Artist: Georgia Dickie
Exhibition title: Agouti Sky
Venue: Oakville Galleries, Oakville, Canada
Date: October, 2019 – January 5, 2020
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Oakville Galleries
Georgia Dickie’s installations are composed from an ever-growing collection of found objects that she accrues in her studio. She selects and positions these according to an ulterior logic that eschews the values and meanings we usually assign to things. Staging, grouping, balancing, and placing are a primary focus of this artist’s practice, activities that makes her presence integral to the presentation of the work.
Agouti Sky stages Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square as a landscape of sorts, made up of the bric-a-brac refuse of society built to consume and discard. A baby chair, boxing gloves, a scrap of lace, a satellite dish: Dickie painstakingly reorders these objects we so easily toss aside into choreographed compositions resembling a reef, a horizon line, and “fields” of conglomerate objects.
She rarely alters her materials, choosing instead to present them as they are, either singled out for individual attention or swept into a larger ecology of forms. Displaced from their original contexts and stripped bare of their prior purpose and use, some of these items become unfamiliar and strange. All we can know of them is what we see now: their material characteristics, colour, texture, and form. These are often the cues that inform the work’s composition, the colour orange or the bend of a wooden beam, for example, signalling the assembly of other structures and shapes.
As with much of Dickie’s work, these installations will be dismantled entirely at the end of an exhibition, with many items returning to the studio to be reconfigured at a later date. A delicately poised composition held together just for now, Agouti Sky offers a parallel to our own fragile world, one seemingly sliding towards imminent environmental collapse.
Georgia Dickie (b.1989, Toronto, Canada) graduated with a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design University in 2011. Recent exhibitions include Jeffrey Stark, New York City, Springsteen, Baltimore; V1 Gallery, Copenhagen; Greene Exhibitions, Los Angeles, USA; Rolando Anselmi, Croy Nielsen, Berlin; Cooper Cole Gallery, The Power Plant, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto. In February 2015, she was the Canada Council for the Arts artist in residence at Acme Studios in London, UK.
Installation view of Georgia Dickie: Agouti Sky at Oakville Galleries, 2019. Photo: Laura Findlay
Installation view of Georgia Dickie: Agouti Sky at Oakville Galleries, 2019. Photo: Laura Findlay
Georgia Dickie, Wendell Spinney (rainmaker) (installation detail), 2019, satellite dish, found objects, collage material, clear resealable bags, thread. Image courtesy of Oakville Galleries. Photo: Laura Findlay
Georgia Dickie, Wiriring (installation detail), 2019, found objects and cable ties. Image courtesy of Oakville Galleries. Photo: Laura Findlay
Georgia Dickie, Interior 4 (London Sketches) (installation detail), 2014, watercolour and collage on paper. Image courtesy of Oakville Galleries. Photo: Laura Findlay
Georgia Dickie, Reef (installation detail), 2019, multi part installation, found objects. Photo: Laura Findlay
Installation view of Georgia Dickie: Agouti Sky at Oakville Galleries, 2019. Photo: Laura Findlay
Georgia Dickie, 3 (installation view), 2019, found objects. Image courtesy of Oakville Galleries. Photo: Laura Findlay
Georgia Dickie, 3 (installation detail), 2019, found objects. Image courtesy of Oakville Galleries. Photo: Laura Findlay
Installation view of Georgia Dickie: Agouti Sky at Oakville Galleries, 2019. Photo: Laura Findlay
Georgia Dickie, Bimbo Hamper (installation view), 2019, found objects, paper towel, belt, case of water bottles. Image courtesy of Oakville Galleries. Photo: Laura Findlay
Georgia Dickie, Till 1–9 (installation detail), 2018–2019, cash register till, found objects. Image courtesy of Oakville Galleries. Photo: Laura Findlay
Installation view of Georgia Dickie: Agouti Sky at Oakville Galleries, 2019. Photo: Laura Findlay
Georgia Dickie, Train, Prepare, Believe (disciples) (installation detail), 2019, found metal and boxing gloves. Image courtesy of Oakville Galleries. Photo: Laura Findlay
Georgia Dickie, Reef (installation detail), 2019, multi part installation, found objects. Image courtesy of Oakville Galleries. Photo: Laura Findlay
Installation view of Georgia Dickie: Agouti Sky at Oakville Galleries. Left: Myrtleherb, 2019, found vine with rocks and objects. Right: And I will shrivel up into a reason, 2019, hat, latex glove, thread. Photo: Laura Findlay
