DAVID DIVINEY

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"Decoy"

David Diviney, "Decoy," galvanized steel bucket, plaster, enamel paint, altered plastic decoy, 2007.

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David Diviney

Artist David Diviney. Photo Rebecca Rowley.

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"Decoy"

David Diviney, "Decoy," galvanized steel bucket, plaster, enamel paint, altered plastic decoy, 2007.

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"Fountain"

David Diviney, "Fountain," galvanized steel bucket, decals, enamel paint, wood, 2006/2007, 16" X 10".

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"Blind"

David Diviney, "Blind," plywood, cedar shingles, misc. wood stains, rubber boots, fluorescent lighting, 2007/2008, 48" X 96" X 10".

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DAVID DIVINEY

The do-it-yourself deconstructions of David Diviney.

BY Portia Priegert

It looks like a mountain range of snow, pile upon pile of billowing white that evokes a northern winter of record-breaking ferocity. But as viewers draw closer to Drift, any illusion of a blizzard’s harsh grip melts like a spring chinook. Turns out, Drift is just a snow job.

Each pile is a silhouette cut from white-stained plywood that Kamloops-based artist David Diviney has inserted between slats of a picnic table. Drift’s presence in the protected environs of an interior courtyard at the Kelowna Art Gallery is one of several ironies at play. His choice of a picnic table for an ongoing commissioned series dealing with the theme of dysfunctional chairs is another. “The picnic table is something that on one level serves as a table or announces itself as such, but on another level, it offers a place to sit,” Diviney says. “It rests in this ambiguous space in its role as a functional object.”

While the project has challenged Diviney to shift his usual studio process of intuitive play to a more prescribed exercise in maquette building and curatorial consultation, it maintains a dialogue with dominant currents in his practice. One is his interest in sculptural forms, despite the contemporary art world’s fascination with installation and multi-media interdisciplinarity. Another is his engagement with folksy narratives that use humour to explore transitional zones, particularly the junctures of constructed and natural worlds. And Drift, like his other work, exhibits a strong concern with materiality. Diviney typically exploits the do-it-yourself ethos with quixotic transformations of everyday objects such as work socks, shingles and galvanized pails, items more likely found at a hardware store than the art supplies shop.

Thematically, Diviney’s work reflects not only on rural life, but also on changing conceptions of contemporary masculinity. His sculptures often imply hidden spaces — like hunter’s blinds — and men whose presence is suggested by proxy devices such as camouflage gear. In Blind, for instance, Diviney positions pairs of rubber boots so their toes poke out beneath a large cedar-shingled board that leans against the gallery wall. Eyeholes stand in for hidden hunters. The shtick is that there are only seven boots — the final man, presumably, is missing a leg.

In a related work, Hide, a trapdoor on the floor is cracked open, creating the illusion of a shallow trench. A camouflage-patterned cap protrudes. Walking amidst such works, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the viewer is also the viewed and, perhaps even the prey, a construct that becomes layered with nuance in a gallery space. “It’s obviously quite an open narrative and one that’s non-linear in nature,” says Diviney. “There’s a lot of room for interpretation. There are a lot of voids in the work.”

Some sculptures, like Decoy, a duck decoy sunk head-down in a pail filled with plaster painted blue to resemble water, or Fountain, a galvanized pail adorned with bullet-hole decals, could easily be revisited as roadside kitsch destined for cottage porches. Yet Diviney’s restrained formal language bears obvious references to Minimalist aesthetics.

Ray Cronin, director of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, praises Diviney’s sly use of materials to reinvigorate clichés. “Diviney’s works are worked just enough,” Cronin wrote in a recent essay. “His ideas seamlessly blend into the material, into the images he is working with, creating pictures that combine time and context into their orbit to create sculptures that resonate beyond our immediate perceptual experience of them, objects that work in our memories and emotions, that exist in that mnemonic realm that poets have occupied so long.”

Diviney sees his works as gestures that respond to and restage aspects of human experience. “I like working with materials or objects from our surroundings that we tend to look past, things that are overly familiar, and within that, playing with the specificity of things, or people’s understanding of those things, and seeing where that takes me and the viewer,” he says.

“I’ve been interested in the idea of the rural as a point of transition between the built and the natural worlds — a somewhat abstract space where this concept or idea meets up against popular culture, popular beliefs or shared histories, things along those lines. In looking at that space it brings things back, as with anyone’s practice, to some sense of looking at one’s autobiography in terms of where one is coming from, or personal interests or personal histories.”

Diviney’s work resonates with the not-so-distant Canadian experience of settlement — particularly homesteading and the family farm — but the 39-year-old artist is actually from the Appalachian hills of rural Pennsylvania. He grew up on the land, but as the child of professionals. Still, he was exposed to the backwoods lifestyle often parodied in popular culture. “I won’t stretch the truth by saying I was picking a banjo on the porch,” he says. “But it was proximate to that lifestyle.”

Diviney moved to Kamloops four years ago when his wife, Melinda Spooner, a painter, was hired for a teaching position at Thompson Rivers University. He splits his time between making art, caring for their two children and working at the institution, mostly in technical support but occasionally as a sessional instructor. The couple met in the graduate program at NSCAD University in Halifax more than a decade ago, where Diviney studied after earning an undergraduate degree from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia.

After completing his Master’s degree, Diviney worked as director of the Eye Level Gallery, an artist-run centre in Halifax, and then moved west to work as assistant curator at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge and to teach at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary. His work has drawn critical attention with a growing roster of group and solo exhibitions at artist-run centres across the country and at public galleries in Halifax, Ottawa, Edmonton and Calgary.

Diviney is currently working on another site-specific project that will be installed in the reflecting pool outside Kitchener’s city hall in September. He was inspired by a ubiquitous Canadian icon — the beaver dam. But he is building Lodge not from logs but from PVC pipe that he has resurfaced with a pseudo wood-grain surface created from caulking, construction adhesives and other building products. “It draws attention to both the site, this pool, and this form that’s gleaned from the natural world — proposing a transition between the natural and the built environment,” he says.

As with Drift, perceptions will ebb and flow. “I think in a lot of my work, there is a suspension of disbelief,” he says. “It’s about a certain distance and approach with respect to the viewer’s relationship with it upon first glance. With this work, as well as many others, you are presented with one reality and as you approach the work, perhaps that dissolves and another reality takes over.”

Drift will be on display at the Kelowna Art Gallery through July 26, 2008.