NIAMH McCANN
JUST LEFT OF COPERNICUS National Tour
Just Left of Copernicus (Roof of the Story)
VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow, Ireland
03 October 2015 – 03 January 2016
visualcarlow.ie
Just Left of Copernicus (A Prologue)
Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick
21 January – 24 March 2016
gallery.limerick.ie
Just Left of Copernicus (The Pastoral)
Solstice Arts Centre, Navan, Co. Meath
01 September – 21 October 2016
solsticeartscentre.ie
Niamh McCann’s practice looks to the visual cultural landscape to invite a reconsideration of our relationship to the world around us, questioning how this world constitutes us as subjects, and how we, in turn, give this world form. As an artist, her exploration of these themes takes the form of concise multi-media work, presented within larger installations and site-responsive pieces.
McCann has been collaborating uniquely and extensively with Limerick architects Jack Byrne and Séamus Bairead in the development of a new large scale structure/object. This aspiring structure/object, entitled Copernicus for Now, is made of industrially produced cardboard tubes and plywood. Copernicus for Now emerged from a previous piece by the artist entitled Occupy that referenced a section of background landscape in the infamous photograph of Armstrong on the moon, and created that horizon line as a series of interlocking pentagons. Here McCann references the aspirational moment that allowed this event to take place, its cultural (near fictional) potency as image, and the ideas contained within B. Fuller’s ‘Spaceship Earth’ (hence the use of pentagon as reference to the geodesic). Copernicus for Now is both object and event, a crater-like landscape for visitors to occupy and events to take place.
The interchange and flow of fact and fiction, and the overlapping layers of history and fable within the work of German architect Hans Poelzig is of particular interest to McCann. Poelzig is perhaps best known for his design and build of the Poelzig Building (IG Farben building) in Frankfurt, Germany, a site of dramatic historic 20th century importance. Poelzig was also a painter and scenographer. Edgar Ulmer, film director, cited Poelzig as a mentor and claimed that they worked together on The Golem: How He Came Into the World (1920). Ulmer subsequently honoured Hans Poelzig as nom de guerre of main villain Hjalmar Poelzig in Ulmer’s 1934 film ‘The Black Cat’.
The changing subtitles of Just Left of Copernicus in each gallery throughout its national tour reflect a changing site-specific manifestation within each reiteration that will also comprise of archival material, wall drawings, process-based work and smaller, more concise, sculptural pieces.