ART-PRESENTATION: Niamh McCann-La Perruque

Niamh McCann is an Irish Artist living and working in Dublin. 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.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: The MAC Archive

For her solo exhibition “La Perruque”, Niamh McCann works by drawing together many different reference points and distilling them into a kind of sculptural poetry. References include photos of the 1969 moon landings with the Copernicus crater as a backdrop, advertising images of Aer Lingus (the national airline of Ireland founded on 15/4/36) from the ‘50s and ‘60s, and the work of engineering pioneer Buckminister Fuller. Her most recent works have found creative play in the study of the life and times of a lesser established Bauhaus architect, Hans Poelzig, celebrated in the 1934 Hollywood horror movie “The Black Cat” and whose character was played by Boris Karloff. Hans Poelzig is best known for the design of Frankfurt’s IG Farben building and the sets for the iconic film Der Golem. The Poelzig Complex/IG Farben HQ building is now used by the Goethe University in Frankfurt, and was for 20 years Europe’s largest office building. It is also the nexus of many historical threads from the production of the deadly Zyklon B to the writing of The Marshall Plan. Suddenly we are into the layered adaptation and appropriation of a romanticised version of a half imaginary, half real contributor to early modernism. This exhibition unites these disparate influences by exploring the idealism they represented in their original incarnations and the ways in which, over time, they have become overlaid with different narratives, stories and meanings. McCann’s interest is in this interweaving of fact and fiction, the overlapping layers of narrative, history and fable that are contained within the cultural and physical structures that we construct.

Info: The MAC (Metropolitan Arts Centre), 10 Exchange Street West, Belfast, Duration: 5/2-24/4/16, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-19:00, https://themaclive.com