RHONDA WEPPLER & TREVOR MAHOVSKY, 1985 CAMARO, 2011, INSTALLATION VIEW AT ARTLAB GALLERY
colonialism. In one case the artist is aboriginal, born in Canada, and in the other three cases, the artists are immigrants to Canada, or are from immigrant backgrounds. But all of their work is not so much involved with what we might call identity politics in a more conventional sense, but I think all of them use their identity, and questions around identity, to in a sense make a performance, or a kind of an exaggerated spectacle out of their own kind of investigation into identity. In terms of the urban space, we see several artists working with ideas of suburbia or the urban environment as highly complex, and like a world of mirrors. There is a way in which urban life is shown as something that surrounds us, and at the same time as something that creates wonders and conflicts. Around the body and ideas of excess, there’s a whole kind of myriad of ways in which artists are working, but I think you would note by looking at some of the works that relate to the body that the body seems like it’s fragmentary, and also you could say a site of contestation, we’d call it: some kind of debate. Then, there’s also work that’s simply visually excessive, and really works with some of what we might call the historical sensibilities of the baroque. MF: How would you explain the fold in accessible terms? PM: The fold is not a preoccupation that we’ve ended up being as invested in as we had thought we would, in part because of its complexity. We didn’t want to emphasize it as something that we felt the work was illustrating, but the idea of the fold in simple terms is really about a kind of
issue no.1 / november
2011
9