January 20 – March 10, 2012
Opening Reception: 20 January 2012, 7 p.m.
MERCER UNION,
A Centre for Contemporary Art
1286 Bloor Street West
Toronto ON, M6H 1N9
T: 416.536.1519
E-mail: sarah@mercerunion.org
www.mercerunion.org
Hours: Tues–Sat 11–6
Originality and the Avant Garde
(On Art and Repetition)
The title of the show is not wholly unique. It borrows from the title of a 1981 Rosalind Krauss text, which questions the avant garde’s attachment tonotions of authenticity and its denial of its own foundation in processes of repetition. The terms of the production and reception of art have shifted since the writing of that text, through both the foregrounding of appropriation as a critical art practice and the rise of sampling at all levels of cultural production. Appropriation and repetition have become central to the way art and ideas circulate, and yet the cult of originality as described by Krauss still overwhelmingly defines our valuation of the contemporary in art. Through a series of doublings and transpositions, the exhibition investigates the potential of repetition as a model for generating meaning. Photographs, film, reflection, projection, the space of the studio and the space of the gallery are superimposed one upon the other in a proliferation of analogues that take for subject their own state of interconnection.
Annie MacDonell is a visual artist whose practice includes film, photography, sculpture, installation and sound. Her work deals with exhausted ideas and images, and the conventions of display as they exist in relation to art and the space of the gallery. She earned a BFA from Ryerson’s School of Image Arts, in Toronto and an MFA from Le Fresnoy, in Tourcoing, France. She has shown work and screened films internationally. Currently, she teaches in the photography department at Ryerson University.