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click on thumbnails for full images and details
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Parallel Lines - is a series of photo-based encaustic paintings, with an interactive sculpture installation entitled 15 Minutes of Fame featuring the bed and suitcase depicted in the paintings.
Artist's Statement:
Years ago I met a Cree youth who told me that within sixteen years he had been through fourteen foster homes. He felt unloved and unwanted. "One day," he told me, "I was so depressed, I threw a shovel through a jeweller's window: I knew at least I'd be wanted in jail."
His story stayed with me. Years later I was given an opportunity to create works with prison beds. This arose through an art commission in which I was invited to create artworks utilizing waste from government buildings. Correctional Services Canada asked what I could do with discarded prison beds. I was intrigued with the challenge. With the youth's story re-sounding in my mind, I took a prison bed around the city of Toronto and engaged photographer John Davidson to document a series of my live solo performance ‘happenings’ through digital photography.
The photos, printed on archival paper, are mounted on birch panels forming a base upon which I apply layers of encaustic (wax) paint to create imagined possibilities blurring the boundary between painting and photography. The original photo captures only a partial version of reality - aspects of the location, mood and lighting. I delve into the image to exploit the tangible but not captured on film, the invisible possible inner life beyond the borders. I fuse the lines between reality and imagination, the actual and the possible, real and remembered, the inner and outer worlds. The result is a series of evocative and deliberately ambiguous photo-based encaustic paintings exploring choice as a determining element in our lives.
Parallel Lines is the third project in a series of works featuring prison beds reclaimed from the former Kingston Penitentiary for Women and previously slept upon by an array of disturbed and occasionally notorious women.
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15 Minutes of Fame
- features a bare prison bed; blanket, sheet & pillow; and a standard-issue prison suitcase containing assorted personal items.
Visitors are invited to:
- open the suitcase; consider, select and arrange items upon and around the bed to create a new installation - a personal artistic statement about incarceration - then:
- present and discuss their installation with other visitors
- write about their installation in the Book of Fame,
which is on site and open for everyone to read.
- Other visitors are invited to write comments about this and other installations in the Book of Fame.
- Each installation remains on display for a maximum of 15 minutes. Installations are documented through digital photos and posted subsequently online.
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View slideshow video
on youtube
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see also:
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Exhibitions
2010
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SpeakEasy
Annual Fine Art Show
Gladstone Hotel, Toronto, ON
• Sighting
• Waiting
• Intent
• Dreams
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Elaine Fleck Gallery, Toronto, ON [encaustic painting]
• Intent
• Dreams
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2009
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Cube Gallery, Ottawa, ON
curator Don Monet
• Reverie
• Intent
• Ophelia
• One
• Desire
• Waiting
• Dreams
• Contemplation
• Consequences
• Solitude
• 15 Minutes of Fame
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Living Arts Centre, Mississauga, ON
curator: Cole Swanson
• Desire
• 15 Minutes of Fame
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2008
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Nuit Blanche Toronto
curator: Wayne Baerwaldt
• 15 Minutes of Fame
• Consequences • Contemplation
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2005
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Art Gallery of Algoma,
Sault Ste. Marie, ON
• curator: Michael Burtch
• 15 Minutes of Fame
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