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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
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Rebecca Diederichs, FLICK, 2004/2005 (laminated digital print, 128 X 197 cm). Image taken from here.
Rebecca Diederichs is a close friend. She is also one of my very favourite artists. Her work is lush and eye-popping, yet she exercises such intuitive discernment that there is also tons of tension. Borrowed fragments are magnified and re-composed with precision. Her appropriations (these stripes above, for instance, are from the packaging on a box of tissues) tease us with the vague sense that they come from somewhere familiar, offering full-on colour-blasts of visual satisfaction but dodging the "ah-hah" of recongition that would collapse them into quotes. In her recent work, Rebecca introduces language, and treats it as yet another piece of the world. Text-in-art can be a deplorable device, but Ruscha-like, Rebecca pulls it off. The words adopt shapes, dissolve into form, but do not lose their sense nor their readability. Here the word "flick" and the concept of "stripe" carry about the same amount cognitive weight, so the piece rolls and folds and interacts with your neurons in a bunch of different ways. It's good for savouring.
Rebecca Diederichs has an opening tomorrow night at 8:00pm at YYZ Artists Outlet. She will be installing a new work called BLAZE. I'm looking forward to the exhibition, which also includes a show by Christian Giroux and Daniel Young, and another by Jeanie Riddle.
| Our shows at York Quay Centre open next week (Friday May 12th). That means the current shows are coming down soon (Sunday is the last day), and if you haven't seen them, you should! City Beautification Ensemble's dystopic future diorama (tiny abandoned cars and tiny bits of rubble and tiny weeds sprouting out of tiny crumbling tarmac) of the Gardiner Expressway is Blade Runner satisfying in both its detail and its amibiguity. The Case Studies show about Beauty, curated by Patrick Macaulay, has a killer weird human-faced doggy by Allyson Mitchell and a giant black ooozy blob by Seth Scriver that looks like a tar pit sprouting its own life form. The other pieces are good too, and the whole thing holds together really well. |  Simon Faithfull, 30Km, 2004 (image taken from here | My favourite thing of all, however, is a video by Simon Faithfull in the show in the main gallery called Timeless – time, landscape and new media. Faithfull affixed a video camera to a weather balloon and recorded the signal via wireless feed. The balloon just went up into the atmosphere and eventually popped. The video is circular, projected on a round screen, and what you see is the earth slowly getting farther and farther away. As you rise, the signal starts to break down. Sometimes towards the end the image will be all noise, and then suddenly a shape will appear and you realise it is the curve of the earth. When you are damn near to entering outer space, the screen goes all black with white static. Then the static slowly diminishes into tiny sporadic points of light. I recommend watching the whole video, which takes about half an hour. It's really beautiful, and, compared to internet satellite technology, the experience feels very personal. I found it very sad, but that could just be me. |