* new location: Arch 16, Eastvale Place, off Kelvinhaugh St. Glasgow.
Preview: Saturday 18 April, 6-8pm
Dawson City follows the artist's residency in January 2008 in Dawson City, located in the Yukon, one of the furthest North Western reaches of Canada.
The works in this exhibition, produced during this stay evoke and explore the nature of existence as the participant and as the observer, conscious of and privy to the myth and metamorphosis of a city buried beneath the snow.
The works in the exhibition suggest the processes of simulacrum, misrecognition, metamorphosis, mimesis and entropy and the psychological repercussions of all these different forms of transformation, all key themes of the artists practice.
These processes have a direct connection to an acknowledgment of the absurdity of the human condition and its manifestations through humour and psychosexual conundrums. In addition we are witness to a relationship to nature and animals through anthropomorphic recognition and their own relationship to mortality and existence, as well as what ultimately emerges as our own. In this way we see the commonality of our precarious relationship to life often accompanied by a recourse to myth, storytelling and legend.
Each of the works in this exhibition are to a greater or lesser extent sculptural stories wherein process takes premise over product. In questioning the state of things Niven questions the stories and laws that bind them and in doing so disturbs the boundary between the past and the present and the animate and the inanimate, the dead and the living, whilst doing so both curiously writing a personal history as well as inviting a public glance.
opening Saturday 18th April 6-8 pm.
open Thursday - Saturday 12-5 pm.
www.tentilten.co.uk
Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201
