More and Less

For the two person exhibition More and Less, Vancouver artist, Michelle Allard, and London, England artist, Kate Terry, have come together at Eyelevel gallery, to each produce spatially informed installations using inexpensive, readily available materials of coloured thread (Terry) and paper (Allard). While both paper and thread are ubiquitous and disposable, the vibrant colours used act to activate the mundane and minimal into the generous and fanciful. Allard and Terry have chosen the flimsiest of materials for separate yet spatially overlapping installations, recalling the rigorous works of Minimalism, resulting in works that are overtly present yet non-heroic. More and Less signifies an engagement with making more out of less while working within modalities that overlap the subtle with the suggestively obtrusive.

Michelle Allard’s GreenScape, is an in-situ installation produced from large quantities of vibrantly coloured office paper and packing tape. Suggestive of both organic and industrial systems of circulation and accumulation, thousands of sheets of green “highlighter” coloured inkjet paper have been prepared, configured, and installed on site, projecting and interacting with the space on a seemingly confused trajectory within the gallery. Through forming accumulated expanses and plumbing-like circuits of rolled paper, Allard is interested in how such a simple and ubiquitous material transforms, moves, and circulates through negotiation. How it carries the possibility of transcending its use value and original context by aligning it with the superfluous and fanciful. Key to the work is the innate quality of paper as an omnipresent product and commodity, transitory in use, and synonymous with work and expenditure. As a form of memo or office currency, it accumulates, stores, and relays information; representing production, the mass-produced and manufactured. To “manufacture”, among other definitions, is to concoct or invent, the root meaning to “make by hand.”  With an interest in accessibility and mobility, Michelle Allard’s use of common paper and related products has become both a practical and conceptual platform.