17 March–22 April, 2000

The reconfiguration of everyday and disposable objects into art (images and objects) has been a concern in the work of Vancouver artists Geoffrey Farmer, Damian Moppett and Kelly Wood and Toronto artist Germaine Koh. Via photography, video and sculpture the artists transform banal materials into the likes of tinfoil sculptures, photographed wax constructions, aestheticized garbage and a growing dustball. The artists rearrange excess material into art objects both lasting and ephemeral in a self-aware gesture that speaks to our consumer culture in this late capitalist society.

Following in the vein of shows such as Waste Management curated by Christina Ritchie at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Self-Conscious is concerned with the modernist notions of the readymade and the everyday as they are carried into the contemporary. Ritchie has written in the Waste Management catalogue: “The art of the 1990s has witnessed a growing involvement with everyday life and increasingly encompasses the world of mundane reality. This is often a world of contingency, built on informal relations that are temporary and fluid.”

Farmer, Koh, Moppett and Wood are particularly involved in the temporary, using materials which are not necessarily classified as detritus, but are disposable and dynamic in their “negative” connotations. Moppett and Wood capture the temporary on film, while Koh stabilizes the temporary in object form and Farmer creates installations which are object oriented but in which the objects are not created with longevity as a priority. The strategies used by these four artists are indebted to art history and critical theory resulting in a body of work which is at once playful and self-conscious.