Niamh McCann is an Irish artist living and working in Dublin. A graduate of Chelsea College of Art & Design, London, McCann has exhibited extensively in Europe, Ireland and in the USA employing a variety of working methods from drawing to sculpture. Solo projects include: <<EME, Pallas Heights, Dublin (2004) and Total Eclipse of …, Planet 22, Geneva, Switzerland (2001).
Previous exhibitions have included: Transmediale – Berlin Kurfürstendamm, (Public Arts Fest. Berlin, Germany 2004), Come In - Vienna International Apartment, (Austria, 2003), Appropriation - Ormeau Baths Gallery, (Belfast, 2002), EV+A – Limerick City Gallery (Limerick, 2001/2), Perspective 2000 – Ormeau Baths Gallery (Belfast, 2000) Dopplarity - Bank Underground Station (2000, as organiser/ curator as well as exhibitor). McCann was recipient of the Perspective 2000 Absolut Exhibition award, the EV+A 2002, travel award and will be participating in an exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art, Turku, Finland in 2005.

 

Niamh McCann - Surface Tension

Rachael Thomas
Senior Curator; Head of Exhibitions, Irish Museum of Modern Art

‘The social subject itself seems to dissolve in this dissemination of language games. The social bond is linguistic, but it is not woven with a single thread. It is a fabric formed by the intersection of at least two (and in reality an indeterminate number) of language games, obeying different rules’.
Jean-François Lyotard .

