TORONTO, September 19,
2005—This
autumn, The Power Plant premieres two works created
specifically for the
gallery: A Pale
Fire by Vancouver artist Geoffrey
Farmer and NO‘W’ (no Rest. no Room. no Things. no
Title) by Brussels
artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx. Each artist focuses on the
formal properties of
gallery space, the role of public art galleries, and the relationship
between
visual art institutions and the viewing public. This will be the first
major
solo show in
Geoffrey
Farmer: A Pale Fire
Vancouver-based
artist Geoffrey Farmer's
installations combine video, film, performance, drawing, sculptural
elements,
found objects and texts, and link provocative readings of popular
culture with
highly imaginative uses of gallery architecture. Farmer’s interest in
the
latent potential of the gallery as a site for social engagement has led
to the
development of a number of works in the form of installation kits.
These
ongoing, process-based pieces stage
disparate
social and cultural histories within diverse sculptural environments,
and will
be the focus of Farmer’s new installation at The Power Plant, the
artist’s most
ambitious to date. A Pale Fire revolves around a
fireplace created in 1968 by French designer Dominique Imbert.
Manufactured in
black steel and hanging from the ceiling by its exposed flue, the
iconic lozenge-shaped
Gyrofocus has come to embody the design ideals of the 1960s. Here,
rather than burning logs in Imbert’s fireplace, furniture is used as
fuel. The
furniture is amassed in an installation that is slowly transformed
through the
progressive dismantling and combustion of its individual pieces.
Curated by
Reid Shier.
Joëlle
Tuerlinckx: NO‘W’
(no Rest. no Room. no Things. no Title)
Building
on a legacy established by her compatriot Marcel Broodthaers, Belgian
artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx works in the vein of
institutional critique. Her practice, however, is distinguished by its
ephemeral, transient and contingent nature. Curator Catherine Wood
describes Tuerlinckx’s
installations as “choreographies of found and hand made objects,
manipulations
of gallery lighting or framed shafts of sunlight, film and slide
projections,
penciled graffiti text and marks, paper ‘screens’ and scattered card or
paper
shapes that the artist describes as ‘confetti’.” Tuerlinckx builds
these
ephemeral traces into elaborate architectures that respond and play
with the
environments that house them. As she states: “When I am offered an
exhibition
space it is as though I receive a kind of parcel, a packet of air.”
Within this
space, our ideas of exhibition practice become mutable, shifting with
the
artist’s gentle restaging of expectation and perception.
The Power Plant is
pleased to present Everything Has a Face, an
exhibition of drawings, paintings and sculpture by Montevideo-based
artist Ignacio Iturria, curated by Wayne
Baerwaldt, Iturria’s work employs kitsch impulse to reveal a human
iconography
of the Americas. Daily rituals of friends and family are examined in
paint to weave
a universal view of the human condition. Iturria’s innocuous apartments
are
human containers with expansive windows, portals to the larger world of
shared
human experience, symbolic of the psychic, surreal turmoil endemic to
urban
life in
The
Power Plant
is
located at 231
Media
Contacts:
Linda
Liontis, 416-973-4381, lliontis@harbourfrontcentre.com
David
Gates, 416-973-4494, dgates@harbourfrontcentre.com