David Diviney
David Diviney

David Diviney
Hollow

Saturday September 9 to Saturday, October 14, 2006
Opening reception: Friday, September 8 at 8:00 pm
Artist’s Talk: Saturday, September 9 at 2:00 pm

Diviney’s recent installations find connections between the structures of our cultural allegories and the material language of sculpture. His work—loosely based in traditions of assemblage, additive/subtractive construction and found objects—locates
a unique connotative resonance in banal, yet oddly iconographic materials and objects.

Hollow presents a sculptural and photographic array that draws on a decidedly pastoral vernacular of folk-art and back-woods building, pioneer tales and foundational myths. Comprised of familiar household and consumer products—socks, balaclavas, buckets and low-grade renovation supplies—Diviney’s installation detects an uncanny, humourous, and at times menacing subtext to our often-ignored, gentrified surroundings. His objects and appropriated imagery illicit both the pleasures and pitfalls of the survivalist imagination, the can-do spirit of frontier ingenuity and the deeply psychological weight of physical isolation. As such, Hollow conflates our typical lexicons of the rural, creating a perceptually baffling environment that speaks to the ever-evolving barter between civilization and wilderness, community and self-reliance, as well as the continuing weight of this discourse on the popular imagination.

Using sculptural tools, Diviney objects suggest narrative and parodic structures that reference the North American gothic of hillbilly tales, cabin fever and camping horror stories, without ever losing touch of the distinct “thingness” of his creations. Like our built environments, his story-lines are often in a state of entropy, awaiting repair. His objects serve both literally and figuratively as hollows of meaning, collectively formulating one’s experience in the gallery space.

DAVID DIVINEY received a MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1998. He has shown his work in recent exhibitions at Stride Gallery (Calgary), AXENÉO7 (Gatineau), Ottawa Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Calgary, Edmonton Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff), Listasafn ASÍ (Reykjavík) and Galerie Wildwechsel (Frankfurt). He has worked as Director of eyelevel gallery in Halifax, Assistant Curator of the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge and has taught at the Alberta College of Art and Design, University of Lethbridge, Thompson Rivers University and Sheridan Institute of Technology. He currently lives in Kamloops, British Columbia.