If the apparent horizon is our evaluation of the landscape in which we live, the known sphere around which we discover our place within the world, then Niamh McCann’s installation, EME, 2004, at Pallas Heights undermines this proven principle, and invites a re-consideration of our relationship to the world around us.
Historically, the concept of landscape has countless been said to depict the human encounter with nature, and is frequently associated with ‘sublime’ inspiration. Yet the works exhibited in EME are underscored by McCann’s personal narrative and history – therefore her encounter is the opposite of such intimations. No transcendental thrill or life enhancing moment is made manifest. Emotional attachment for Niamh McCann becomes a systematic template, connected to her reversion to the language of materialism that draws from the city’s visual culture and residential architecture. EME also uses the particular architecture of Pallas Heights as a framework to denote the assimilation of perception and understanding. Housed amongst local residents in the top floor of a semi-derelict apartment block awaiting demolition, Pallas Heights offers an alternative exhibition space that frames McCann’s installation. The dialogue here is re-enforced in a highly politicised manner, which in turn generates questions of the place and role of art, and its relation to the social and political context of Pallas Heights.
Silently seductive, Untold Horizon 1, 2004, suggests a dialogue between its harsh domestic gloss surface and the conceptual interrogation advanced by the installation. On entering the space we see a false wall within the first room of the flat. From floor to ceiling a large wooden ‘A’ frame wraps sinuously around the architecture. With its blue linear tones striped along the surface, this work appears coldly detached from its surroundings, creating a palpable tension within the space. The salvaged graphic industrial white neon symbol on the side of the work has the radiant glow of cheap commodity, yet our attraction to it is evident as we’re transfixed by its slick beauty. McCann’s references are from intuition and imagination, which she intercuts to memories of clichéd tourist and commodity signs all evoking complex discourses between representation and the real. She also playfully explores the complexities of surface in which diverse narratives and visual language collide; slipping in and out of identifiable political and cultural affiliations. At once, the works serve as a custodian of the coded language and landscape of the city, bringing to mind Lyotards’s notions of language. For Lyotard, language functions as the operating dynamics of a culture, defining society and its ambiguity. Akin to his investigation of concealment and camouflage in our social landscape, McCann’s muti-media compositions also proffer a distinct approbation and survey of the world in which language constitutes part of our social selves. The mirrored surface of Untold Horizon 1 captures the viewers reflection, and in doing so suggests a concern with self, as well as a play with image, word and text that recalls Lyotard’s conception of language as constructing the social self. We see our own reflection in the acrylic and gloss paint and by default become part of McCann’s landscape. Arguably, her compositions generate their own spacial of perception and experience, creating a language that adapts the deft game of observation and veiling.
Analogous to McCann’s appropriation of cultural styles and symbols are the notions of travel and technology. At the beginning of this century ‘we can no longer be innocent of the understanding that technologies – and the question who has access to them – condition both what and how events are represented, signs ordered, theories articulated identies(re)produced ’. Niamh McCann’s practice derives from her own diverse travels and sense of place. Her work is a geographical metaphor for the ways in which travel and communication can be substituted for each other in a world which is each day increasingly becoming faster and easier to navigate.
The fact that there is no visual rest within installation space is underlined by the work Emergency Cut Short, 2004. This work consists of a wall drawing/painting located in the upstairs of the flat. With a punk sensibility that utilizes conceptual word-play, the wall is aggressively painted a rough unfinished white. Interposed within this are letters painted red in a hospital font, stating ‘emergen’ preceded by three graphic arrows. The work suggests a layered reading. We can just make out the spelling of the word ‘emergency’ yet uncertainty darkens our perception, the letters seeming to seep sideways into the wall and cut short, not spelling out the word in full. Does then, McCann suggests an urgency and if so, for what? Are we waiting for the unexpected? The surface in Emergency Cut Short suggests a pillaraging of meaning and a conflict of message.McCann’s previous work, NIC CISSALC, 2003, comissioned for the exhibition The Institute of potential, Art and Failure, Carlow, employs similar strategies of salvaging from the urban landscape. This installation consisted of an anagram of letters taken from a defunct cinema sign in Dublin. This re-ordering of letters into anagrams is a familiar device in her work. We see her enquiries as a dichotomy between her sources and the finished artwork, one which she constantly revisits in a self-reflexive enquiry into ontology. McCann creates a variety of motifs within her works, and in doing so constructs her own vocabulary with each motif having its own history. The surfaces of her landscapes become organic breathing entities. As they expand she captures the changing urbanisation of our environment and the resulting profound social values, exploring the shifting nature of attitudes to cities in an ever more globalised society.
The installation at Pallas Heights questions the credibility of surface in physical and actual form. This is done by McCann’s tools of choice; language, and the influence of particular cultural contexts. McCann penetrates social interactions with particular places, and in doing so, poetically and politically explores these ideas of the individual invisibly linked to the world and its will. EME is arranged as a dense network of relationships, a hybrid of international and localized cultural signage that suggests an increased complexity in understanding the local specificity, while also initiating visual strategies of anxiety and identity. Similarly, the Berlin based artist, Franz Ackermann creates a chain of developments, and in doing so creates a ‘meta-world’ from his travels that oscillates between topic and methodology. Contemporary graphic texts and signage specify the metropolitan reality, constituting an oblique geographical representation that can only be deciphered through a physical and mental journey undertaken by the artist. Both McCann’s and Ackermann’s practice involve the perception of the morphology of cities as centres of contact and exchange. Finding a way through our hi-tech, unstoppable global culture is both the methodology and the meaning in their work.
Niamh McCann’s works also refuse to settle down spatially and conceptually. They pulse between figure and ground, appearing submerged by the surface, threatening to break free into fictive space. Their surfaces seem to fulfill Jasper Johns's dictum: "Take an object, do something to it, do something else to it." In the process, the art object is momentarily threatened with utility only to "turn the tables". In this way McCann’s installations destabilizes the audience's expectations about art, especially when experienced in the venue of Pallas Heights. At once unmistakably powerfully eloquent, these works are ‘still lives with broken moments ’. Underpinning the whole exhibition EME, are questions relating to the definition of art, its poetic and political meaning, and its place within the present day. She beautifully captures the undercurrent of cultural and social contexts. Niamh McCann’s works are injected with a constant oscillation between fact and fiction, whilst opening up a surface tension of the possibilities of reality.