Friday, June 30, 2017 to Saturday, July 29, 2017
Forest City Gallery is proud to present Dust is Dancing, an exhibition by Paul Kajander, Laurie Kang, and Colin Miner.
Duration: Friday, June 30, 2017 – Saturday, July 29, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, June 30th, 7-9 PM
About the exhibition:
it’s vague; the screen takes forever to load.
Words! And typing
is this ok?
I’m grey.
The speed of synapses
LOL and typos
Is there a question that we are all asking
or wanting to answer?
Yeah, mine is purple..
Yes… oh shit
now I’m purple too
I’ve recently started bird watching. It isn’t so much about the birds, as it has been about realizing that we have crazy training in “seeing”, in looking for details, in recognizing patterns, movement, shapes, form, contrast, etc. I didn’t realize - until I started looking for birds, especially with other people - how trained my eyes were, and how that fit with this practice of bird watching.
I think something about my interest in the mutability of materials, matter, inorganic and nonhuman matter etc., makes me feel that looking is a two way interaction always.
The object presses back as it is pressed upon with the eye. Object being whatever is looked at. Kaja Silverman wrote that “Two is the smallest unit of being”.
Vision is contingent on the other, and the other is actually always within (we are constructed by multiplicities, not in any sort of hermetic state)... this highlights the relationships between things as the “things”, rather than the things themselves. And I’m hoping to push this idea by arranging the objects together, highlighting the contingency of vision.
So where the garden is unruly and “natural” but also cultivated and cared for, it’s in responding to the way the vegetables “press back” in their imperfect form that these compositional opportunities emerge that are super compelling. This brings me back to the Monk, while she’s fresh in my mind, because it feels like that way of working (as she argues for creativity in general) is egoless, non-singular and flourishes without the obstructions of hierarchy.
Three artists who had never worked together before assembled Dust is Dancing, an exhibition that first took place at Modern Fuel in Kingston from March 2 to April 15, 2017. Initiated by Colin Miner, this show brought together works arising from a mutual interest in material and conceptual investigations spurred in part by the phenomenon of seeing, particularly the embodied and psychically charged impression that vision makes as well as the discourse that runs alongside photographic, image-based and more broadly defined optically-oriented practices.
Throughout the process of installing their works, Kajander, Kang and Miner entered into a responsive editorial mode, which substantially altered the expected exhibition in favor of producing an enigmatic set of associative relations to encourage active viewing through the arrangement of works in the gallery. The artists agreed on the works that would constitute the show and how these could be ideally situated to both support and complicate each other’s practices.
Revisiting the central theme of this exhibition for Forest City Gallery, (and retaining its title) the artists have chosen to engage with the space adopting a parameter that mostly constrains them to installing on the horizontal plane of the floor. Evocative of a field, microbial mat, garden, yard or stage, their works are brought into physical proximity through liminal orientations and the intentional blurring of authorial status.
This arrangement of works encourages a porous overlap and spontaneity of placement in responding to the specific scale, feel and architecture of the gallery as well as to each of the works produced independently by the artists. Through display strategies that are rooted to the floor as opposed to tacked to the walls, the artists use the exhibition to antagonize the fixity of intention and tautological certainty that accompanies more individualistic approaches to showing discrete works.
Seen as a companion exhibition that is read against the disparate gestures of its prior iteration, Dust is Dancing at Forest City Gallery in London further explores the way in which relations emerge in seeing what specifically has been arranged somewhere, in what space, for what time.
About the artists:
Paul Kajander’s work encompasses video, sculpture, ceramics, sound, performance and photography, often in mixed media installations. His work has been shown in various exhibition contexts, including Franz Kaka; Toronto, the New Media Society; Vancouver, the Hammer Museum; Los Angeles, The SFU Audain Gallery; Vancouver, Daniel Faria Gallery; Toronto, the Seoul Museum of Art; Seoul, The Real DMZ Project; Cheorwon-gun, Art Sonje Center; Seoul and the Western Front; Vancouver. www.paulkajander.com
Laurie Kang works in photography, sculpture, installation and video. Recent and forthcoming exhibition sites include Franz Kaka, Toronto; Topless, New York; The Loon, Toronto; LVL3, Chicago,Wroclaw Contemporary Museum; Wroclaw, Raster Gallery; Warsaw, Camera Austria; Graz, Parisian Laundry; Montreal, 8-11 Gallery; Toronto and The Power Plant Gallery; Toronto. In the fall of 2016, she was artist in residence at Interstate Projects in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. She lives and works in Toronto. www.lauriekang.com
Born in Halifax (Canada), Colin Miner holds a PhD in Visual Art and Culture. He is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, most recently in the Peruvian Amazon, and has presented exhibitions in Canada, China, and Germany. Miner’s practice considers an ontological anxiety that shadows the photographic and its production of meaning through qualities of relations (lightness, darkness, reflection, refraction). This takes form through assemblage, composition, and duration, with projects developing in the spaces of crossing paths and uneven terrains. Installations, writing, facilitating exhibitions, and the artist project Moire have become articulations of an expanding practice in which the political becomes visible through the absent, cyclical, and askew. www.colinminer.com / www.moire.ca
