NATHAN COLEY (BORN 1967)

Nathan Coley investigates the social aspects of our built environment, working across a diverse range of media including public and gallery-based sculpture, photography, drawing, and video. Interested in public space, the artist explores how architecture comes to be invested - and reinvested - with meaning, and how through the competing practices of place these claims and significations come into conflict.

For Coley, buildings are empty vessels given significance by their social history: by the communities that populate them. The artist, then, is interested in these politics, insofar as they put a political demand on place in the current pluralist climate of enforced equality. Fiona Bradley comments, "The gap between the city as built and as experienced, as it exists in the world and in the mind and memory, resonates throughout Nathan Coley's practice... [he] conjures cities, metaphorically dismantling them." Or sometimes metaphorically blowing them up. In 2001, in a project for the Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon, Portugal, Coley constructed a video work, 'The Land Marked', commenting on the landmark as a social hieroglyphic. The edifice he chose for his work to address was a historic and much contested fifteenth century tower in Belém, on the edge of the city and the sea. In it, the tower appears flanked by two others, two industrial chimneys which though not present today, did once exist in the manner Coley presents them. The artist then virtually re-enacts a historic incident: the demolition by explosion of the two modern towers. Then he does the opposite, portraying the destruction of the Belém tower and leaving its industrial counterparts intact. Though only a projected digital animation, the work garnered the attention of more than just the art world: it made national news.

Coley's practice reveals that claims to public space in postmodern society (society marked not by national cohesion, but fragmentation, transnationalism, pluralism) are made by groups of people who have different ideas on how it should be used; the structures they erect manifest these desires, values, and beliefs. Indeed, through his photographs, videos, installations and constructions, the artist reveals the unconscious of the architecture and cityscapes he interrogates, investigating social as much as physical constructions. Or as Coley says, "It's in your imagination."

Nathan Coley was born in Glasgow and now lives and works in Dundee. The artist graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1989 with a BA in Fine Art. He has enjoyed solo exhibitions at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2004), the Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon (2001) and the Westfalischer Kunstverein, Munster (2000). His work was included in 'Days Like These', a group exhibition at Tate Britain (2003), and in the 'British Art Show 6' at BALTIC (2005).Recent solo exhibitions include: De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, East Sussex, UK (2008); '46 Brooklands Gardens�', Jaywick, Essex, England, UK (2008); Haunch of Venison, Berlin, Germany (2008) and 'Nathan Coley', Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2009). Recent group exhibitions include: 'Tales of Time and Space', Folkestone Triennial, Folkestone, UK (2008) and 'Mythologies', Haunch of Venison London, UK (2009). Coley's work is represented in many European collection