2016
Installation using Water vapour, lights, custom mechanisms
First exhibited at Angell Gallery, Toronto.
Typically presented alongside the artwork Infinite Newsfeed
Created with the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts
Two clouds move towards each other and collide in a ring of light. They break into nothingness. The phenomenon repeats every 12 seconds.
Two clouds of water vapour emerge from holes in opposite gallery walls and float toward each other. They collide and dissipate into nothingness, a phenomenon that repeats in perpetuity. The artwork is simultaneously a spectacle, and an over-elaborate exercise in futility. This large-scale installation occupies the entire main gallery space and generates over 3000 litres of water vapour per hour. It is the dramatic and conceptual centrepiece of the exhibition Art & Inactivism, tapping into a sense of powerlessness and puzzlement over the state of our current public discourse.
My 2016 solo exhibition at Angell Gallery, titled Art & Inactivism was a watershed moment in my artistic output. To this point, my artwork had explored the liminal zone between the material and the immaterial, between legibility and illegibility, and between content and form. In the three works presented in this exhibition, I examined how that zone manifested itself in our culture.
Something Something National Conversation (in 2 characters or less) is a mediation on how communication technologies—-social media in particular-—overload our sense of legibility. It is a visual metaphor for the way digital culture has transformed our understanding of “content” from the way it was once defined—-as the substantive meaning of a text—-into content as we now know it: an amorphous type of capital which, like other types of capital, exists primarily as a means to reproduce itself.
I began this work in 2015 and, either through prescience or just coincidence, debuted it shortly after the 2016 American presidential election. The election, of course, was a major turning point in how we looked at online discourse. It was no longer harmless. What had seemed, at the time, like just a bunch of hot air online had conjured a very real presidency. It was like a magic trick.
The sleight of hand, it turned out, was happening in that liminal zone. This sculpture is a monument to that zone between the old idea of content-as-substance and the new idea of content-as-volume.