Dimensionality takes assumptions of perspective coming to an end, or mutating under new environmental pressures – video games, computer animation, 3-D computer models – as its generative trope. Curator, Andy Patton has assembled a group of artists whose specific practices address the new spaces of digital realities. The works in the exhibition are often diagrammatic and stripped of worldly detail. They declare an involvement with information instead of sensuous phenomena. The participating artists don’t produce the sort of naturalist space we’ve seen for the last few centuries, rather, their space is structured like that of video games; a space that’s only convincing if it streams rapidly by, before its too-generalized surfaces can be inspected. Deep and convincing, as though you could walk into it. As Patton states, “Star Trek was wrong: space is the initial frontier.”
Photo Credit: Peter MacCallum
Documentation
Artist Bios
Sheila Ahearst
Sheila Ahearst was born in Ottawa, Ontario and studied Fine Arts at york University. She was a board member at YYZ from 1986 to 1994. She has exhibited across Canada including The Art Gallery of Ontario, London Regional Art & Historical Museaum and Homer Watson House. Sheila is represented by Wynick/Tuck Gallery. She lives and works in Toronto.
Robert Fones
Robert Fones was born in London, Ontario in 1949. He has worked in a variety of media including sculpture, painting, woodblock printmaking and photography. In his work he has investigated the transition from manual to industrail production, the hidden narratives of geological and cultural change, and ambiguities of pictoral space. He has published extensively, including artists’ books with Coach House Books and Art Metropole and critical writing in Parachute, Vangaurd and C Magazine. His work is in the collections at the AGO, The National Gallery of Canada and numerous private and corporate collections. Fones currently teaches at the faculty of Architecture, Landscape & Design at the University of Toronto.
Mora Gamblin
Mora Gamblin is an artist based in Toronto. She recently graduated from the Toronto School of Art with a Diploma in fine art. Her artistic practice attempts to generate new spacial experiences based on the work of the American artist Donald Judd. Currently she is studying industrial design at Humber College.
Nestor Kruger
Nestor Kruger was born in 1965 in Montreal, Quebec. He graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto in 1989. He has hd solo exhibitions at Mercer Union, the Art Gallery of Ontario, as part of their Present Tense series, Optica gallery in Montreal and most recently at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. He has also participated in many group exhibitions here and abroad. He is currently represented by goodwater in Toronto.
Angela Leach
Angela Leach has continued to develop and exhibit a body of work investigating geometric abstract painting since she graduated from Ontario College of Art in 1989. Leach’s early work was presented with the artist collective Painting Disorders and she is currently represented by Wynick/Tuck Gallery (Toronto), State Gallery (Vancouver) and Halde Galerie (Switzerland).
Kristen Peterson
Kristen Peterson holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from McGill University, a diploma of Fine Arts from the Toronto School of Art, and she is currently completing a Masters of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto. Peterson’s drawings made using tape or cut vinyl applied directly to the wall, explore how space is created and percieved.
David Reed
David Reed is a Californian who lives and works in New York. After deciding that he wanted to become a bedroom painter, he inserted paintings, through video, into the bedrooms from Alfred Hichcock’s film Vertigo. He exhibits with Max Protetch Gallery in New York.
Andy pattton
Andy pattton lives and works in Toronto. He has exhibited at the Biennale of Sydney, the AGO and the National Gallery. Over the last decade he has made wall paintings and abandoned architectural sites. He periodically writes on art and poetry, and curated Information Systems, and (with Janice Gurney and Alan Tregebov) The Interpretation of Architecture during the period he was a board member of YYZ.. He was also a founding member of YYZ Publications and is a visiting scholar at the Centre of Baalquisian Studies in London, Ontario.
Featured in YYZINE: VOLUME 5, ISSUE 5