Assume the Position

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Poster-final

ASSUME THE POSITION
Opening Reception Saturday July 9, 2016 7pm
Penny Gallery – 321 5th St S, Lethbridge
M.F.A. Thesis Exhibition July 12-29, 2016 noon-4:30pm Mon-Sat

Working with diverse media including lenticular digital images, ‘magic eye’ pictures, fused plastic beads, and digital video, Assume the Position’s molecular maximalism queers time and space. Artist and audience are implicated in tensions between insider and outsider, visible and invisible, now and then. Unsettled performative images suggest playful approaches and new attitudes toward temporality as strategies for mediating contemporary anxious affects.

KIDS AND YOUTH WELCOME
BRING YOUR GLASSES
WATCH YOUR HEAD

Party in the Front, Business in the Back

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Party in the Front, Business in the Back is an ongoing series of lenticular digital images that can help us envision new temporal possibilities for professional artistic disaster.

The images in Party in the Front, Business in the Back use a combination of 1/12-scale miniatures inexpertly constructed from wood and paper, toys (erasers, play-doh, plastic spiders), and other small objects (rubber bands, pencils, dice). All of them to, to one extent of another, depict “artistic disasters”: things going wrong or flying of control, of just being not quite right. Many are deliberately ambiguous, making use of associative contrast and connotation to leave viewers enchanted but uneasy.

Lenticular images use a transparent plastic film comprised of hundreds of narrow cylindrical lenses (“lenticules”). The lenses refract a different offset image to each eye, which tricks the brain into thinking an image is three-dimensional. Widely used in children’s toys, religious iconography, and vintage porn, lenticular printing implicates the audience by demanding a present viewer’s binocular eyesight to become fully visible. Lenticular prints are a sandwich: a digital print on DisplayTrans backlight media, a layer of optically clear adhesive, and the lens sheet on top, precisely aligned. The photo in back in printed in stripes – one stripe of each image under each lens. My lenticular sheet is 30 lenses per inch, so prints with two images have 60 stripes per inch. (Prints with three base images would have 90 stripes per inch, and so on.) I’m excited by their possibilities for storytelling that use embodied vision to create an ambiguous temporality – one that disrupts the clear vision on which it depends.

Lenticulars expose viewers’ subjectivity by demanding our present bodies with two eyes. These images’ resolution is an illusion produced by my body and its specific position. Their grainy images, even when fully resolved, hold the promise of transforming into something else with the slightest movement. If, physically and textually, the images move, they move temporally as well. Party in the Front’s unstable images are located simultaneously in the past, present, and future. They are haunted by the ghosts of what they are not, of what they might become, and of what they are about to become. They flicker, unstable. Initially composed of two images, the prints become more than two: a physical, visual, and temporal array. Instead of merely reconciling opposites (each defined by what they are not), the image binaries have become inextricably conjoined.

Party in the Front extends my practice’s giddy-but-ambivalent illumination of artists and art institutions behind-the-scenes. This work, with its physically and temporally unstable images (and viewers), might be interpreted, in part, as an attempt to illustrate my own anxieties about economic and professional precarity, as we humans hurdle into the future.

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“Downtown Lethbridge”

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“Downtown Lethbridge” inserted punctuation marks into the external facades of five buildings in the downtown area: the Lethbridge Public Library, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Oddfellows Hall (at the corner of 4th Avenue and 5th Street), Lethbridge Fire Hall #1, and the Trianon Building.

“Downtown Lethbridge” began with the idea of making buildings and their stories legible: their design and architectural style and their actual history and use, as well as the uses and histories that the public assumed or imagined for them. Visually subtle and deliberately ambiguous, they blended in with the structures’ existing design. Punctuation marks give language structure; they are signs that can either aid interpretation or completely change meaning. The punctuation shapes, based on Monotype’s version of Century Schoolbook Bold, were cut with a plasma router from 1/8 stainless steel.This project literalizes the task of ‘reading’ architecture as text, as well as considering that buildings themselves speak.

“Downtown Lethbridge” was commissioned by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, as part of Into the Streets: Avenues for Art, a public art initiative presented in collaboration with Musagetes, an international organization devoted to making art more central in our lives, and Cities for People, an initiative launched by the McConnell Foundation to explore the role of arts and culture in advancing urban resilience and livability. Five artists were invited by the SAAG to propose projects that somehow animated Lethbridge’s downtown area.

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Way Out / Way In

Way Out & Way In
Collaborate traveling exhibition featuring MFA students from the Universities of Lethbridge and Saskatchewan
January 2016 – Penny Building Gallery, Lethbridge
February 2016 – Gordon Snelgrove Gallery, Saskatoon

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Fused Bead Commissions

I happily accept commissions of your favourite humans or other animals in fused beads. Email megan at populust dot ca for more information.

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