We are excited to present Niall McClelland’s first solo show with the gallery. We included him in a group show just over a year ago and loved the work. His solo show “One Tune Outta Turn”, contains a collection of new drawings and paintings that focus on coaxing graphically forceful imagery from roughed-up, workaday media. The violence and destructiveness of disaffected youth is channeled in to a constructive and formalized violence. The studio practice of smashing and breaking glass resonates and recalls misdirected anger and chaos, while the folded photocopies reference more productive ends of the culture nodding to zines, gig posters and D.I.Y mentality.
The works in the show include a series of laboriously folded photocopies called No Maps. His previous folded works have all seemed to have a center or a guiding principal of organization whereas these new pieces feel chaotic and extremely subtle. There is not a map, a reason to be, a reference in these pieces, they are what we bring to them. McClelland takes away the easy definition of what these might portray by calling the works No Maps 1-5. The folded paper pieces can be interpreted as gliding energy in a vast cosmos, or a detail on a fleck of dust or as only remnants of process and labor. However they are interpreted they are much more open ended that his previous pieces.
The other works included in the show are made by breaking glass on canvas and using the glass as stencils to create negative space in the paintings. Other works are crumpled canvas drop cloths with paint leaking through the verso to the front. The entire body of work feels like an active experiment. One where you know Niall is busy in his studio, running back and forth and breaking a sweat. His process reminds us of Viennese Actionists channeling their anger and grief into a studio practice of violence and catharsis. However the outcome of all McClelland’s activity is quite quiet and contemplative, an outcome at odds with his background identifying with puck-rock culture, music and alienated youth and Irish revolutionaries. The work takes the debris of disaffection and dissatisfaction and turns it into a trigger for reflections on the formal qualities of art and a non-obvious interpretation of his cultural touchstones.
His exhibit includes the paper pieces and the canvases as well as includes other re-purposed material adding autobiographical and sub-cultural symbology to the otherwise restrained process-oriented pieces.