Department for the West

Given that the purpose of a certain activity may be to elucidate complexity rather than to distill the truth, to open up the spaces between things rather than to see them crystallized. Given that we have learned, in two thousand years, that we must master that which is outside, control it and possess it. Given that we have learned to use the tools of logic, of history, of technology, of progress to conquer that which obviates the reason of our being and seeks to neutralize those very tools with which we contour existence. Then the elucidation of this territory requires jumps and leaps that move beyond the dialectic into the geography of space and time exploring the delineation (delineated from within by the tools of the rational world) of the contours of the self, of the world, of life and of death. Here is the birth of a requirement for a poetics. It is with this notion of the poetic, and, perhaps also that of archeology, that we may begin to examine the process involved in the work of Janice Gurney, Stephen Horne, Andre Jodoin, Andy Patton, Beaty Popescu and Brad Brace included in this show. Many of the pieces use photo-mechanical reproductions. Andy Patton presents comic strips (reproduced by colour Xerography) in which various words have been blotted out, changing and recreating the meaning embedded in the text. Andre Jodion presents large blowups of a 1982 issue of Canadian stamps which themselves depict earlier stamps. This series of framings is itself framed by the final reproduction and again by the final appendage of Jodoin’s name below it. These two simple but deliberate layerings of meaning are layered finally with the insertion of the identity of the new authors, in the first case by the inclusion of Patton’s interpretations and in the second by the appendage of Jodoin’s trademark.