
Unseeable
Abbas Akhavan, Geoffrey Farmer, Rochelle Goldberg, Kapwani Kiwanga, Duane Linklater
September 18–October 23, 2021
Documentation
available here
The unseeable – that which cannot be seen visually – is a boundary familiar to those in the physical and life sciences whose business is articulating a reality beyond human vision. Our shared condition in a global pandemic, altered by an invisible virus, has made the determinal yet widely ignored structures of our world articulated now more than ever. Our shared social, political, financial and historical realities are made glaringly present – their edges, fault lines and fissures highlighted, refusing to be ignored. What we once glossed over, took for granted in our numerous privileges, that which was unconsciously and consciously unobserved has been overwhelmingly made present. It is hard to imagine that which has been made visible can be unsee
The recent works of Abbas Akhavan, Geoffrey Farmer, Rochelle Goldberg, Kapwani Kiwanga and Duane Linklater negotiate the limits of visible knowledge, not through the absence of the visual, but in their articulation of that which is not. The majority of the works were completed in recent months amidst shifting life situations and focused studio time facilitated by our new logistical restrictions and are the impetus for the exhibition.
Abbas Akhavan’s most current series of subtle, poetic studio experiments utilize pigments and linen, exploiting their unique material particularities. For curtain, 2021, the artist references a Viennese theatre curtain, its undulating folds rendered flat in bold waves of pigment delicately applied to linen and hung directly on the gallery wall. While the familiar red curtain is designed to conceal what occurs behind it, then reveal activity in its absence, Akhavan focuses on that which is meant to remain "invisible", the curtain itself. Its suggestive mimesis leaves nothing but the gallery wall behind. In eighth square, 2021, a grid sequence is cut into pigmented linen but hung vertically from a single point, breaking down the modernist grid suggestion. The work invokes a chess strategy where a pawn reaches the "eighth rank" of the chess board to selectively become a queen, a queer reference for the artist.
Central to the exhibition is Geoffrey Farmer’s My Genealogy, 2021, an immense acid etched brass sculpture. It exists as a sequenced façade of realistic representations of wood planks, which on first encounter resembles both a minimalist installation and a floating dock. Referring to his own subjective “family tree,” a close relative’s lumber truck accident is the catalyst for both personal and familial distress and for this works formal origins of multiple planks of wood, deriving from a historical photograph of the accident scene. The title and work also refer to the use of the term Genealogy in Foucauldian philosophy, a historical technique of questioning commonly assumed philosophical or social beliefs such as “sexuality” or the role of influential power in presumed historical truths. The planks that form the sculpture have their own history as well, clearly bearing their material experience through welds, holes, water stains and a patina of time, articulating only in part their past lives.
Rochelle Goldberg’s sculpture, installation and wall work continues to ask how we can extrapolate beyond the assumed boundaries between living entities and objects. Goldberg’s notion of ‘intraction’ represents an in-between space, where the boundary between one entity and another is destabilized and where the remains of encounters between multiple material and conceptual realities are articulated. The work here, completed between her studio in Berlin and on site at the gallery, continues to summon historical, ecological, religious and poetic subjects. Deconstructing a bouquet of lily flowers, she interleaved sheets of paper between the plant material as it simultaneously dried and rotted, leaving shadows and plant material itself affixed onto the paper. The work, then treated with shellac and graphite, further articulates this temporal process. Her sculptures, concrete casts of an early commercially available doll, a repeating form in her work, and those of hands grasping rocks in motion confound presumptions of our own knowledge of material processes and symbolic history.
Kapwani Kiwanga’s works speak both to architecture as a controlling device for the human body and to the mediation of vision and knowledge itself. Kiwanga’s practice is formed in research, focusing on forgotten or ignored histories which she translates into in her installations, film, sculpture and videos. While seemingly in direct conversation with minimalist and phenomenological discussions in contemporary art history, these works refuse and complicate an easy reading both through their installation in relation to gallery architecture and through the use of black, white and blue shade cloth. Used globally on plants and fields to control light, temperatures and air flow, this agricultural textile allows non-native plants to be grown in foreign soils and climates, a colonial practice used for centuries. Allowing vision to pass through, but be mediated, these works articulate numerous political and personal underlying filters. A subject’s visibility is not neutral, nor is the viewer or the viewers gaze, all are consistently facilitated by external structures and histories. Despite this, our vision and its potential persists.
