Flux is a series of colour photographs that document the interiors of empty houses that are in various stages of renovation. Although frozen into a state of artificial stillness by the camera, the spaces shown are undergoing a period of rapid transformation. The rooms are soiled and bare, but filled with the marks left by past inhabitants. The images provoke questions about our relationship to domestic space and decor: as an extension of our identities, as protective shell, as site of creative expression, as metaphor. The images are elegiac and melancholy, but their rigidly organized composition and appearance of objectivity discourages readings of sentimentality or nostalgia. Many of the interiors shown were covered in paneling in the fifties or sixties. Bared, the walls reveal evidence of past activity: a child’s small drawing, unfaded wallpaper where pictures once hung, and patches of surface darkened by years of repeated contact with the oil from human skin or hair. These marks are overlaid with the traces of more recent processes: the soot stains left at the places where wood panels intersected, or the broken plaster swept into a corner by a carpenter. Renovation aims to erase these abject traces and the debris created by its own processes. Flux is, in some ways, archeological or investigative in nature: aiming to capture the various layers of evidence while they are temporarily laid open and juxtaposed.
Exhibition History:
2006 Prologue I. Republic Gallery, Vancouver.
2006 Home Theatre. SFU gallery. Curated by Bill Jeffries.
2005 ReCollect. Two person show with Mary Kavanagh, curated by Corinna Ghaznavi. A Space, Toronto.
2003 Carol Sawyer and Adalgisa Campos. Or Gallery, Vancouver B.C.
Reviews:
The Georgia Straight, November 23-30, 2006, p. 72. Artists eye rooms with a view, by Robin Laurence.
The Vancouver Sun. November 2 – 8, 2006, p. D23. The banal lives side-by-side with the sublime, by Clint Burnham.
North Shore News, October 20, 2006, p23. Home Theatre explores domestic spaces, by Lisa Foeste.