HABITAT

The title HABITAT refers to the ways we live and the places we live in, both imagined and real, as they figure in the works assembled for this exhibition. Comfort, convenience, interior design, artistic intervention in private space, the city and the urban retreat are all at play. The exhibition encompasses a variety of approaches, both conceptual and practical, and includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, photographs and domestic objects.

HABITAT introduces the work of the critically acclaimed Vancouver duo Hadley + Maxwell and brings the work of London-based artist Janice Kerbel back to Toronto. Kerbel was recently a Sobey Art Award nominee and will be featured in next May's Montreal Biennial. While Hadley + Maxwell (who currently reside in Berlin) have rearranged an apartment with Duchampian panache in their The Décor Project (2005-6) series, Derek Sullivan has given one of modernist design's iconic chairs a colourful twist. James Carl's dark stone sub woofer is a Brancusi-like mass yet also a mysterious double for the common electronic equipment we know. Eric Glavin's new hard-edge wall painting is extrapolated from the ordered facades of utopian modernist apartment housing and stands in contrast to Ben Reeve's painterly treatment of the banal anonymity of a single-family subdivision house. In contrast Montreal's Pierre Dorion looks on the suburban wasteland with a poetic and precise eye. Also from Montreal, Adrian Norvid presents a caricature of sub-basement to penthouse real estate speculation and Nicolas Baier's work transforms photography into painting while recalling the doomed open-office planning that was once the newest thing. Special editions by Zin Taylor and Corrine Carlson and Marla Hlady's sound objects in the form of cocktail shakers will inspire holiday cheer.

Works by Eric Glavin and Pierre Dorion are courtesy Birch Libralato, Toronto, and Galerie René Blouin, Montreal, respectively.

HABITAT

Künstler: Marla Hlady, Derek Sullivan, Adrian Norvid, Ben Reeves, Nicolas Baier, Zin Taylor