Duane Linklater’s textile works in relation simultaneously articulate and withhold knowledge. The dyed, stained and painted canvases formally engage recent Western abstraction, painting and art history, yet their accrual of traditional Indigenous materials such as sumac, charcoal and cochineal dye, stake claim to another value system and language entirely. Linklater expands on his work with Cree syllabics (a visual Indigenous writing system), drawing them on the surface of the paintings here. The symbols themselves transform into lines suggestive of mapping, the language of formal abstraction or another symbolic communication altogether. The deep, dark areas that provide the ground for these marks can be read simultaneously as shadows of a figurative head in portraiture, as nonfigurative experiment or the result of a process whose context we do not have access to. It is through these multiple layers of material and cultural translations Linklater addresses knowledge lost and gained.
Valérie Blass
USA
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CZECH REPUBLIC
FUTURA: BLOK III Dilithium
September 7–November 14, 2021
FUTURA, Prague
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CANADA
Two Truths and a Lie
September 21–December 30, 2021
Oakville Galleries
Tanya Lukin Linklater
CANADA
Two Truths and a Lie
September 21–December 30, 2021
Oakville Galleries
*PUBLICATION*
Northern Convergences
Slow Scrape
*PRESS*
o bod
ReIssue
Commonwealth
*PRIZE*
2021 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts
—
USA
Duane Linklater
USA
mymothersside
September 18, 2021–January 16, 2022
Frye Art Museum, Seattle, USA
*PRESS*
The Seattle Times
Abbas Akhavan
UK
curtain call, variations on a folly
August 14–October 17, 2021
Chisenhale Gallery, London
*PRESS*
The Guardian
Time Out New York
The Quietus
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GERMANY
Inventing Nature: Pflanzen in der Kunst
July 24–October 31, 2021
Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe
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TURKEY
Once Upon a Time Inconceivable
September 4–October 29, 2021
Protocinema, Istanbul
*Press*
Artforum
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CZECH REPUBLIC
Dilithium
September 7–November 14, 2021
FUTURA, Prague
—
CANADA
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Exhibition History
Abbas Akhavan, Geoffrey Farmer, Rochelle Goldberg, Kapwani Kiwanga, Duane Linklater
Unseeable
Sept 18–Oct 23, 2021
Charmian Johnson
May 29–July 3, 2021
Ian Wallace
In the Museum
April 10–May 22, 2021
Damian Moppett
Vignettes
February 13–March 27, 2021
Liz Magor
Downer
December 5, 2020–January 30, 2021
Duane Linklater
primaryuse
October 24–November 21, 2020
Elizabeth McIntosh
Mom or Mother
September 12–October 10, 2020
Valérie Blass
La poudre aux yeux: Of smoke in mirrors
May 23–June 27, 2020
Ashes Withyman
Some kind of doctor receiving thunder
February 8–March 14, 2020
Abbas Akhavan
They asked the fox, “Who is your witness?”
He said, “My tail.”
