illness between parent and child, specifically Manic Depression.

"I really think it's a Black White incident ... " (2003)

A shocking and provocative case study straddling issues of racism, anti-semitism and elder abuse that is based on true events. The film uses hearing aid recording devices and video surveillance cameras to tell the story.

Lines of Resolution (2023)

A spoken word video, written, read and performed by the artist. The story describes the discrimination and hatred that exists between film purists and video artists. The story uses Roma Gypsy travelers and the 70's punk rock movement as metaphor for 'rejection' in outsider communities. The story was originally published for print in The Millennium Film Journal magazine. 

The Colors of Spring

Documentation of an 'Expanded Cinema' dual film projection and a live poem reading of The Colors of Spring written and performed by Joey Huertas.  A love story about a psychiatrist and social worker who rent a romantic cabin in the woods, but are too emotionally damaged to communicate with each other outside of love making.

CineSalon is thrilled to announce the launch of the CineSalon Online Artist Programme. Each year, CineSalon will stream programmes of film works by six featured artists. Each programme will be available to view free and worldwide for two months.

The first CineSalon Online Artist is Katie Gerardine O’Neill, a multitalented legend of Irish underground art. Based in Dublin, O’Neill works with analogue photography, moving image, digital imagery, sound-collage, writing, performance and more. Her practice is experimental and plays with tangible materials and metaphysical ideas: the unconscious, the void, the idea of a self. Her work touches upon the uncanny, the sublime, and teeters along the imaginary in an attempt to forge a new reality in the midst of absurdity. Her work could be described as a hand reaching out from inside a flower that is engulfed in flames; attempting to grasp the fleeting hand of the Other, unsure of how the gesture will be received. O’Neill is influenced by the Dada and Surrealist movements, punk and no-wave, Psychoanalysis, Beckett, and Buddhism.

The following programme will be available to stream until January 15th 2025:

I Drift like a Wave on the Ocean (2024)

An audio-visual poem made from eco hand-developed 35mm film images collaged with music by the artist inspired by Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching.

Memento Mori (2020)

Through tableaux, disembodied noise and an opaque weaving together of past and present, we bear witness to a historical retelling situated in an era where nothing is quite what it seems.

Message Green (2020)

An audio-visual poem, exploring the profundity of nature, the necessity of solitude, and the importance of being in touch with one’s inner voice.

Sinthome (2023)

"I speak without knowing it. I speak with my body, and I do so unbeknownst to myself. Thus, I always say more than I know." - Jacques Lacan.

Dream (2022)

An audio-visual poem assembled from hand-developed 35mm film images collaged with music by the artist.

Le Rêve éveillé des Nouilles (2019)

A magical grey cat dozes off in the summer's heat and remembers her strange journey...