Artist

Niamh McCann

Niamh McCann's diverse and playful practice, which includes sculpture, installation, painting and video, explores philosophical riddles/conundrums through seemingly random visual juxtapositions and spatial relationships, looking toward themes of travel, globalization and urbanization within very particular social and political contexts.

Using everyday objects and images from the contemporary urban environment, McCann makes visible poetry of chance connections, whimsy and paradox.  McCann works with found materials, industrial processes and situations - given logos, re-appropriated signs, newspaper montages - that she alters and then reconfigures to create works as alternates scenarios or landscapes to question the quotidian means.  Physically, many of McCann's pieces capture the viewer's reflection suggesting a concern with self, as well as a play on image, word and text.  The artist builds compositions, which generate their own spatial perception and experience, creating a language that adapts the deft game of observation and veiling.

Materially and physically McCann's pieces are silently seductive.  The works combine harsh domestic gloss surface with mirror panels.  Created neon works have the radiant glow of cheap commodity  yet attract with their slick beauty.  McCann splices together references from intuition and imagination with memories of clichéd tourist and urban signs, all evoking complex discourse of representation and the real.  The artist also plays with the complexities of surface in which diverse narratives and visual codes collide, slipping in and out of identifiable political and cultural affiliations.

• Niamh McCann
• Snippet (2006)
• Mirror panels, wood support, freestanding neon letters with frame

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