November 23, 2019–January 18, 2020
Christina Mackie
September 21–November 2, 2019
Rochelle Goldberg
May 25–July 20, 2019
gatekeepers
Abbas Akhavan, Valérie Blass, Raymond Boisjoly, Rebecca Brewer, Trisha Brown and Trisha Brown Dance Company, Chris Burden, Raven Chacon, Geoffrey Farmer, Hanne Darboven, Marcel Duchamp, Julia Feyrer, Alex Frost, Cynthia Girard-Renard, Rochelle Goldberg, Dan Graham, Brian Jungen, On Kawara, Janice Kerbel, Christine Sun Kim, Duane Linklater, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Christina Mackie, Myfanwy MacLeod, Liz Magor, Elizabeth McIntosh, Damian Moppett, Stephen Murray, Kate Newby, Jerry Pethick, Eileen Quinlan, Judy Radul, Aurie Ramirez, Rob Renpenning, Marina Roy, Kevin Schmidt, Nick Sikkuark, Michael Snow, Ron Terada, Calder Tsuyuki Tomlinson, Ian Wallace, Nicole Wermers, and Ashes Withyman
Unexplained Parade
February 9–May 11, 2019
Judy Radul
Words No Pictures Pictures No Words
May 11–June 16, 2018
Julia Feyrer
Background Actors
March 16–April 21, 2018
Rebecca Brewer, Rochelle Goldberg, Charmian Johnson, Christina Mackie
Nature
January 26–March 3, 2018
Elizabeth McIntosh
ISLANDS
November 17–December 22, 2017
Ron Terada
TL; DR
September 15–October 28, 2017
Elizabeth McIntosh, Monique Mouton, Silke Otto-Knapp
May 26–July 8, 2017
Ian Wallace
Street Floor Table Page Wall Canvas, 1969–2017
March 31–May 13, 2017
Ashes Withyman
Bullae
March 10–18, 2017
Geoffrey Farmer
The Big Kitchen
January 14–February 25, 2017
Rebecca Brewer
The Holding Sky
November 12–December 17, 2016
Raymond Boisjoly
September 16–October 29, 2016
Damian Moppett
May 6–June 25, 2016
Liz Magor
March 5–April 23, 2016
Brian Jungen
January 22–February 27, 2016
Valérie Blass
To only ever say one thing forever the same thing
November 21, 2015–January 9, 2016
Janice Kerbel
Score
September 12–October 24, 2015
Liz Magor, Jerry Pethick, Ron Tran
A view believed to be yours
May 15–June 27, 2015
Myfanwy MacLeod
TELL HER NOTHING SHE TELLS ALL
March 21–May 2, 2015
Ian Wallace
The Construction Site
January 17–February 28, 2015
Duane Linklater
But the sun is up and you're going?
November 15–December 20, 2014
Ron Terada
Jack
September 19–October 25, 2014
Jerry Pethick
Where sidewalks leap upon the table: works on paper 1966–2000
May 24–June 28, 2014
Rebecca Brewer
The Written Face
March 29–May 10, 2014
Geoffrey Farmer
The Grass and the Banana go for a walk
February 8-March 15, 2014
Gareth Moore
Household Temple Yard
November 26, 2013–January 11, 2014
Damian Moppett
Salute
September 20–November 2, 2013
Brian Jungen, Duane Linklater
Modest Livelihood
June 7–July 20, 2013
Andrea Büttner, Joëlle de La Casinière, Gareth Moore
April 26–June 1, 2013
Raymond Boisjoly
March 1–April 13, 2013
Liz Magor
I is being This
November 16–December 22, 2012
Christina Mackie, Jerry Pethick
Bigger than a book, wilder than a tree
September 14–October 27, 2012
Judy Radul
April 27–June 9, 2012
Julia Feyrer
Alternatives and Opportunities
March 2–April 14, 2012
Ian Wallace
Masculin/Féminin
January 13–February 18, 2012
Ulla von Brandenburg, Guy de Cointet, Geoffrey Farmer, Janice Kerbel, Daria Martin, Judy Radul
People Things Enter Exit
October 28–December 10, 2011
Ron Terada
Jack
September 3–October 8, 2011
Robert Kleyn
Works 1969–1983
May 20–June 25, 2011
Arabella Campbell
March 25–April 30, 2011
Alex Morrison
February 3–March 12, 2011
Brian Jungen
November 19, 2010–January 15, 2011
