Mix with care

Mix with care featured works by Geoffrey Farmer, Brian Jungen, Germaine Koh, Myfanwy MacLeod, Damian Moppett, Alex Morrison, Ian Wallace and Kelly Wood, and brought together uncommon models of public space to reconceive the notion of the civic plaza.

A 6-foot frog riddled with bullet holes spurting trickles of water stands in a plastic pond at the front of the gallery. Entitled The Fountain heads, Myfanwy MacLeod's sculpture deflates assurance in the mastery of the sovereign individual and quietly derides the audacity of monumental public objects (like sculptured fountains, for example, or corporate-sponsored/decorated spirit bears) that overstate their jurisdiction. Germaine Koh's flexible work Points reconfigures a series of orange pylons to demarcate a detour, corral visitors, or safeguard some sort of unspecified liability. Brian Jungen's plywood cut-out cites the construction hoarding that he purpose-built outside Vancouver's Contemporary Art Gallery, designed with square holes to direct pedestrians' attention to a block of older Yaletown buildings perhaps slated for redevelopment. Open Air Cinema by Alex Morrison shows a graffiti contest taking place on a public common in Kreutzberg, Berlin, thereby flipping acts associated with political protest and street action into the realm of performance and spectacle. Kelly Wood's Toronto Garbage work advances refuse as social critique, while Geoffrey Farmer's new installation entitled And Finally the Street Becomes the Main Character..., yokes a film industry-styled dumpster and fake brick together with an elaborate sound component. A large new mobile by Damian Moppett joins his series of large photographs, Cities of the Future, depicting models of architectural groupings in the studio. Trading one form of abstract space for another, Ian Wallace discerns the dense grid of forces traversing New York’s flashiest enclave in his work, Times Square NYC (July 11,2003) I. Together the works in Mix with care jostle prosaic conventions of a civic plaza and agitate the regrouping of public space.

Mix with care
Geoffrey Farmer, Brian Jungen, Germaine Koh, Myfanwy MacLeod, Damian Moppett, Alex Morrison, Ian Wallace, Kelly Wood

5 July – 16 July, 2005
16 August – 24 September, 2005