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Steven Laurie: Art of the Motor
May 31 – July 13
Exhibition Opening Reception & Artist Performance: Saturday May 31, 2008 at 1 PM, all are welcome. Click here to view the performance...
Whitby, Ontario is a community in orbit. While located just beyond the Greater Toronto Area, the “gravitational” effects of its proximity to Canada’s largest city have shaped virtually every aspect of its existence. Its present and its future are inextricably bound to the giant just off to the west.
All because of the automobile. General Motor’s announcement in late 2006 that it will begin manufacturing the new Camaro at its Oshawa plant just a few kilometers down the road denotes the central place of the automobile in satellite communities like Whitby. Big box stores accessible only via the car have replaced the downtown core as the commercial, social and cultural centre(s) of the city, and Whitby, like so many other orbital communities, can sometimes appear to be little more than the nighttime and weekend residence for Toronto-bound commuters. Hemmed in as it is on its eastern and northern sides by acres of parking lots servicing both a GO train commuter station and Iroquois Park, Station Gallery directly experiences the effects of the automotive revolution that drives much of the regional economy.
The reinvention of a classic American muscle car and its manufacture in a region that is the heart of the Canadian automotive industry, then, speaks not only of economics – of the jobs it will save at a manufacturing plant slated for closure – but also of the priorities of an automobile-based and obsessed culture, and how they profoundly affect life here in the orbital zone. Toronto-based artist Steven Laurie grew up in Whitby. Perhaps not surprisingly, his art has everything to do with the social repercussions and meanings of car culture. Though Laurie’s sculpture and media-based work involves the manufacture and use of machines that reference everything from leaf blowers and chainsaws to stationary exercise machinery, his work is entirely automotively rooted. Art works which do absolutely nothing but make noise and produce exhaust fumes – like his Handheld Revver (2005) or Stationary Revving Machine (2005) – employ a vocabulary that has everything to do with the car: glossy paint jobs, splashy decaling, the use of automotive components like chromed exhaust pipes and specialty mufflers, and the sonic qualities that denote a powerful machine. Laurie’s is indeed an “art of the motor.”
For Steven Laurie: Art of the Motor, new and recent work by the artist will be installed in a gallery setting organized to closely resemble a trade show exhibit. Static displays of Laurie’s pieces will be complemented by work that can be activated by gallery visitors. Here, our automotive subculture is front and centre. Click here to view the exhibition catalogue...
Curated by Station Gallery Curator Olexander Wlasenko.
Also featuring: Äutöshöw: David Carlin, Lori Grace Johnson, Dermot Wilson
Äutøshöw: David Carlin, Lori Grace Johnson, Dermot Wilson
May 31 - July 13, 2008Äutøshöw: David Carlin, Lori Grace Johnson, Dermot Wilson examines our need to go faster and the aesthetics of speed through a series of works by three North Bay-based artists that focus upon the mystique of the vehicle as it appears to us now. This exhibition is a re-examination and a reinterpretation of the car as a symbol of progress at a time when progress seems impossible and accidents seem inevitable. For more information visit the official Äutøshöw website here.
French philosopher Paul Virilio has pointed out that every technological advancement has seen the inevitable accidents, the dangers, and the abuses and misuses of that technology – the accumulating catastrophes that colour our world today.
Äutøshöw foregrounds those accidents – like the invention of the drive-in movie theatre in Dermot Wilson’s work, the fouling of our air and the long-term impact of global warming caused in large part by our automotive dependency that appears in David Carlin’s work, and the technological abuses and misuses that figure in Lori Grace Johnson’s sculptural and installational works.
Curated by Station Gallery Curator Olexander Wlasenko.