Kevin Schmidt
September 17–October 23, 2010
Damian Moppett
The Sculptor’s Studio is a Painting
May 21–June 26, 2010
Geoffrey Farmer
The Surgeon and the Photographer
January 29-March 6, 2010
Myfanwy MacLeod
Gold
November 6–December 12, 2009
Ian Wallace
Works 1970–1979
September 18–October 24, 2009
Brian Jungen, Rebecca Belmore, Myfanwy MacLeod, Kevin Schmidt, Alex Morrison, Sam Durant, Ron Terada, Geoffrey Farmer, Jin-me Yoon
Loaded
May 15–June 20, 2009
Christos Dikeakos
March 26–April 25, 2009
Gareth Moore
Uncertain Pilgrimage
January 15–February 14, 2009
Jin-me Yoon
October 30–November 29, 2008
Jerry Pethick
September 12–October 11, 2008
Ron Terada
May 23–June 28, 2008
Germaine Koh
April 11–May 10, 2008
Roy Kiyooka, Damian Moppett, Jerry Pethick, Ian Wallace
Process as Work
February 29–March 29, 2008
Kelly Wood, Monika Grzymala
January 18–February 16, 2008
Alex Morrison
November 23–December 22, 2007
Ian Wallace
October 18–November 17, 2007
Judy Radul
September 7–October 6, 2007
Arabella Campbell
June 8–July 7, 2007
Brian Jungen
April 27–May 26, 2007
Sam Durant
Scenes from the Pilgrim Story: Natural History
March 16–April 14, 2007
Damian Moppett
Progress in Advance of the Fall
January 19–February 24, 2007
Isabelle Pauwels
November 25–December 22, 2006
Geoffrey Farmer
Airliner Open Studio
October 21–November 18, 2006
Kevin Schmidt
September 9–October 7, 2006
Gareth Moore, Jacob Gleeson
St. George Marsh
August 24–September 1, 2006
Christos Dikeakos, Geoffrey Farmer, Arni Haraldsson, Brian Jungen, Roy Kiyooka, Germaine Koh, Myfanwy MacLeod, Damian Moppett, Isabelle Pauwels, Jerry Pethick, Judy Radul, Kevin Schmidt, Ron Terada, Ian Wallace, Jin-me Yoon
274 East 1st
June 3–July 8, 2006
Christos Dikeakos
November 25, 2005–January 16, 2006
Alex Morrison, Isabelle Pauwels, Frances Stark, Johannes Wohnseifer
And to stop you interfering, I shall have to dematerialize you again
October 13–November 19, 2005
Geoffrey Farmer, Brian Jungen, Germaine Koh, Myfanwy MacLeod, Damian Moppett, Alex Morrison, Ron Terada, Ian Wallace, Kelly Wood
Mix with care
July 5–September 24, 2005
Ron Terada
May 20–June 25, 2005
Arabella Campbell, Neil Campbell, Ron Terada, Ian Wallace
Painting After Poverty
April 8–May 14, 2005
Sam Durant
Color Pictures
February 25–March 2, 2005
Germaine Koh
Shell
January 14–February 19, 2005
Roy Kiyooka
Open Window on a Slow Train
December 2004
Jin-me Yoon
Fugitive
October 22–November 27, 2004
Myfanwy MacLeod
Don’t Stop Dreaming
September 10–October 16, 2004
Artist Curating Artists:
Damian Moppett curates Allison Hrabluik and Zin Taylor
May 28–June 26, 2004
Geoffrey Farmer
Every Surface In Some Way Decorated, Altered or Changed Forever (Except the Float)
April 7–May 15, 2004
Artist Curating Artists:
Myfanwy MacLeod curates Kyla Mallett
February 11–March 13, 2004
Damian Moppett
1815/1962
October 30–December 6, 2003
Carsten Höller, Cameron Jamie, Jakob Kolding, Myfanwy MacLeod, Kyla Mallett, Valérie Mréjen, Isabelle Pauwels, Raymond Pettibon, Ron Terada, Lawrence Weiner, Erwin Wurm
Seethe
September 10–October 25, 2003
Iain Baxter, Geoffrey Farmer, Roy Kiyooka, Germaine Koh, Myfanwy MacLeod, Ron Terada
I Sell Security
May 29–August 16, 2003
Kelly Wood
Black Plastic
April 11–May 17, 2003
Ian Wallace
February 28–April 5, 2003
Alex Morrison
Housewrecker
January 17–February 22, 2003
Allyson Clay
November 29–December 21, 2002
Ron Terada
September 6–October 12, 2002