To be said like the Muppet/Pig Sketch

Dagmara Genda has work up at KWT Contemporary,In Toronto. I highly recommend checking it out. I blogged about Dagmara’s work a little over a year ago when it was at Modern Fuel in Kingston. I wrote then about the state of flux depicted in Genda’s work, coming from a place of cultural identity. This remains as relevant as ever, especially this morning as I look through these “Then & Now” photos of rapid urban development.

For our MFA Group show at Loop Gallery my drawing became a blanket fort. (My Thanks to Raffy, Thea, and Jon for there contributions in making this fort. ) My drawings take their cue from retro future images and other works that proclaim a world view. These source images, while originally a form of propaganda, are now disconnected from their original context. They exists as islands of lost possibility afloat in the cultural stream. With our current cultural narrative in flux and all images gaining new context in an online space ,images our free to be put together into multiple individual assemblages. The assemblages create unique, vast, limited, genius or flawed world views.  There exists great anxiety and uncertainty as we try to find a narrative (or multiple coexisting narratives) that fit. My blanket fort displays an image created by an assemblage of influences I’ve drawn from the digital realm. It’s fabric softens the anxiety, exploration and creation of such images and emphasizes the notion of play in such a process. It’s size is clearly to small to fit my 6’2” frame, ( as well as the frames of others who explored it).  suggesting that their is room for the view to grow change and eventually become irrelevant itself. 

See the flickr set of others getting under the blanket fort.

BE AWARE there are new Paul Noble images online!

Our Second Year MFA class has a show opening at Loop Gallery, Saturday Dec 10th, come by the opening from 2pm-5pm. My drawing as a blanket will be there. More at the Facebook Event Page

Last night I went to the Art & Drinks, a temporary video art space/bistro for a performance by Renee Lear. Lear put on chance based video piece in which dice determined the selection of video camera and treatment of the footage.The event being recorded is a little more difficult to describe. it is a video work that is contingent on the live experience. 

the man pictured above sits in front of balloons that have been silk screened with patterns suggesting an Indian or middle eastern style. a consistent noise is playing in the background that has the same influence, vaguely sintarish. The man plays a broken balloon the way you can play a bland of grass harmonizing with the background noise. The effect is both legitimate music and a humorous act of play. It would be akin to playing Mozart with a whoopie cushion.You can get into the music and then giggle when it sounds like a fart.

While the event is occurring, Lear is editing live from three camcorders. The results are projected onto the wall on one side of the room an a small mirror on the other. The mirror is perhaps not essential to the piece and more part of the architecture  (although its placement is intentional in some way). I mention it here, however for the quality of the projected image. The mirror removes the digital aspect of the image and makes it seem “real”, a compelling effect.

as Lear edits the footage,  a different experience of the event is created for us. It’s as if we’re experiencing the event through someone else’s perspective in real time. The man becomes washed out and slightly  removed from the background, at times the background balloons take prominence.  One notices the video and checks it every 30 seconds, but is hard to take your eyes of the man playing for very long, so the true nature of what is happening to the video is somewhat unknown to me (This might also be due to my position in the room.)

a full evaluation is not quite possible for me yet, but after it was finished I felt as if cultural expression have been evaluated, dissected and put back together for me.