Re:Visiting looks at the careers of eight living Canadian artists through juxtaposition. Older works are placed in dialogue with newer ones produced by the same artist — in some cases, accompanied by various forms of commentary by each maker on how the earlier work is transformed by the comparison. Each example is quite different. Sometimes, the thread that runs between the works is so strong that the way the later work affects our experience of the earlier work is quite subtle. Other comparisons appear to demonstrate a radical break, where an artist has shifted from one project to a kind of work that implicitly declares that project’s end, perhaps even its contemporary irrelevance, in a purposeful statement that gains force through its cancellation of an associated, previously established position. The comparisons show how an individual artist is uniquely empowered to write and rewrite their own artistic autobiography, by revisiting, recuperating, reinterpreting, revaluing, and/or reusing fragments from their past production, rescuing them from the fixity of the moment of their making and revealing latent possibilities in them, within a dynamic process of making themselves as artistic subjects who enact a unique stance with respect to their own cultural traditions in a constantly changing external world. Ultimately, this exhibition aims to demonstrate through examples the multiplicity of expression that informs, and constantly reinforms, our understanding of the word — debased by generalization, abuse, and overuse — art.

Artist:

Daniel MacDougall
Glenn Lewis
Herménégilde Chiasson
Jin-me Yoon
K.C. Adams
Lucy Hogg
Medrie MacPhee
Ron Shuebrook

—Pan Wendt, Curator