Past
Exhibitions
Kelly
Mark: Stupid Heaven
September
13 - October 28, 2007
Opening Reception: Thursday September 13, 7-9 pm
Curated
by Barbara Fischer
The
Exhibition Continues at:
The
Blackwood Gallery
September 14 - October
21, 2007
Closing Reception: Sunday October 21, 1-5 pm
 |
| Video
Stills from: "REM" (DVD 2:16:33, colour w/ sound), 2007 |
The
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (Hart House, University of Toronto), in
collaboration with the Blackwood Gallery (University of Toronto at Mississauga),
presents the first major survey of works by Kelly Mark in Toronto. Bringing
together key works from the last ten years, the exhibition includes
drawing, sculpture, video, performance, audio work, as well as multiples
and recent, television-based projects.
Among
the shelves of Kelly Mark’s studio, filled with CDs, books, and
other things, a punch clock clicks every minute and sounds with a loud
clang in 1-hour intervals. For over ten years now, Mark has diligently
punched time cards, signing in and signing out for the time she spends
making art. The time cards are part of “In and Out”, a monumental
work she has pledged to continue until ‘normal retirement age’
– even though it is already in a private collection. This matter-of-fact
diary of labour, combined with Kelly Mark’s self-proscribed persona
as a worker, and the evidence of work as repetitious task – all
this has earned Mark the reputation of working class hero in Toronto’s
art community.
An
interest in everyday moments and monotonous activity is mixed in Kelly
Mark’s work with deadpan humour and self-deprecatory purpose.
In some of her earliest works, she focused on obsessive collecting and
filling time with virtually nonsensical tasks like counting the grains
of salt in a salt-shaker. More recently, her focus has shifted away
from filling time with her own activity to making her work or her own
presence the frame by which to observe the flux of time, of repetition
and events, and of ritual endeavor in the world. One series of photographs
records the same mannequin in a changing window display over the period
of a year; another series documents the multifarious improvisations
by which people have managed to attach notes to broken parking meters.
In “Hiccup”, a multi-channel video-recorded performance,
the artist is seen spending an identical amount of time doing exactly
the same thing in the same location over several days, and thereby highlights
the constancy of change around her – the weather, the light, traffic,
people.
The
current exhibition brings works from the late 1990s together with her
recent interests in television, the medium which feeds on time as no
other. Rather than taking issue with the content of television, however,
Kelly Mark has been interested in the more oblique aspects of its presence,
such as making installations that consist simply in the glow of the
flickering light that it casts, specific to program genre – Porn,
Romance, and so on. The exhibition culminates in the four-room installation
of the new feature length video mash-up, titled “REM”, which
has been culled from over 170 different sources broadcast on TV and
painstakingly edited together into a tour-de-force, dream-like narrative,
where characters lose themselves in others, where time warps, reality
turns into dream and back again. The story is shaped as if to wrest
meaning out of the experience of channel surfing, including attention-span
disorder which might be the temporal condition of television watching.
- Barbara Fischer
The
circulating exhibition and forthcoming catalogue is a joint production
of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, the Blackwood Gallery, and the Mount
St. Vincent University Art Gallery in Halifax.
Biographical Notes:
Born in 1967, Kelly Mark studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and
Design in Halifax before moving to Toronto. Her work has been shown
in numerous exhibitions across Canada and internationally. She is represented
by Wynick/Tuck Gallery in Toronto and Tracey Lawrence in Vancouver.
The exhibition has been made possible with the generous support of The
Canada Council for the Arts.
Event
Calendar
Thursday, September 13, 7-9 pm – Opening reception
at the JMB Gallery, Hart House
Saturday, September 22, 2 pm – Curator’s
talk at JMB Gallery, Canadian Art Gallery Hop
Sunday, September 23, noon to 4 pm – Free bus
tour of University of Toronto galleries starting at noon at the University
of Toronto Art Centre, continuing to the Doris McCarthy Gallery (UofT
at Scarborough), the Blackwood Gallery (UofT at Mississauga), and returning
to the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at Hart House at 4 pm. Kelly Mark
and Barbara Fischer will introduce the exhibition at the Blackwood and
Barnicke Galleries.
Saturday, September 29, the gallery will be open all
night for Nuit Blanche (7 pm through 7 am Sunday morning, September
30)
REVIEWS
Jérome Delgado: "Le Mesure du Tempts " Le Devoir, October 5, 2008
REVIEWS
Laura Kenins: "Work in Progress". The Coast, May 29, 2008
REVIEWS
Robert Reid: "Visual Poet Finds Lyricism in Life's Prosaic Moments". The Record, February 4, 2008
REVIEWS
Robert Enright: "Elegant Stupidities". Border Crossings, PP 20-21 Issue #105, 2008
REVIEWS
Sandra
Q Firmin: "Kelly Mark" Artpapers PP 69-70, Jan/Feb 2008
REVIEWS
Dan
Adler: "Kelly Mark" Artforum. December, 2007
REVIEWS
Sarah
Milroy: "Passing time, wasting time, marking time" The Globe
& Mail. Sept 26, 2007
REVIEWS
Rosemary
Heather : "Kelly Mark: Always Working" Canadian Art. Winter
2007
REVIEWS
Fran
Schechter: "Mark Pushes Paradoxes" Now Magazine. Oct 4, 2007
REVIEWS
Jade
Colbert: "Stupid Heavn" The Newspaper (UofT). Sept 27, 2007
REVIEWS
Andrea
Grassi: "Some Recognition for the Previously Un-Marked" The
Newspaper. Oct 1, 2007
