Nathan Coley, Show Home,
City Arts Centre, Dublin, 25 March to 17 April 2004
 |
| Nathan Coley: Show Home,
City Arts Centre; courtesy Nathan Coley / City Arts
Centre / Tony Kenny |
Nathan Coley's latest work has
brought the typical / mythical Irish cottage to the roof
of the City Arts Centre. A jarring meeting of rural
and urban, past and present, not to mention 'real' and
artificial results: for the 'show home' of the title refers
not only to contemporary Ireland's ridiculously inflated
property market, but also to the structure of the work
itself, for it is in fact only a three-sided façade.
The 'show home' is a quaint, whitewashed
cottage with a green door that could have been lifted
straight off a vintage John Hinde postcard and somehow
'Photoshopped' deftly into the city's skyline. Its
fabrication with only three sides is significant, pushing
the work to be read as sculpture rather than architecture:
the artifice of the spectacle is evident from certain
angles, revealing its own construction. From the
back it mimics the form of a billboard hoarding of the
type so often used for advertising by property developers.
 |
| Nathan Coley: Show Home,
City Arts Centre; courtesy Nathan Coley / City Arts
Centre / Tony Kenny |
The aspirational home evoked by
the title is in this case characterised by nostalgia rather
than modernity. Show Home appears like a
material manifestation of a collective emotional longing:
it's the uncomfortable simulation of a home that no longer
exists in today's Ireland, its physical hollowness echoing
its practical impossibility. It creates a point
of visibility for ideas to do with accelerated urban development,
ownership and identity, and its siting opposite Dublin's
glass-and-money financial centre, the IFSC, couldn't
be more appropriate.
Show Home's highly public
and visible rendering of the archetypal but illusory
Irish cottage confers upon this work a genuine sense of
public ownership and accessibility, elusive qualities
too frequently absent in public artworks. A temporary,
wistful monument to public imagination, it asks more questions
than it answers. Clearly an outmoded and unrealistic
ideal in today's society, how do we update this ideal
for the twenty-first century? Are history and memory simply
wiped clean or demolished: does the past become appropriated
as kitsch or can it be integrated into a meaningful future?
 |
| Nathan Coley: Show Home,
City Arts Centre; courtesy Nathan Coley / City Arts
Centre / Tony Kenny |
The work is a highly appropriate
final project for the City Arts Centre, and neatly punctuates
the conclusion of the Civil Arts Enquiry, before the organisation
itself is moved to new premises and adopts new, multiple
and dispersed artistic strategies. Located on the
roof of the City Arts Centre at Moss Street, facing the
IFSC and the Custom's House across the Liffey, Show
Home is situated at a geographical (spatial) and historical
(temporal) intersection in contemporary Ireland.
Who knows what happens next?
Sarah Browne is an artist
and writer currently working on a residency and community
art project at the Riverbank Arts Centre, Newbridge, Co.
Kildare.
Show Home, originally
commissioned by Locus+, supported in Ireland by the British
Council, is presented as part of the process of the City
Art's Centre Civil Arts Enquiry.
