Never Odd or Even
install shot
MKG127, Toronto

The works in this show include a series of objects that range from the vaguely to the eerily familiar. Continuing my interest in material game-playing and the double-take, I reinterpret the replica with several degrees of verisimilitude. I recreate everyday items such as stacks of tape, books, cardboard boxes, toilet paper and paper towel rolls, burnt matches, chewing gum, cigarettes, erasers, a beach-ball, a tennis ball, bottle caps, etc. as either highly detailed, reductive or slightly distorted sculpted replicas. An experiment with the edge between representation and abstraction, the varied approached in replication creates a disorienting environment which challenges the viewer to negotiate between the perceived and the actual.

Arrangements of the objects within the space highlight formal or semantic relationships, and reveal arbitrary taxonomies, hierarchies and ordering systems. Objects, particulary those reproduced as reductive or distorted versions of themselves, are understood through their proximity or relationship to each other, through the networking of nearby forms.

There are numerous tensions present in the work - between the modest individual object and the painstaking reproduction; between the appropriation of familiar existing commodities and the fabrication of singular unique objects; and the transvaluation that results from the gesture of raising base materials to the category of art.

Making use of visual similes, material puns, colour cues, trompe l'oeil and reductive referents, I deconstruct the familiar, creating a multi-layered tangle of perception and knowledge.