OCAD - Staff After Hours

January 10 - February 12, 2007
Group Show
OCAD Professional Gallery, Toronto, Ontario

This exhibition was a great opportunity for me to show the OCAD community and my colleagues, what my chosen profession and passion really is. I did one piece for the show, which was first shown at LE Gallery's third anniversary show of October 2006. The piece was entitled Icarus' Vain Search for the Lost Moon Landing Videos. This title was a really more bizarre and playful work, incorporating my nerd first love, Star Wars' Death Star topped off with my mom's hair extension wig from the 1960s. A sleeping beauty inspired mirror with creepy purple dripping chicken foot hung on the wall under a cantilevered crane arm beckoning the viewer to peer into the tiny toy mirror, while it loosely held on the the rope/string that kept the Death Star aloft through a pulley at the end of that crane arm. On the floor, a candelabra turned upside down with a tentacles emerging from where candle sticks would have been housed, slithered towards the Death Star. On the base/platform of the upside down candelabra, a teetering and tenuously balanced scaffold emerged with a another smaller tentacle sprouting from a sliver leaf urn holding or grabbing for a silver leafed pig with wings. Pigs definitely were meant to fly in the face of Man losing the most convincing evidence that we held supporting the fact (or theory) that Man set foot on the Moon in 1969.

The title was inspired from a news item that had little play in the media, that the original Moon landing video was discovered missing in late summer of 2006. There was other footage shown on TV, but it was grainy and didn't have the resolution that the original magnetic tapes beamed to and recorded by a few dishes, like the famous Parkes dish in Australia. This was especially important to find because no copies had been made and the only technology that could view and make a copy of the tapes was due to shut down by 2007. To date (February, 2009) the tapes have still not been found.

I love this odd bastard child work, it had elements that just seemed so carefully insane. I felt like I had taken leave of myself, and it had started with a day dream I had working on the last of Liars Have Need to Have Good Memory (2005), where I imagined this candelabra that walked off by itself like some of the sculptures that appeared in the movie Beetle Juice (1988) by Tim Burton. Odd juxtapositions blossomed, like a 24k gold Death Star model hovering over the skeleton of a building (scaffold) moving with hermit crab like intentions by tentacles, which were becoming more realized and now purple, compared to my earlier less plastic and graphite covered small tentacles on the Laocoon In Hades work from Liars Have Need to Have Good Memory show in (2005). It just looked like it was going to topple over at any moment. Truth was is was very delicate and precarious, but I'm obsessed with making things stable, but creating the illusion of things about to fall over, to give them that more tenuous and precious tenacity of catching something in some shocking-caught-in-the-act Wee Gee like flash photograph before it all comes crashing to a pile of rubble.

Here is what I wrote about it prior to this show in November, 2006:

In this latest piece there is a role-play of characters and objects in a contemporary context. I reference classical mythology and contemporary popular culture (a new mythology to some) by introducing Icarus and icons from the Star Wars saga. Just as Icarus' story is a tragedy of classical and epic mythological proportions, so too is the Star Wars space opera.

Icarus: tried to escape from the kingdom of King Minos (Island of Crete) with his father Daedalus, after being imprisoned in a tower. During the escape, Icarus falls to his death into the ocean by flying too close to the sun with wings constructed from feathers and held together with beeswax, despite Daedalus’ warnings. He was doomed by his own hubris and his father’s past injustices.

The Death Star: those who would be caught by its gaze would be doomed, whether it was a planet or fighter ships. Its power was great, but like any great villainous icon it had its weakness, just as the Gorgons (Medusa) had their own. The Death Star, with a serpentine sculpted wig in this work, bears an ironic if not satirical resemblance to one of the Gorgons. It also alludes to a moon, just as it was confused for in the movie of Star Wars.

