RE: Arrange - Group Show, Harbourfront
http://www.harbourfrontcentre.com/visualarts/2012/re-arrange/
Michael Abraham, John Abrams, Elizabeth D’Agostino, Vanessa Maltese, Lorna Mills, Luke Painter, Craig Porter, David Trautrimas
Curated by Patrick Macaulay
The title of this exhibition is Re: Arrange but it could have also been called Re: Purpose or Re: Think or even Re: Start, as all of these descriptors aptly portray the creative process of the artist in their studio. Artists spend a lot of time playing around. Not “playing,” playing, but being creatively playful. Trying new materials, switching things up, moving things around, all in search of inspiration and resolve in the artistic process. What happens when something is removed or added could be the answer to making something work. The artistic process is all about experimentation; trying new approaches. This exhibition brings eight artists together who are playful in their artistic practice.
–Patrick Macaulay
What a great group of artists to be showing with. I'm really pumped.
In studio image:
This is a revisiting of Archeron's Bed. I've reworked all the elements by recreating or making new pieces to further explore this piece that was originally exhibited at LE in 2007. I'm really excited about how the work is evolving over the years and more reflective of some kind of Dante inspired walk along the bed of Acheron through some primordial/industrial wasteland.
Summary from the RE: Arrange website:
This piece, entitled Archeron’s Bed, references the mythological river of Archeron, the dark and swampy “river of pain”. This mythic river was believed to flow from the living world to Hades, the world of the dead. The duality of this river, with its important connection to both the worlds of the living and the dead, is the starting point for this work.
Archeron’s Bed, revisits and rearranges elements of Porter’s previous work. It seeks to play with and further blur the classical conceptual lines and struggle between the worlds of Humans and of Nature. The installation is simultaneously a vignette of an encroaching industrial and historical scourge, and yet embodies oceanic elements, like coral reefs, mollusks and hydrothermal vents.
Through constructs and reinterpretations of objects, drawn from his own growing and ever changing cabinet of curiosities that he has been building since childhood, Porter’s work explores loss on personal, global and mythic levels, while continuing to investigate the evolution, transgression and dissolution inherent in these themes.
Craig Porter has been practicing and exhibiting since the early 1990s. He holds a BFA – Honours (1991) from York University and an AOCAD (1996) from OCAD, where he is currently employed as the Manager, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and School of Interdisciplinary Studies. Porter has been represented by LE Gallery, Toronto, since 2004.
Porter’s work over the last decade has explored loss and the entropy of things and meaning through the retelling and recontextualization of myth, literature, popular culture references, the canons of Western European art and the minutiae of his personal experience and collected objects.
