Toronto artist seeks individuals/groups to participate in project.
Philip Kremer
emeliec...@sympatico.ca or gal...@propellerctr.com
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TORONTO ARTIST SEEKS INDIVIDUALS/GROUPS TO PARTICIPATE IN PROJECT.
Donate unwanted or found small multiple objects (minimum 10) identical or
serial, organic or inorganic etc. Artist will provide stamps for
mailing/pick up objects.
Call 416.537.6443/416.504.7142 for questions/to participate.
Objects will become part of an installation in August at Propeller Centre
for the Visual Arts, Toronto.
Mail to
Permanent Growth Project
888 Dupont St. Studio #103
Toronto, ON M6J 1Z8
Email inquiries: emeliec...@sympatico.ca
Or drop off submissions to
Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts
984 Queen St.
W Toronto, (Queen & Ossington)
Email inquiries gal...@propellerctr.com
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The permanent Growth Project will be a process-based installation that
will take place from July 31st-August 10th, 2002 at Propeller Centre for
the Visual Arts
The objective of the project is to integrate the gallery, the
participants and the artist (myself) into one entity rendering them equal
contributors in the process of the installation. As an artist-run centre,
Propeller facilitates artistic activity with an emphasis on community and
innovation. As such, I have chosen to work site specifically to create an
integrated space with an eclectic collection of found and donated objects.
These objects will be on exhibition (mounted on and into the wall) and
will have been assembled in my studio and in situ. The decisions about
objects, serial or identical, organic or inorganic are left up to the
'participator', the choice derived from the context of their individual
lives, surroundings, circumstances, and desires. This is not a
comparative study but rather an invitation to become a part of the
material and visceral presence of the piece; it is a lived situation that
foregrounds participation rather than representation as its goal. The
objects can be considered a permanent collection, their synthesis and
situation a permanent growth.
The role that I play in the project's construction is
multifaceted. My past work has drawn upon the residue of memory and
bodily experience present in objects and has incorporated found vernacular
material or a specific site which I utilize to explore the nature of this
residue employing an interventionist strategy. In The Permanent Growth
Project I will explore this area of interest in a collaborative way
extending my intervention outward, to affect a greater population and
fully integrate it into the process of the project. By placing adds in
local papers, arts submissions columns, community institutions, and
cultural centres the initial social intervention (call for submissions)
carves an expanded context in which the work can be situated and discussed
providing further opportunity for intervention.
The installation will incorporate the objects that are gifted to the
project as well as ones chosen by me, gathered from the town I grew up in
Paris, Ontario and Toronto, were I currently reside. I wish to create a
giant plastic quilt that contains the objects like a skin and I will
fasten it to the interior walls of Propeller. Connected to the
signification of skin, the folds and pleats of the plastic allude to the
interplay of the diverse folds and layers of cultures and communities.
The body becomes the site of personal history and memory brought together
in community but remains heterogeneous and autonomous parts of the whole
through the contributors express choice of object; the replicas of the
donors corporeal self. The installation taken together will create a
powerful narrative that is constructed through objects pieced together
through their placement and containment in their new embodied skin
The individual histories and memories contained within the disparate
objects are sealed and preserved in the quilting of the plastic skin. The
objects remain visible to the viewer; their stories interwoven and
dialectical, complicated by my choice of placement and method of
incorporating the objects into the skin (the taxidermic intervention).
The use of taxidermy will further my past conceptual and plastic
investigations into notions of preservation and decay and their
museological implications on the individual and the collective.
As an artist I am seeking to provide a substrate for the objects
collected. As a curator I am seeking to organize and shape the manifest
presentation of the synthesized material collection. In the final outcome
of the process the skin is stretched over the interior architecture of
Propeller; mapping a new territory for its practical use as well as
providing an entry-point for conceptual and personal contemplation; the
viewer leaves with new eyes to see the objects of the everyday, a renewed
awareness of the 'Permanent Growth' that in many ways defines the urban
landscape and its inhabitants.
Transplanting objects growing in the urban landscape into a creative
context is analogous to the assertion of the self apart from the
intuitions that cultivate the collectors.
Emelie Chhangur.
April 13, 2002