Opening reception: Friday, October 20 at 8:00 pm
The strong, tangible logic at work in Jeremy Hof’s sculptural forms can nevertheless be a terror to comprehend. Like a Japanese puzzle box or pop song—whose every move appears simple, predictable and tight—Hof’s unassuming experiments and delightful quasi-functional fill-ins make sense on the surface, but often yield a more baffling undercurrent. His work carries the seduction of a promise while simultaneously challenging the notion that this promise can be kept or delivered.
Taking a sheet of plywood and equal length of wooden dowling, Hof has cut each to fit the Back Gallery with the intention that every bit of the material be used, as in a perfect economy of means. But the singular poetics of this gesture become blurred during the actual process of transformation: even allowing for sawdust, the sheer number of cuts means that a slightly miscalibrated saw can spell disaster. As the exciting tête-à -tête ensues, Strategies For Coping With Change forces Hof to anticipate every variable—an uncomfortable, if real, premise for discovering the means to genuine agency in the world.
Jeremy Hof is in his 4th Year of Visual Arts at Emily Carr. His projects tend to deal with transitions or changes in communication strategies, and how these strategies become mediated by, and even determined by, different technologies.