Bjorn Copeland and Georgia Dickie at Et al.

Artists: Bjorn Copeland and Georgia Dickie

Exhibition title: CLOSING

Organized by: Simon Cole (COOPER COLE, Toronto)

Venue: Et al., San Francisco, US

Date: March 18 – April 16, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists, COOPER COLE, Toronto and Et al., San Francisco

One always has to know when a stage comes to an end. If we insist on staying longer than the necessary time, we lose the happiness and the meaning of the other stages we have to go through.

Closing cycles, shutting doors, ending chapters – whatever name we give it, what matters is to leave in the past the moments of life that have finished.

Did you lose your job? Has a loving relationship come to an end? Did you leave your parents’ house? Gone to live abroad? Has a long-lasting friendship ended all of a sudden? You can spend a long time wondering why this has happened.

You can tell yourself you won’t take another step until you find out why certain things that were so important and so solid in your life have turned into dust, just like that. But such an attitude will be awfully stressing for everyone involved: your parents, your husband or wife, your friends, your children, your sister.
Everyone is finishing chapters, turning over new leaves, getting on with life, and they will all feel bad seeing you at a standstill.

Things pass, and the best we can do is to let them really go away.

That is why it is so important (however painful it may be!) to destroy souvenirs, move, give lots of things away to orphanages, sell or donate the books you have at home.

Everything in this visible world is a manifestation of the invisible world, of what is going on in our hearts – and getting rid of certain memories also means making some room for other memories to take their place.
Let things go. Release them. Detach yourself from them.

Nobody plays this life with marked cards, so sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Do not expect anything in return, do not expect your efforts to be appreciated, your genius to be discovered, your love to be understood.

Stop turning on your emotional television to watch the same program over and over again, the one that shows how much you suffered from a certain loss: that is only poisoning you, nothing else.

Nothing is more dangerous than not accepting love relationships that are broken off, work that is promised but there is no starting date, decisions that are always put off waiting for the “ideal moment.”

Before a new chapter is begun, the old one has to be finished: tell yourself that what has passed will never come back.

Remember that there was a time when you could live without that thing or that person – nothing is irreplaceable, a habit is not a need.

This may sound so obvious, it may even be difficult, but it is very important.

Closing cycles. Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because that no longer fits your life.

Shut the door, change the record, clean the house, shake off the dust.

Stop being who you were, and change into who you are.

– Paulo Coelho, Closing, 2015

Et al. is pleased to host CLOSING, a 2-person exhibition featuring the works of artists Bjorn Copeland and Georgia Dickie; and organized by Simon Cole, Director of Cooper Cole Gallery in Toronto, Canada.

Bjorn Copeland (b. 1975, Malone, New York, USA) received his BFA with a focus in sculpture from the Road Island School of Design; Providence, RI, USA; and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME, USA. Copeland is also one of the founding members of the seminal electronic music band Black Dice. He has participated in group exhibitions at galleries such Daniel Reich Gallery, CANADA, Gagosian, New York, NY, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Chicago, IL, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL, USA; Standard, Oslo, Norway; David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark, and the Musee D’Art Contemporain De Montreal, Montreal, Canada; amongst others. In addition Copeland has had solo exhibitions at Jack Hanley, New York, NY and San Fransisco, CA; China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles, CA; and Daniel Reich Gallery, New York, NY, USA. Copeland currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Georgia Dickie (b.1989, Toronto, Canada) graduated with a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design University in 2011. Her work addresses the complexities of contemporary object-based practice, and is characterized by a deep interest in found materials and their inherent limitations. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include V1 Gallery, Copenhagen; Greene Exhibitions, Los Angeles; Croy Nielsen, Berlin; Cooper Cole, The Power Plant, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto; Oakville Galleries, Oakville; Nudashank, Baltimore. In February 2015, she was the Canada Council for the Arts artist in residence at Acme Studios in London, UK. Dickie currently lives and works in Toronto, Ontario.