A Riveder le Stelle (2015)

Mary Hambleton and Sara MacLean

January 22 – February 22, 2015

TYPOLOGY Projects is thrilled to announce the launch of our guest curating program with the two person exhibition, A Riveder le Stelle. Featuring a selection of rarely seen works on paper by the late New York painter Mary Hambleton, and a video installation by Toronto artist Sara MacLean, the exhibition is curated by interdisciplinary artist and independent curator Heather Nicol.

Taking its name from the final line of Dante’s Inferno (1314), A Riveder le Stelle, “to gaze once more upon the stars,” is conceived as a virtual conversation between two artists, separated by time, place, and practice, whose work nevertheless manifests striking formal and conceptual correspondences. Among the many such convergences are a mutual interest in the body, the scientific gaze (particularly as it relates to diagnostic medicine), relationships between the infinitesimal and the celestial, and the sense of wonder such scrutiny engenders.

View the press release

http://typology.ca/exhibition/a-riveder-le-stelle/

Stairmasters

Debbie Adams, Melissa Fisher, Seth Scriver

Stairmasters featured three commissioned projects for the inauguration of “Artscape Youngplace”, a fully renovated early 20th century school building transformed into a multipurpose arts facility in downtown Toronto. The commissioned artists created site-specific installations in the building’s three stairwells. While each project occupied a distinct, immersive vision, together they signaled how the creative territorialization of often-overlooked architectural space can heighten the connective, liminal experiences of ascent, descent, and moving-in-between. Stairwells are open-access, but they are often travelled alone -- this interface between pubic and private was considered by the artists as they explored themes of interiority, individuated thought processes, and the singularity of life experiences.

Debbie Adams

Flash

Debbie appropriates imagery from 1950s phonetics flashcards to consider the subjectivity of knowledge, language and meaning. Challenging our understanding of semantic forms of representation, she confounds and captivates viewers by simulating the experience of "not knowing". This varies tremendously: influences like mother-tongue, cultural background, and age affect viewers in different ways. Flash honours the many decades of learning experiences that have transpired within this building - or that may well have been evaded in her stairwell.

Melissa Fisher

Lately, I've just been trying to find the balance

Melissa considers the private and interior quality of her windowless site as a mirror of the individual, occupying her space by demanding its parameters. She employs both positive and negative material in her vinyl-cutting methodology, embracing both yin and yang, leaving no by-product. Viewers encounter familiar shapes, such as circles and triangles - or forms, such as arcs and zigzags - which the artist deftly morphs into evocations of fanciful, dark and enigmatic territories.

Ookie Ookie's trip (Nude Ball Decending The Stairs).jpg

Seth Scriver

Oukee Oukee's Trip

The unabashed nature of Seth Scriver's humour is both delightful and unsettling. Across his creative production, misfortune, misunderstandings or misfits can take on epic proportions; in this "animated mural" he employs the stairs' descent as a platform for witnessing the painful effects of life's compounding, passing events. In spite of it all, Scriver has noted that his protagonist "is still smiling!"

Unarchive

The passage of time and human intervention threaten to erase the past; in response to a building in transition, Unarchive examined over one hundred and sixty years of site history for the inauguration of "Artscape Youngplace", a multipurpose arts facility in Toronto. The rich Givins/Shaw Public School archival collection was mined to provide the basis for an exhibition of new work by six contemporary artists; vitrines of historic displays; and projects made in collaboration with school children. Whether cracking open a box of old photographs, looking through a dusty filing cabinet of letters and documents, or double-clicking a .Zip file of compressed digital information, the provocative pleasure of encountering archival content is a catalytic moment of reorder and reappraisal. The exhibition considers some of the ways that cultural artifacts such as archives, edifices, fims, and monuments frame our understanding of that which is no longer viscerally accessible.

A downloadable catalogue of Unarchive and Stairmasters is available here

Dave Dyment

Students Draw Scenes From Movies Which Were Filmed At Their School

Dave's work involves the obsessive collecting and cataloguing of cultural data, from which he gleans unexpected meanings. "What might kids find interesting about their school's history?" These idiosyncratic displays may provide an answer.

Ian Carr-Harris and Yvonne Lammerich

#3 Givins, 180 Shaw (detail)

Ian and Yvonne's collaboration resulted in the creation of two words that mirror, rebound and cross-reference, highlighting their shared concerns and divergent practices. His text-based work delivers the historic school chant in fresh form; her architecturally oriented project collapses distant, frozen moments within new frameworks of time and space.

Nina Levitt

Elemental

Nina's Elemental redeploys class photographs from Givins/Shaw with imasges from local archival and personal collections, in a bittersweet examination of collective memory and the passage of time.

Lee Henderson

The Nature of the Victory (detail)

Lee explores embodiment, impermanence, passion, and the bravery of individual lives. His work here uses sports memorabilia, which preserves the legacy of athletic victory at Givins/Shaw, but also speaks to decay and loss.