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After Paradise presents a collection of used, souvenir biscuit tins as an ideal, perpetually blooming garden. What do we save? How do we recognize paradise?
My mother died last year. Collection and loss have very much occupied my thinking as I continue to sort, save or discard her things; choices are made, connections are recognized and new collections imagined.
Paradise is utopically pictured in most cultures as nature reordered, economic, instructional, and reassuringly, enclosed. It is individually characterized by an illusive longing: What shall I keep?
What does it mean? Contemporary thinking however cannot also escape questions of genetic engineering, sexual politics, colonialism, nationalism, and environmental responsibility. After Paradise considers this destabilized ideal in an interior space filled with secondhand containers hoping to keep anxiety away.
You too can collect and save aspects of Paradise.
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Loop Gallery, Toronto. November 8- December 2, 2007 |
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Loop Store |
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Digital prints, 15" x 15" |
Domestic Science continues my interest in the problem of naming through time. In these prints floral images from used biscuit tins are formally identified in printed botanical latin as well as by hand, with their common names. The names suggest a specific placement in science and history; species and cultivars found or bred, celebrated in popular reproduction, used domestically, re-collected and identified again. But reference manuals confuse. Names are updated. Plants change or are no longer propa gated and lost. The images may mean something else. My story. Your story. A choice: Lloyd’s Thread Tin, Stamps, Postcards, Hardware, Spice, Shortbread... found here, given by...I forget. I think I’ve always had it.
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