Hollow cores, other findings and one last chance
October 23, 2008
By Stacey Ho
One of Jerry Ropson's many lists from his new exhibition.
A brief list of some of the items in Jerry Ropson’s upcoming exhibition, Hollow cores, other findings and one last chance: drawings, framed and unframed; drawings done on glass with vinyl; “There” prints depicting wooden shacks, smoke, piles, and other personal symbols of his native Newfoundland; black on black “Here” prints, featuring lists, himself and another character in the process of various tasks; axes that double as metre sticks; bottles; ice with messages frozen inside, molded into bottles; flags with scraps of love letters left in sidewalk cracks; tubes with secret messages written inside them; ladders; a worktable covered with pseudo-scientific notes and experiments.
“It’s funny,” says Ropson. “I had all these notions of what it’s about. There’s so much going on, anyone coming in and responding to the work will take away different things.”
This open-ended practice appeals to Ropson, as it draws others into his personal process, with an emphasis on chance encounters and happenings. Within the gallery, viewers are meant to tamper and interact with the space. Within the city of Montreal, flags, ice bottles and other tokens will be left around personal sites of significance. Ropson’s list-writing gives another glimpse of the small, fleeting things that make up his thoughts and life.
Empty
October 16, 2008
By Mike Landry
Jamie Campbell's "Tiger Girl."
Joined under the banner of the exhibition Empty at Montreal’s Galerie Push, Kotama Bouabane and Jamie Campbell present two takes on the theme in their hip photographic work.
For his half of the show Boubane presents selections from two series of work. In Chalkboards, Boubane documents chalkboards at the Ontario College of Art and Design over the span of a week. He found it spoke to the outmoded nature of photographic technology, in that everyday newer cameras effectively erase older ones. He also liked how language could be transferred to text and then erased.
“Photography in general is the idea of capturing something, but it’s just an image on a two dimensional surface you can never really capture it wholly,” says Bouabane.
Fear the Doily
October 9, 2008
By Mike Landry
One of Alain Bonder's menacing doily works.
When Alain Bonder was living in Montreal his dad used to send him random images with notes scrawled on the bottom. One of his favourites was an image from an old Italian horror movie of a man cowering under the covers.
For many years the note lived stuck to the Ottawa-based painter’s walls. But something clicked last year, and Bonder decided to pair his own macabre rendering of the image in black and monster green with an ornate doily dipped heavily in black paint. Although it was meant to be a keeper, Bonder soon found himself with an entire series called Fear the Doily.
“On top the doily looks dead on like a UFO to me. So it was this strange object, but at the same it’s something that would never hurt you,” says Bonder. “You would have to really try to be hurt by a doily.”
