Jeremy Drummond (Richmond, VA, USA)
IMPASSÉ
Jeremy Drummond, Adrienne Spier, Ehryn Torrell
April 28 - May 27, 2006
Opening Reception: Friday, April 28, 2006 @ 8pm Panel Discussion: Saturday, April 29, 2006 @ 1pm CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT ABOUT THE PANEL!
All are welcome. Admission is FREE.
Adrienne Spier (Toronto, ON)
Ehryn Torrell (Halifax, NS)
IMPASSÉ
Our lovely little portmanteau of a title suggests nothing if not an ending: a resounding sense of nowhere left to go. But in the moment of any ending is a space for stopping and taking stock. The works gathered under this title all perform a kind of measuring: a sizing-up, and a gauging of where we are. These works focus on various facets of the urban landscape: in particular those aspects that seem to have reached some kind of a dead-end. Here, then, is a place to check the edges, and to wonder if we might actually have reached a point at which no further progress can be made.
Surely, where we see ourselves is stuck in some kind of a fin de siècle, pre-apocalyptic dénouement. Even in the face of runaway progress, we are still harbouring secret inklings; that we have, in fact, run out of things to say. We watch endless episodes of Survivor so that we can vicariously ponder the one album we would bring if we had to bring only one album. Like the turn of the last century, we are at a point where it feels increasingly difficult –if not impossible- to imagine the next step.
In anticipation of the next step, we must try and ponder what is in store for us. Ehryn Torrell’s large-scale paintings of decomposing houses reflect a pattern for how we perceive and treat the past; an investigation of the outmoded. While representing a literal ending, these depictions of collapsing houses also allow for extrapolated and inevitably inexact musings about the houses’ past lives. Our endings will also be subjected to similar readings: our suburban strip malls will look like this some day.
Similarly, the things we leave behind, like the used and unwanted furniture in Adrienne Spier’s sculptures, speak volumes about our histories, shapes, and patterns. Spier’s treatment of this discarded furniture: dissecting and reanimating it, is eerily akin to some kind of scientific study, a quasi-archeological approach. Unearthed, and subjected to the whims of their finder, these specimens reveal personalities of their own, and of their makers. Even though this discarded furniture has indeed reached its useful end, it can still be made to speak about its past. Information is wrung out of its outdated parts.
Our outmoded accoutrements are the sign-posts and furnishings of all that we have created. Thesecan be rearranged to fit the subjective study of those future scientists who will come (we hope) to examine what we’ve left behind. Jeremy Drummond’s reconfigured photo-works suggest the lone sign-post at the very edge of the city: the one on the last street of the newest development. These signs act as metaphorical landmarks for our contemporary landscape, an indicator of the way we engage with our surroundings. We sit at a mental crossroads between almost-identical options, sensing somehow that the choice we make will have to be final.
- Nicole Burisch (Banff, AB)
Jeremy Drummond
Biography
Jeremy Drummond (b. 1976, Edmonton, Alberta) grew-up in Vancouver, British Columbia and Brampton, Ontario, Canada. In 1999 he received a BFA from the University of Western Ontario and in 2003, a MFA from Syracuse University. His digital work extends into the areas of drawing, printmaking, photography, sound and installation but his primary focus is the production of single-channel videotapes. His award-winning video work has been exhibited internationally in festivals, galleries and museums throughout North America, South America, Europe and Asia. Select exhibitions include the Images Festival of Independent Film and Video (Toronto), LA Freewaves (Los Angeles), Transmediale.03 (Berlin), WRO 2003 Media Art Biennial (Wroclaw), Moscow International Film Festival (Moscow), and the International Biennial of Video and New Media (Santiago). In 2001, Drummond founded Spark Video International (Syracuse, NY) and in 2004, co-founded Spark Video Canada (London, ON) with David Poolman. His curatorial practice has extended to presentations throughout North America and Europe, most recently at the 2nd International Student Festival of Film Art (Balchik, Bulgaria) and Sushi Performance and Visual Art (San Diego, USA). He was a board member of Spark Contemporary Art Space (Syracuse) from 2000-2003 and was the co-director of the Forest City Gallery (London) from 2003-2004. Currently, Drummond is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at the University of Richmond (Richmond, Virginia). The majority of his recent work deals with issues pertaining to the underside of contemporary media culture and it’s proliferation within the suburban environment. In 2005 his video, Home Is Where You’re Happy, won the NFB Award for the Best Emerging Film or Video Maker at the 18th Annual Images Festival of Independent Film, Video and New Media (Toronto). Drummond’s videotapes are distributed internationally through Monte Video (Amsterdam), Videographe (Montreal), Video Out (Vancouver), Video Pool Inc. (Winnipeg) and Vtape (Toronto).
Artist Statement:
Drummond’s recent body of work focuses primarily on two subjects: nondescript contemporary landscapes and the human body. Through factual documents, fictional constructions, and personal experience his work collectively embraces a contradictory space between representation and perception, and reality and imagination.
Themes in his work demonstrate the varied interaction between people and their environment, on an intimate level or on a grand scale. Street Signs reflect the desire to create a false sense of community by selecting appropriate street names as a form of cultural representation. Through photographing existing street signs and transferring them into automotive-based materials, this series merges the aesthetics, representation and surface perception of the environment in which they represent.
