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Featuring emerging Toronto artists Anuta Skrypnychenko (photography), Sebastian Butt (video), and CN Tower Liquidation* (sculpture: Sebastian Butt, Xan Hawes and Charlie Murray),
this exhibition maps out "a geography of anonymity" via an exploration of the role of anonymous people in art works.
A geography of anonymity exists in cities where we constantly move around and sit beside people we don't know: people we call strangers. It exists in the photographs found at thrift stores, extracted from the homes of the deceased, and photographs taken of a lonely man on a street corner. We navigate this geography with mixed emotions, sometimes with detachment, while searching for meaning below the surface of our every day lives. The artists in this exhibition are explorers of this geography, which is not uncharted, per-se, but often avoided or ignored. Each work is like a detour; slightly disorienting, surprising, and like all side roads, full of new contour and rich detail.
Using the anonymous person as vehicle, these photo, video, and sculptural works reflect on various themes including voyeurism, nostalgia, the archive, ritualization, and fetish. In each work, a person or people are shown, but always with obscured faces, and their locations are archetypes of locations, such as an apartment, an empty room, a diner with bare white walls. These people could be anyone, anywhere, which begs the question: Where do we imagine they are, and why? Where do they fit into our imaginations? Do we take account of them? How little or how much?
-Anna Kovler, Intern and Guest Curator
* click here for the CN Tower Liquidation Instructional Tour
(Also opening on Nov. 24 in the Lower Gallery and Mezzanine:
Alex D'Arcy, "Nocturnes" and Lauren Nurse, "New Sculpture" )
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