ARCHIVES >> Front Gallery: Adrian Blackwell
Back Gallery: Alex Morrison
Platform: Janis Demkiw
Front Gallery: Adrian Blackwell
Back Gallery: Alex Morrison
Platform: Janis Demkiw
Front Gallery: Adrian Blackwell
Back Gallery: Alex Morrison
Platform: Janis Demkiw
Adrian Blackwell, Spiral
Space, 1999, University
of Manitoba. Photo: Rafael
Gomez-Morima
Adrian Blackwell, Spiral
Space, 1999, University
of Manitoba. Photo: Rafael
Gomez-Morima
Alex Morrison, Home
Wrecker, 1999, video loop,
3 min. Photo: Scott Doucette
Alex Morrison, Home
Wrecker, 1999, video loop,
3 min. Photo: Scott Doucette
Janis Demkiw, No Visitors,
1999, colour photograph.
Photo: Courtesy of the
artist
July 06, 2000 - August 05, 2000
Opening Reception: July 6, 2000
Open Focus It's a dream of the perfect party where conversation, as powerful as a song, cascades along a slow twisting course, leading nowhere in particular. Stand back and it makes a gleeful remark on what the modernist architect shares with the skate punk: a love of aerial feats.
An amphitheatre-like conversation pit, Adrian Blackwell's Model for Public Space offers no single spectacle to arrest or direct attention. The piece begins with a simple drawing and an engagingly open-ended hypothesis about shared time and space. A Skilsaw-etched circle spirals outward to a thirty foot radius. Rings of plywood are propped up on supports in order to make a continuously unfolding ramp of bleachers that will hold the weight of walking, sitting, and talking. People enter, or stand at the perimeter. They hoist themselves up, navigate other bodies, make room for the newly arrived, watch and offer their reflections to any others who happen to be in the space. Some will arrive to participate in scheduled discussions. In this space, words can weave their way through the various levels, moving from beneath to above, falling inward, or floating across the centre. An ideal of social being cast in wood, Blackwell's model looks like a speaker on its side, amplifying upward. As the city, fearful of loitering and lawsuits, removes the swings and monkey bars from parks and school yards and permits franchise developers to replace city life with 'urban event space', artist and architect Blackwell speculates about how design and structure can nurture other public possibilities. His Model for Public Space casts doubt on the values that contemporary culture ingests along with the incentives and returns of transnational capital. His notion of the public-indebted to Habermas, Arendt and the Situationist's theory of the derivé-upholds the ideals of collective action and open discussion, and allows for layer upon layer of spontaneous, emergent behaviour. This appreciation of sedimentation and trophyless play remains resolutely at odds with the prevailing ethos of efficiency, surface, and surveillance. Perhaps this is why the project, although originally conceived within the context of a collaborative proposal for the redevelopment of the Yonge and Dundas intersection, has necessarily taken on a life of its own.
Kathleen Pirrie Adams
This spring Adrian Blackwell participated in the workshop Anti-loft presenting his photo-models of living and working spaces at 9 Hanna Ave. He's shown sculpture, architecture and photography in Trans at Artlab in London, Urban Textures at Gallery 101 in Ottawa, offsite @ toronto, Spiral Space at the University of Manitoba, 1000 words at Gallery TPW, and Centrifugal in Hamilton. He has taken and facilitated courses at Toronto's Anarchist Free School, and teaches architecture at the Universities of Waterloo and Toronto.
Kathleen Pirrie Adams is a writer, curator and occasional filmmaker. She is the programming director of InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre and is currently working on a project entitled 45 Supreme:Pop Music in Contemporary Art.
