Furtive Tears
Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Ireland
4 October 2018 — 6 January 2019
Furtive Tears is a project by Niamh McCann that explores the dynamic relationship between the audience, object and mode of display. In her new installation at the Hugh Lane, McCann brings together the protagonists Edward Carson (politician) and Hans Poelzig (architect and set designer) and the vestiges of their mythologies to portray the internal language of gesture, meaning, inference and allegiance.
It is an exploration of the importance of a viewer’s perspective when confronted with the act of looking and the reading of objects within the context of a constructed landscape. Weaving fact, fiction and history, the installation reveals how we look and how we are looked upon. The work addresses how the mind navigates the perpetual process of coding and decoding our own behaviours when negotiating the positions we take up in society.