May 23 – June 16, 2012
Opening: Friday, June 1, 6:30 – 9 p.m.
THE RED HEAD GALLERY
401 Richmond St. W., Suite 115
Toronto, ON, M5V 3A8
T: 416.504.5654
E: art@redheadgallery.org
www.redheadgallery.org
Hours: Wed–Sat 12–5 p.m
7:30 pm Poetry Reading: by Jim Johnstone,
Julie Roorda,Ruth Roach Pierson, Larry Sulky
Ambient sound piece by Tom Auger
The Red Head Gallery presents Elaine Whittaker’s Cc: me, a mixed media installation of drawing, live bacteria, and sound. The body becomes a site for the infectious nature of language – nuanced, messaged, poetic, copied. Abstracted human figures, sketched using discarded carbon fax typographies, are presented as both wall drawings and insertions in petri dish installations teeming with live bacteria. These spent faxes, of once urgent environmental campaigns, are juxtaposed against crass viral commercial messaging, become shadowy iterations of the body, images of mutable histories, degraded texts, and transformative ecology. Four local poets, Julie Roorda, Jim Johnstone, Ruth Roach Pierson and Larry Sulky, and sound artist, Tom Auger, respond to the work. The poets’ words are, in turn, transformed into evocative tracings of wit, longing, memory, and life. Installations of word, sound and object. The textual, the aural and the visual. The carbon copy of yesterday becomes the transfigured art of today.