Alex Morrison
Space Invader
The difference between 'home' and 'house' is rhetorical yet philosophical in nature. Domestic architecture, physical as it may be, is rooted in an ideological abstraction called 'home',an agglomeration of support systems and amenities such as the nuclear family, friendly neighbors, backyard cookouts and full-package cable TV. Alex Morrison's oeuvre emerges from the forced abandonment of common notions of domestic space- a welcome consequence of his transient history. This pared down existence screens him from faux sensibilities as the overly retentive anti-style of Martha Stewart, yet provides him with an unique, creative, visual language developed upon the provisional savvy of his fleeting lifestyle. Within this, Morrison has built a strong critical foundation, identifying his precarious domestic actuality as a stable thematic disposition.
Impermanence permeates Morrison's work. Every House I've Ever Lived In, drafted directly on the gallery walls, exists in an air of temporary suspension as it awaits its impending demise. The work's longevity or lack thereof, is only rivaled by the duration of each period of occupancy at the respective sites represented by indiviual drawings. This work chronicles the overswhelming and consistently growing list of Morrison's residencies since his birth. Meticulous lines, all of similar weight, resurrect planar elements and details of each house. Echoes of door jams, stair treads and wall studs delineate form, yet collapse at the hint of space within the indiscriminate and overlapping marking of grounds. A metaphor for the memories from which they were drawn, the rendered structures rest in limbo between dilapidated disrepair and potential renovation.
Spatial unrest is prevalent in the performative action documented by a video loop entitled Home Wrecker.This work provides a view into a scantily outfitted, partially abandoned apartment where Morrison assumes the part of a presumably uninvited guestor mischievous house-sitter, perhaps both. As the artist meanders around the room on his skateboard, he comes into contact with anything and everything that nears his all encompassing path, nothing stands in his way. Furniture and architectural features don't operate in a traditional sense as Morrison devalues and reissues the meaning of each object. The aftermath reveals an altered state of ordered disarray in which the reassignment of function has inevitably occurred. What is deemed an unacceptable act of social transgression is actually a poignantly intuitive inversion of domestic codes and hierarchies. The result is aloud, yet poetic diagram of the artist's lack of relationship with the contents of this house in particular and with the generic accoutrements attributed to 'home' in general. In Teenage Runaway Campsite,a standard sheet of plywood leans against the gallery wall, thus creating a sheltered space. This work could easily be mistaken for a skateboard ramp, a forgotten leftover from the days of minimalism, or even a heapof curbside trash. Nothing more than the essentials equipe this makeshift habitat, identifying it as the lowest common denominator of 'house'. Once inside, the viewer is confronted by a facade of 'identity wallpaper', as the artist has dubbed it, which offers a glimpse into the personality of its creator/interior decorator. A collage of images from a range of magazines from soft-core pornography to skateboarding riddle the interior, recall bedroom walls of years past- an infinite world of fantasy exists almost unnoticed. Here, within a brief utopian moment silently embedded within the bounds of architecture and on the periphery of domesticity, Morrison's ideological stronghold stands safely beyond the reaches of outside encroachment and control.
Alex Morrison was born in Redruth, England. Over the years he has attended various art colleges at various times. Recent exhibitions include; From Memory at Platform, London, Serial Killers at Platform, London and Chistopher Cutts, Toronto, Belvedere at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, England and Laissez Faire at Printed Matter, New York City. He currently lives in Halifax.
David Diviney
David Diviney was born in Hershey, Pennsylvania. He received a B.F.Aat Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia and an M.F.A. at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He has exhibited throughout the United States and Canada, and in museums and galleries in Germany and Iceland. Currently, he is the director of eyelevel gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Janis Demkiw
No Visitors
I am not home all that often. When I am, I never know quite what to do with myself. Sometimes it gets lonely. A guest would be nice because it's not much fun having lots of things without the occasional show-and-tell. My peephole lets me check the hallway without disturbing my neighbors. It's generally empty. My timing's probably not all that great. Drop-in visitors never seem to be around when you're looking for them.
Janis Demkiw is a switchboard operator at a large bank. She also has an Honours B.F.A. from York University. Recent exhibitions include 5x5x2= at Art System, Toronto, 2000, and Suburban Landscape at Red Head Gallery Toronto, 1999. She lives and works in Toronto.