Mariah Garnett: Other & Father / Niamh McCann: La Perruque / Helen O’Leary: The Shelf Life of Facts

February 2016 sees the launch of three newly commissioned solo exhibitions for the MAC’s gallery spaces from artists Mariah Garnett, Niamh McCann and Helen O’Leary.

Mariah Garnett: Other & Father

The MAC is proud to be presenting the first solo exhibition in the UK and Ireland of work by LA-based artist Mariah Garnett.

Garnett mixes documentary, narrative and experimental filmmaking practices to make work that accesses existing people and communities beyond her immediate experience. This exhibition is the first iteration of a large-scale moving image work that will unfold over the next few years that explores Garnett’s new relationship with her estranged father who originally hails from Belfast. Using a variety of strategies, the artist explores ideas of representation, the construction of memory and family lore, and the parallels in the ways cities—particularly those affected by conflict—shape their own histories, mythologies and identities.

In this work Garnett explores, unravels and reinterprets personal and political histories carved out in a city over forty years ago, highlighting the infallibility of both private and public memory, whilst also superimposing her own queer experience onto a place which to her is both familiar and strange.

A new limited edition artwork accompanies this exhibition.
www.mariahgarnett.com


Niamh McCann: La Perruque

This project marks the first solo presentation of work in Northern Ireland by Dublin-based artist Niamh McCann.

McCann works by drawing together many different reference points and distilling them into a kind of sculptural poetry. Her most recent works have found creative play in the study of the life and times of a lesser-established Bauhaus architect Hans Poelzig (1869-1936). This exhibition looks in particular at the architect’s design and development of Frankfurt’s IG Farben building, his involvement in the production of the iconic film Der Golem, and further cinematic links to his life and work.

The artist unites varied influences and historical touchstones 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. These works attest to McCann’s interest in the interweaving of fact and fiction, and the overlapping layers of narrative, history and fable that are contained within the cultural and physical structures that we construct around us.

A new limited edition artwork accompanies this exhibition.
www.niamhmccann.com


Helen O’Leary: The Shelf Life of Facts

This exhibition takes the form of a new site-specific commission for our Upper Gallery by New York-based artist Helen O’Leary.

O’Leary’s work in painting draws on her Irish background, and explores with deftness, rigor and craft, the idea of origin, of how everything we subsequently become has been framed by the visual, cultural, moral and emotional lines of definition that are drawn around our formative childhood worlds.

Contained within the gallery space is a series of large scale “history” paintings made from thwarted joinery, armatures, insets and shelves that both display all of their components and continually rebuild and reframe their own structure and meaning. The artist’s painterly explorations are located between moments of material and emotional certainty. They both laugh at and question the structural prosthesis of conventions that are established through economic, cultural and gender constraints. This new work concerns itself with the uncertainty present in any economic downturn or change, between youth and middle age, and in the rupture between external and internal life.

www.helenoleary.com


For further information please contact Maeve Hawkins, Marketing Manager at maeve [​at​] themaclive.com.