January 16 – February 28th 2015
Opening reception is January 15 at 7pm.
Featuring work by
Derek Coulombe
Tom Hsu
Kari Kleinmann
Lida Pawliuk
Curated by Brynn McNab
The Facility for Consideration is an exhibition engaging in a many-voiced conversation concern the artist’s conception of space. Rather than using the public space as a medium itself, this curatorial project scales back to the two-dimensional, looking from a more aesthetic vantage on the ways in which our perception of the built environment can be arranged and navigated.
To what extent does the aesthetic project have utility? Through influence, you suppose, through translation, affect, and communication. Less thought of perhaps, is the constitution of a new understanding of space, of the structures surrounding both the artist and the viewer, and in its depiction a criticality, and a positing of the new. Space, although growing no bigger, has become exponentially more complex in the last few decades. The implicated range of minute or distant structures and detailed architectures to the awareness of the individual is now immense and grows proportionately to the availability of information and experience. The networks we familiarly navigate have created a Zeno’s Paradox – the vertigo of never being able to reach the other side of a road which we have always already been crossing; the array of measurable points between points multiplies as we regard more closely. These include our personal use of the digital, the infrastructural niceties of the global public, and our discourse on increasingly available past representations. The conception of these newly available spaces directly and absolutely effects the methods with which we move through them, influencing how we use them to our advantage, or how they corral us to theirs.
Artists’ work has always been concerned with the parcelling out of space, and its perspectival serration. The last century saw a radical transformation in the avant garde on the manner in which space is translated, depicted, or recreated. This process of spatial criticality, which has always been integral to artistic work, has more recently become more self reflexive, concerned with a critique of artist’s depictions of space, with a more engaged concern about how this effects the general public’s perception and use of this space socially, economically, and politically.
These critical spatial shifts host examples in all creative forums, from architecture, to coding, to painting, to literature, and they are becoming more central to both popular and aesthetic discourse. In protest to a supposed stagnancy in criticism, there are still new spaces to be reconstituted and conquered, and they are germinating incessantly. The artists participating in this exhibition, although they are working exclusively in two dimensions is generative primarily in the moving through and close consideration of space. The work –in medium being still, flat, and contained– is insistent upon it.
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