David Diviney: Head for the Hills

OPENING RECEPTION Sunday 24 October at 2 pm ARTIST'S GUIDED TOUR Thursday 25 November at 8 pm

Born in the Appalachian foothills of Pennsylvania, David Diviney is an artist whose practice is rooted in rural culture. In a recent artist statement he offers, “I have been taken by the notion of ‘the rural’ as a point of transition between the man-made and natural worlds – a somewhat abstract space – and how it meets up with popular culture as well as personal and shared histories.” His sculptures and installations are made from everyday hardware-store supplies and lumberyard materials (galvanized buckets, garbage cans, rubber boots, wool socks, sonotubes, cedar shingles and particle board) deftly manipulated into assemblages that fuse Minimalist aesthetics and production sensibilities with tongue-in-cheek references to vernacular constructs – outsider art forms, do-it-yourself ethics, folklore, etc. – and imagery. This balancing of disparate aesthetic and cultural agendas is a foundational strategy in Diviney’s work that respectfully quotes Modernist sculptural history, tradition and formal language while combining them with Postmodernist narrative structures, humour and cultural parody. David Diviney attained his BFA degree in 1995 from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia. He graduated in 1998 from the MFA program of NSCAD University in Halifax, and was the Director of Eye Level Gallery until 2002 when he moved to Lethbridge, Alberta, then Kamloops, British Columbia, to pursue curatorial and teaching positions. In 2009, Diviney returned to Nova Scotia to work as Curator of Programs for the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia at the Western Branch in Yarmouth and, as of this year, as the Curator of Exhibitions at the AGNS’s main gallery in Halifax. This exhibition, an overview of Diviney’s practice, begins with early works produced in Halifax but predominately debuts many works created during his sojourn in Western Canada.