COLLECTOR at FOFA Gallery

 

 

This piece, entitled Collector is currently being shown at the FOFA Gallery for the CONTESTED SITE: ARCHIVES AND THE CITY show, which runs parallel to the UAAC that Concordia University is hosting this year. It is being displayed in the Sculpture Garden Courtyard.

Here is the statement for the work:

Collector

My ongoing research into combining art and recycling has led me to experiment with different ways in which the city’s trash, detritus, debris, and leftovers can be revived and rebuilt in such ways as to gain valuable insight into the nature of the post-industrial city, its inhabitants, and how we conceive of waste. For about the past 10 years, I have built an archive of scraps, memories, and fragments of everyday life in Montreal, mostly in the form of waste and recycled materials.  My obsession to collect and document the city in this way has strengthened my conviction in the importance of recycling and of sustainability, and on an artistic level, has challenged me to create new ways of ‘re-presenting’ the urban environment.

My latest piece takes the idea of art and recycling almost literally, whereby I have built a trash collector/creature made from a recycled work table, a stack of found typeset drawers, and other recycled materials and waste. The creature’s “raison d’être” is to collect trash –much like a garbage collector or recycling truck would- and transform the contents into art. The metaphor of the ‘creature’ that takes trash and transforms it into art offers exciting propositions about everyday life in the city and what should be kept, valued, and  put on display. Through a hybrid of sculpture, printmaking, and painting, Collector re-conceptualizes the context of the discarded materials by converting garbage and found objects into artistic material. Through this reversal, it offers the viewer a new type of pictorial language through which they can imagine the city.

The city reflects our collective activities and energies, acting like a temple in constant flux. Collector becomes, in its own right, the collective unconscious of the city by piecing together what the everyday viewer does not see, or chooses not to notice. Does the everyday pedestrian use these visual (and even auditory, tactile, and olfactory) clues to understand how he or she functions and finds meaning in the everyday? Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin wrote extensively about the idea of the ‘flâneur’ as a key figure in the 19th and early 20th century city. The term flâneur varies according to the historical timeframe, but a contemporary manifestation describes a person who engages with the urban landscape in a way that is highly personal and intuitive, feeling and reading the city -both the intentional and unintentional designs of the urban phenomena- as a kind of living poem. The artist as flâneur reveals a character that is compelled by artistic inspiration to wander the streets seeking material for artistic re-articulation. Through this process, he/she is rewarded with a philosophy of being and living that is tuned to the past and present of the urban environment and its potential to provide meaning for the individual. Keeping in mind this notion, Collector exemplifies the activities of the modern-day flâneur: it negotiates the space between the artist and the city, while engaging with waste and recycling as a way to add meaning to what the city now represents.

Collector is a sculpture that is divided into two sections, one being a bin where the trash is collected, and the other a string of typeset drawers that display how the trash and information collected in the bin have been transformed. The bin is filled with all sorts of recycled objects that the creature sifts through to produce new interpretations of the urban landscape. This material “data” is then reorganized, transformed, and displayed as new visual representations, mashing up two-dimensional and three dimensional elements into stream-of-consciousness ‘tableaux’. Most of these tableaux play with the information from the cityscape by juxtaposing real-size objects, trinkets, tiny toys, printed images of everyday phenomena, and old discarded Montreal street maps, resulting in visual propositions resembling miniature scenes. These are loosely built in, through and around the 3D perimeter of each typeset drawer, and the drawers are attached with straps to form a long string of sculptural pictures that is suspended over the cart in the shape of an arc. This arc is held in place with pool cues that spread out into the air from the center of the cart. The last drawer on the string reenters the bin, giving the creature the opportunity to re-recycle what it has already recycled and thus perpetuate its identity as a symbiotic organism that communicates with the city that it is made of.

Beyond its immediate social and philosophical implications, Collector can also be seen as a nexus connecting the current state of the city with the notion of the art gallery, the artist’s studio and the history of the city, creating a flexible zone of interpretation in which multiplicities and hybrid thinking can thrive. Its traveling nature and its ability to compress and decompress visual information allows it to function as an alternative space for the dissemination of art. Furthermore, it presents an archive of collected objects that chronicles how our city is made of so many different things, people, histories, etc, and brings these together as an autonomous being. Finally, Collector’s existence is directly related to the populace’s habits, values, and attitudes when it comes to consumption, waste disposal and recycling, and re-interprets these issues through a new language based on possibilities and potential solutions rather than the status quo.