Curator's statement

The aim of this exhibition is to explore the various ways in which artists relate to their psychological, artistic, and physical environments and, through their art, try to understand and construct a place for themselves. The installations on view here expose and contain the process of art-making while at the same time suggesting the emotional and intellectual core that lends them substance.

What British artist Angus Fairhurst has said of his own work resonates here: "I'm interested in how far you can push something until it's completely destroyed, because I think it's not just destruction-you're making something else.”

Rob Wynne takes us into this world with a contradictory warning: over a found photograph depicting two characters in an amateur theatrical production the artist has embroidered the word “Disregard.” Which of course challenges the viewer to regard first in order to disregard. His installation presents a near-surreal realm of self-contradictory absurdity—a text-woven rug that begins with a sentence in English and abruptly continues with “words” in no known language, and a drawing in thread on vellum covered with broken glass.

Spanish artist Isidro Blasco makes self-portraits by way of photographs of his living circumstances—his apartment, his neighbors engaged in everyday activities. Out of these fragmented images, he creates a whole that offers a new, compound reality with the fragments remaining just that. This allows viewers to experience life in the making--an ever-changing perspective. Constructing a truthful world requires that the process be apparent and that change be visible.

As for reality, itself, what in the world is it? Or is it in the world? Italian artist Carlo Ferraris offers videos and photographs that are straightforward and yet verge on the surreal: a table, for example, whose legs don't meet the ground with men sitting at it and a young boy standing up beneath it. Ferraris hints at narratives, but they can rarely be grasped. They require the viewer's imaginative intervention and, even, suspension of disbelief.

The seeming transparency of any reality or sense of identity is necessarily an illusion for Claude Simard who was born in Larouche, Québec. His work is deeply tied to the power and fragility of memory, with a sense of place and of personal history always at play. Like Gordon Matta-Clark and the artists in this show, Simard creates his own world which is alluring, precarious, and anything but translucent. Here in a vitrine, Simard has placed four conch shells mounted on leglike sticks and filled them with shattered green glass. Looking like mythological birds, these objects, treated here as relics, contain captured and preserved evidence of a fleeting world.

All of the realities in this show are tenuous—they can easily be at once assembled and disassembled in the mind of the viewer. These artists tell us that all art is art under construction. The process can never be completed.

Barbara MacAdam