Desert Islands: Message in a Bottle (Depot)
Jen Hutton BOTTLED POET 2010
From Thomas More’s Utopia to the television series Lost, the notion of a mythical island existing outside normal time and space has long haunted the human imagination. In his 1953 essay "Desert Islands," philosopher Gilles Deleuze made a case for just such a place: island as psychogeographic anomaly. “The island,” he wrote, “would be only the dream of humans, and humans, the pure consciousness of the island…The essence of the deserted island is imaginary and not actual, mythological and not geographical.” That Deleuzian paradox gives conceptual direction to the group exhibition “Desert Islands,” currently on view at Pith Gallery in Calgary. For the exhibition, curator Scott Rogers invited nine artists to respond to Deleuze’s text, with wide-ranging results. Montreal artist Michael Coolidge offers viewers the possibility of dream-like repose in a trio of pillow islands hand-painted with empty quadrants of a map. Calgary’s Jason de Haan takes a comparative measure of cosmic and quotidian utopias in a cyanotype of a lunar eclipse and a standing driftwood sculpture with an embedded gold ring. Toronto artist Jen Hutton riffs on Deleuze’s phrase “great Amnesiac” in a text-based drawing and a Google Earth–derived, anagram-treated installation on the gallery's facade based on the building's former existence as a bottle depot. London, UK– and Chicago-based duo Christian Kuras and Duncan MacKenzie tests the perceptive vagaries of future prediction in a painting of a coastal weather station. And Icelandic artist Jóna Hlíf Halldórsdóttir makes the most of a message in a bottle, presenting a bottle of rum that, once emptied by gallery visitors, will carry her interpretive note on Deleuze’s text down the Bow River. Works by Heidi Hove, Amélie Guérin and Mikhel Proulx round out the exhibition. (1018 9 Ave SE, Calgary AB)
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Jóna Hlíf Halldórsdóttir A Message and A Bottle 2010 |
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Christian Kuras & Duncan MacKenzie Various Kinds of Weather 2010 |
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