These two elements together play out the recent drama of NASA losing significant original moon landing videos. Although on the surface this event seems absurd, the lost videos are representative of a significant and tragic loss, which questions and challenges our very recent past glorified odyssey of landing a man on the moon. This event, without our contemporary need for concrete or photographic truth, now seems more like myth than fact, and it lends further creed to those who believe and tell the stories that the moon landings never even took place, but were staged by NASA and televised from movie sets.

Wax and Wane

March 30 - April 11, 2004
Group Show: Craig Porter & Tania Jaggi Kerr
LE Gallery, Toronto, Ontario

Wax and Wane was the first major show of mine since 1996, after a group show in the AGO titled Art Of Darkness. Between this period I had been creating smaller works for friends, collecting stuff and archiving it in my Mom's basement. I was mostly doing a lot of writing/drawing in sketch books, but I had become a victim of needing to make money and earn a livelihood from the left side of my brain. I was lured into Financial Services and became a Junior Financial Planner for almost 4 years starting in 1996. I also moved back permanently to Toronto 2001.

Wax and Wane primarily revisited earlier explored themes of personal meaning and its creation and subsequent loss. The work for this show, as well as the prior work in the mid 90s through to the present (2009), is mediated through some of conventions of storytelling, using mythology (primarily Greek/Roman) and the suggestion of narrative as a building blocks and reference. I chose the title for the show, Wax and Wane, to connote loss (for both Tania and I), and liked how it suggested cyclic appearance and disappearance (of the moon) and on a real personal level addressed creation and destruction, of things and meaning in the context of this show. I wanted to address these themes and how it unraveled and wove (I like the reference to the three Fates weaving the lives of Man) as narrative in relation to the art object, with their own interaction and the viewer, all the while being cognizant of the context of being "Art Work" in a gallery.

The stories and myths referenced in tandem with the art works, evoked loss and tragedy framed by titles, such as,"Orpheus Turns...", and referencing the flood story, a disastrous event which shows up in most major mythologies in variations (Greek, Norse, many Aboriginal myths and stories ,and, most relevant to this show, the Christian Biblical story of Noah and The Flood).

The material in the work seems almost ancient, or ready to fall apart and rot. I intended the work to have a very earthen look and pallet, as if the works had just recently been unearthed or entombed for thousands of years. I made objects, like an alien elongated human jaw with bees wax cast rows of teeth melted on and dripping, and decrepit wooden scaffold that looked like it had been through a flood with rusted wire and rotted rope holding it barely together, to create the illusion of relics or antiquities.

Using bee's wax and cinnamon helped to invoke pleasant memory, as the scent teased my memory and bubbled out into this temporal and manifest stream of consciousness installation. I found that using Wax/honey (material/food that has been found in Egyptian tombs, surviving thousands of years only to still be edible and intact) was that fecund connection to a past: ancient; yet, fragile and capable of sustenance.

My Grandfather (Inchley) had a farm where he also kept bees, and I've always been fascinated with bees, their culture, history and mythology. Bees were revered in ancient cultures as having a connection to the mortal world and underworld simultaneously, and even in early Western European cultures bees where barometers of a family and their relative health and happiness. Bees could only be raised in a happy harmonious family and bees had to be talked to and told news on a regular basis, especially when families were in trouble or when family members died, lest the bees themselves suffer. This became a ritual: "telling of the bees", whose practice was first established in Hellenistic Greece. This was my belated "telling of the bees" ritual, in hopes that the hive could once again be revived from the seemingly dead.

This show had been entombed inside of me inside of me for over seven years, and its dust and mildew made me itch. This was the second (the first being Frequency in 1996) and more developed show that attempted to reconcile many losses that occurred to me over the period of ten years : of family, friends, collected things/treasures, now forever lost to death, time, earth and real flood waters. The spectres of these all haunted me, and in an attempt to appease and exorcise their spirits, I created these works. The shows that would follow this exhibition expanded further on loss, but also on the curiosity of how loss evolves and is manifested itself into a shape, in terms: memento, or memento mori. I am interested in playing with how a collection serves and is served by the collector, as much as it is the audience that happens upon our respective "cabinets of curiosity".