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Indepth Arts News: "Erica Stocking: Objects to Move the Assemblage Point and Other Tools" 2006-08-05 until 2006-09-02 Artspeak Vancouver, BC, CA
Playing is a serious matter. Like dreaming, play is a unique and vital form of consciousness, but unlike the simulation of a dream, playing occurs in the world. Play requires playmates and/or playthings. By imagining a chair as a throne or a house cat as a child, a player chooses to be in two places at once and balances them by a system of distance equivalences. This experience of unanchored, compound reality is echoed in Castaneda's description of the assemblage point, the ambulatory point where human experience and reality is constructed. Erica Stocking has created tools to concentrate, direct energy, and make it easier to be in two places at once. Objects to Move the Assemblage Point and Other Tools addresses the passerby with instruments of serious play.
Erica Stocking received her BFA in 2004 from Emily Carr Institute and lives in Vancouver. Her exhibition at the Lobby Gallery, within a Vancouver hotel, created a functioning, half-sized hotel room behind the existing gallery wall. Her work has been included in local exhibitions at the Helen Pitt Gallery and the Butchershop Gallery. She is a founding member of Norma, a Vancouver based collective whose work often deals with group identity and draws from visual and performance art histories, pop culture, and social behaviour. Norma's performance and installation works have been exhibited locally at Artspeak, LIVE Biennial of Performance Art, grunt gallery, and Access Gallery.
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This project will be visible in Artspeak's windows while the gallery is closed for August and is curated by Colleen Brown Objects to Move the Assemblage Point and Other Tools will be installed in Artspeak's front entrance and can be viewed from the street through the gallery windows. Every street level window has its own way of introducing its interior. Slick storefronts frame brief tableaux for their ideal visitor. In jumbled and dusty windows there is often an intentional sly nod to the passerby - a newspaper clipping or sequence of noteworthy objects. Windows of smaller shops and services tend to operate like portraits of the owners, mixing tools of the trade with more personal items. These window displays provide the beginnings of stories the pedestrian can choose to enter. In a commercial window the opening of the story being told suggests a clear plot to be followed. Erica Stocking, using a number of genres of display, balances disparate narratives to introduce a story without the linear engine of a plot. Released from serving a predetermined plot, objects in the display can be cast in many roles to become tools for imaginative play.
