2008 - Yvonne Lammerich

“Belief”, Diaz Contemporary, Toronto, 2008.

BELIEF 1 (2008); BELIEF 2 (2008)

WAVE (2008); WAVE / WORD (2008); WAVE / COLUMN (2008)

RE(A)D (2008)

BLUE; WHITE; ORANGE (all 2008)

This exhibition was the first large-scale presentation of my work since moving to Toronto. It featured BELIEF 1 (2008) and BELIEF 2 (2008), which gave their titles to the exhibition.

The work BELIEF consists of two flat, vertically oriented surfaces formed from rigid plastic panels, canvases of a sort, from which complex shapes have been cut and extracted. The extracted elements are reconfigured through a series of folding operations so as to form the three-dimensional figure of a chair or a table – primary structures that annunciate being and making, action and rest. The resultant objects are then situated at a distance from the wall, just wide enough to allow the viewer to move through it. It is as if the vector formed by that movement, in which vision is eclipsed, gave figure to the threshold – at once linking and dividing the intensities of thought and feeling to and from the extended objects populating our world; as if the work ultimately resided neither in the inscribed surface, nor in the dimensioned object, but in this movement that traverses the distance between them.

WAVE (2008)

WAVE is based on an earlier work shown in Montreal (BLACK WAVE). Here, however, the Cartesian grid has been subverted by the axial extensions of the body to insinuate a fold and suggest the motion of a wave, perhaps even the sound of the wave’s curling.

WAVE / WORD (2008)

The word ‘wave’ is constructed of three-dimensional letter-forms that the viewer reads by peering into an opening at the bottom of each of the hollowed out forms, identifying the letter through its unfamiliar but ultimately recognizable hollow negative shape. In deciphering each the letter-forms, the viewer rehearses the simultaneity of occupying both the sign and its space.

WAVE / COLUMN (2008)

The same number of pieces that are magnetically attached to the wall in WAVE, when stacked up, form a column the height of my body.

5′ 7.5″ (BLUE, WHITE, ORANGE) (2008)

The size of 5′ 7.5 is related to my body height. This work targets the body as subject matter. The colours at the centre of the ‘targets’ in BLUE and ORANGE constitute skin colours of specific individuals, one light-skinned, one dark-skinned. In WHITE, the target’s centre is a blend of both. In all three, the colours of the outer rings are component colours that make up those skin colours. Significant in these paintings is the record of the body’s tremor in painting the target with my outstretched arm in describing the concentric circles. One purpose in this work was to neutralize through colour the socio/political bias of racial identity.

RE(A)D (2008)

RE(A)D concerns the question of perspectival position, employing the art historical difference between classical and contemporary assumptions of spatial relations. The work consists of a series of chairs that emerge from drawing to an independent object, a red chair, which becomes the position from which the viewer, when seated, can ‘read’ the shift of view from a standing to the sitting mode of a painted window on the opposite wall, experiencing the alignment of spatial relations that occupy that perspectival space.