( ) at Daniel Faria Gallery

Artists: David Altmejd, Steven Beckly, Shannon Bool, Ryan Gander, Mark Lewis, Heather Rowe, Jennifer Rose Sciarrino

Exhibition title: ( )

Venue: Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto, Canada

Date: June 28 – September 7, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto

Daniel Faria Gallery is pleased to present “( )”, a group exhibition featuring works by David Altmejd, Steven Beckly, Shannon Bool, Ryan Gander, Mark Lewis, Heather Rowe and Jennifer Rose Sciarrino.

Parenthesis literally means “to put beside” from the Greek roots par-, -en, and thesis. It is relational: one thing put beside another. One thing within another thing. To function properly, a parenthesis requires a partner; it seeks its other half in order to enclose the space between. It becomes plural: parentheses.

Parentheses act as a frame, holding and protecting what lies between their curved arms. They ask us to look closely at what is there. Seen through a window, the outside world is given parameters. Sometimes the cropped view can offer us more information than the wide view. Parentheses can also be disruptive. They interrupt. They draw us away from the main event if only so that we can return to it with greater clarity. They tell us that we might be missing something, saying, look again.

The works included in this exhibition create and complicate space both inside and outside the frame, whether through technological renderings, material manipulations, or perspectival distortions.

Within the Plexiglas of David Altmejd’s Untitled (Glass and chains), material is not so much contained as it is suspended, creating a delicate geometric drawing that hovers in space. That space is then concentrated and compressed in the sharpened angles

of Heather Rowe’s Untitled (Fragmented frame and mirror), reflected back to us in slices and slivers. The transparent frame of Ryan Gander’s Associative Ghost Template #9, references a collage composed of research images and texts on the subjects of artifice, illusion and invisibility. All that remains are laser cut apertures – empty spaces – referring to the dimensions and placement of the original items.

In Steven Beckly’s Equipoise, a thin gold chain is suspended from a photograph of the backside of a male figure, creating shadows and movement in the space between object and image. Meanwhile, the words from his neon work Forever and ever leak their light onto their surroundings, resisting containment in both semantics and form.

Shannon Bool disturbs the heavily masculine history of modernist architecture with The Weather, a jacquard tapestry of Mies Van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House. We find ourselves looking out of a glass window at an expansive view from inside the house, a perspective which is then challenged by Bool’s overlaid embroidery.

Museum, a film by Mark Lewis, imagines a future when nothing is left of the world except the remnants of Lina Bo Bardi’s infamous installation of paintings on glass panels at MASP in Sao Paulo. Over 1000 high resolution photographs are combined to produce a three dimensional world where a lone cine camera is able to wander and explore. Jennifer Rose Sciarrino’s Folded Facet 2 (Bronze), also originates in the digital realm. A computer-generated shape is bent, skewed, cut and folded. Its surface is then hand-drawn with bronze, creating indexical patterns which shift according to the natural oxidation of the material. The transition of form from computer screen to tangible object conveys an uncanny air of rendered space.