Adrienne Spier
Biography
Adrienne Spier works with discarded materials that were originally designed to aid the body, such as furniture and tools. She alters the objects in ways which cause them to exaggerate their own obsolescence. Her exhibitions include; "Distribution Services" at Gallery Optica (Montreal), "Waiting Rooms and Offices" at Gallery Dare Dare (Montreal), "Ignition" at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery (Montreal), and “Basement Apartment” at Eastern Front Gallery (Toronto). She currently lives and works in Toronto.
Artist Statement
My work deals with refuse – or unwanted objects. Urban centres have been my primary sources of material. Over the past six years I have investigated refuse collection sites in Montreal and Toronto. These include domestic curb waste, the Toronto Transit Commission’s Lost and Found, and Concordia University's Distribution Services Department. I will now be turning my attention to the waste of Calgary.
In my sculptures and installations I dismantle or rearrange found furniture, undermining its functionality. The resulting installations end up personifying uselessness and frustration. We all have intimate contact with furniture on a daily basis. We trust chairs to support our weight and we freely caress a tabletop or counter in the places where decisions are made. Furniture is designed to accommodate the human body and therefore mirrors our shapes and proportions. It is a crutch supporting our weight, making our days easier and more efficient. Observing the ways in which objects are disposed of also reveals patterns and yields insight into the continual flux of social, economic and political systems.
My aim is to reconfigure familiar refuse in ways that facilitate reflection on their historical place in society, their value and their functions. The work investigates and questions at what point efficiency becomes inefficiency, and the practical becomes useless. It also raises questions about failure on the personal, societal and global levels.
Ehryn Torrell
Biography
Ehryn Torrell currently lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she maintains an active studio practice and teaches part-time. One week prior to this show's opening, she received a Master of Fine Arts Degree in painting/drawing from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design. In 2001, she completed the Independent Studio Programme at the Toronto School of Art and in 2000, received an Honours Bachelour of Art in Visual Art and English studies from McMaster University. Torrell has shown at a number of Toronto galleries, including SPIN Gallery (2006, 2004), Fran Hill Gallery (2002), ZYPR Gallery (2001), the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition (2003, 2001) and from 2001-2003 was an active member of Propeller Centre for Visual Arts. Beginning in 2004, she has been a member at Struts Gallery, an artist-run centre in Sackville, NB, where she exhibits her work as part of the Living is Easy member's projects. Her work has also been included in exhibitions in Halifax (NS), Banff (AB) and Ulsan, Korea. In the Fall of 2004, she attended the "Informal Architecture" residency at The Banff Centre, which had a significant impact on her work. In the group show, "Impasse," at Truck Gallery, Torrell is exhibiting a 19.5 foot painting entitled "In amongst the ruins," which was a significant component of her December 2005 MFA thesis exhibition at the Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia. See www.ehyrntorrell.com for more information.
Artist Statement
My involvement with the abandoned house began in August of 2003, when I moved to Halifax. I saw this derelict, pink house exposed on a corner lot – its entire back portion had been removed and so the first and second floors were open to view. It looked like a pathetic, over-sized dollhouse. It was never clear whether it was in a state of repair or demolition. I asked countless individuals about the house - some were aware of it because of its distinction on a corner lot, most knew of its association with the murders, but all knew exactly to which house I referred when I described it as the pink house. Apparently it had been abandoned for nearly forty years. In February 2005, under violations against civic codes, it was to be torn down. I felt increasingly drawn to this house and its stories, partly because it reminded me of the well-used dollhouse I played with as a child, but more so because of the empathy it stirred in me. My family and I have left our cottage to rot – our cottage, a place that means so much to me and one that has been in our family for nearly fifty years. Each time I walked to the pink house, I was taking a very deliberate walk from my apartment in the South End of Halifax to this house in the North End of Halifax, a house that sat in the crux of a marginalised community. Through these experiences, I realised how places that are like strangers to us can build not only empathy within us, but also tell us something about who we are, how we perceive and what our imaginations are capable of.
Through the process of making this work, the pink house became symbolic – symbolic of chaos, neglect, memory and waste, but also symbolic of a collapse between public and private spaces. During the demolition, its privately owned debris scattered onto the streets and spilled onto the sidewalk, causing a real physical disruption - if only for a few days. The painting, “In amongst the ruins,” presents an unlikely reversal between public and private by privileging, through its enormity, the chaos of the domestic demolition site over the clean, modern cityscape, which is presented in the far distant right of the background. Through its subject matter, composition and scale, this work attempts to break from the common reading of painting as a flat visual field and into the creation of a place – a visual, mental, and physical environment similar to that of mine when I witnessed its collapse. The work presents not only massive piles of debris, but it also offers up areas for creative detective work and spatial play within a destroyed domestic environment – where the ruins become material for invention and imaginative experience. In this sense, the work mimics the process of its creation, whereby a neglected space is re-built and cared for through invention and imaginative fiction in an attempt to locate meaningful experience in something as familiar and increasingly prevalent as the demolition site.
+ 15 Window Project Space:
Prelude to Spring - Andrew Gable
