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Indepth Arts News:
"Swell: Montreal Artist Stephen Schofield"
2002-05-20 until 2002-09-15
Toronto Sculpture Garden
Toronto, ON,
CA Canada
Swell, by Montreal artist Stephen Schofield, started from a single drawing of a wind-whipped clothesline with its inherent beauty derived from the violent struggle between wind, pegs and sheets hung on a line. In the context of the Toronto Sculpture Garden, this piece explores more than the interface between urban and suburban spaces and the difference between public and private experiences.
Here, exaggerated clothing forms, fruit deconstructed into fractal format and perky pop spheres are strung together on this structure which has evolved to suggest an outdoor pool. These suspended elements describe a spatial dynamic that is involuted and twisted and which, according to the artist, "parallels the forms and relations our bodies take in the pleasure of eating, sports or love making and wherein proximity, intimacy, confusion, substitution and reversals of our parts takes over as subject. The fractal curve element and the ball element both suggest different and contrasting orders of geometry to the sheet element. If I had thought of the sheet element as being the elegant, baroque aspect of the ordinary world, then the fractal element is the "wired", techno aspect and the ball element is the "popular", plastic aspect. I have brought these elements together to reflect how the objects of our daily world negotiate the promiscuity of their different types, materials and functions."
All the separate elements appear swollen because they were made from temporary moulds of flexible crystal plastic blown up through air produced by a vacuum cleaner running backwards. These elements are variously coloured and are suspended from a steel cradle that measures approximately 5-feet high x 24-feet long x 6-feet deep.
Stephen Schofield has shown nationally and internationally. His most recent solo exhibitions were at The Power Plant, Toronto, and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Calgary. He is represented by the Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto.
The Toronto Sculpture Garden has featured more than 65 artists in over 45 exhibitions since it opened in 1981. It is operated by the City of Toronto's Department of Parks and Recreation. The Garden was developed through the sponsorship of the Louis L. Odette Family, the City of Toronto and the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Culture. Exhibitions are funded and administered by the non-profit L.L.O. Sculpture Garden foundation under the direction of the Garden's Director, Rina Greer, working with a ten member volunteer Art Advisory Board.
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