March 17th to May 6th, 2011
Virutorium by The Kit Collaboration and Robert Saucier
Opening Reception : March 17th at 7PM
Artist Talk : March 19th at 2PM
Difference by Robin Peck
Opening Reception : March 24th at 7PM
Artist Talk : March 26th at 7PM
Difference by Robin Peck and Virutorium by The Kit Collaboration and Robert Saucier. Robin Peck was born in Alberta and is now living in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Robert Saucier is living in Montreal, Quebec, and The Kit Collaboration works out of Great Britain.
A dual solo exhibition: a minimalist installation by Robin Peck in the main gallery and an interactive robotic sound installation by The Kit Collaboration and Robert Saucier in the 1922 gallery.
Difference
Known for his philosophic relation to sculpture, and for his skilled use of subtle physicality, Peck uses basic forms and unexpected materials to inspire questions about space, time, memory, structure, objects, and history.
These raw plaster sculptures bring to mind images of crystallized caverns, mined mountains, or ancient rituals. they are epic as a result of their restraint, as reduction of form brings us to the very end of legibility, a void into which we project meanings. Peck explores the crystalline pyramid, formed by stacked cardboard boxes covered with plaster-impregnated cloth, as graceful and meditative as their materials are common. Once boxes designed to come easily to the hand of the consumer, they are now salvage, haptic sculptural simulacra that are sublimations of his consumption. It is the astounding simplicity and rawness of Peck’s work that makes it so accessible, yet his work also references the history of sculpture, architecture, and three-dimensional design, specifically early 20th century cubist collage, soviet constructivism, minimalism and conceptual art, and contemporary post-modernist consumer-object art.
“In Peck’s oeuvre since the early 1970’s, the stepped form has been a periodic constant. His use of it now looks back not only over his own history, but further, to a time of epic, biblical architectural history, and beyond even that to the geologic time in which crystals are embedded. The regression is to something fundamental: distant but still vital precursors that can dwarf the present. As forms and images, we have lived with them our entire lives. These are ur forms (those from which all others flow, irreducible, the beginnings of originality). We know them from Babel and Marduk, Giza and Saqqarah. They rise out of the sands of legend and imagination, a staple of movies and novels.” – Dion Kliner, “Distance, Difference and Memory,” 2010
Robin Peck is based in Fredericton, New Brunswick where he is an associate professor at Saint Thomas University. He received his MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and later studied art history at UBC. He has shown extensively over the last 40 years, and is also well known as an art writer and curator. His work is included in many public collections including the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Glenbow Museum, and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. He is also the recipient of numerous grants and awards. Recent solo exhibitions include the
Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver (2007) and Diaz Contemporary in Toronto (2010). Recent group exhibitions include enacting abstraction at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2009). He has taught sculpture, art history, and criticism in various universities and colleges including the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, the Emily Carr College of Art and Design, and the Alberta College of Art and Design. His book, Sculpture, A Journey to the Circumference of the Earth was published in 2004.
Virutorium
Virutorium is the second joint project by The Kit Collaboration + Robert Saucier. their first project, Infrasense, was a large-scale sound installation that toured 11 galleries in Canada, UK, USA and Belgium between 2004 to 2006 and dealt with the cultural economy of paranoia surrounding the word ‘virus’ in its biological (sexual), computational (coding), and capital (marketing) forms. Virutorium is an interactive robotic sound installation, a kinetic and aural work that advances themes originated in the Infrasense project. This new project explores the extensive and pervasive cultural dynamics of the ‘virus’ and seeks to highlight how far viral systems and models are influencing bodily and computer based communication systems, modes of capitalism and socio-sexual relations, ultimately contemplating how we construct cultural memories about transient entities that we consider detrimental to our livelihoods.
