From Object to Reference (1983)

An exhibition commissioned by the Carmen Lamanna Gallery, Toronto; June 4 – 30, 1983

Click to see exhibition text and documentation

Or scroll below for exhibition text only

FROM OBJECT TO REFERENCE is a laboratory of experimental art history. It is an initial concrete attempt to locate a tradition within Canadian art, to find the evidence of a history. That is, it brings together these works—separate events, dispersed in the space and time of their original presentation and divergent filiation—in order to let them display a coherent development. This development identifies a character and intention that is specific to the work produced over a period of time in one locale—that is to say, Canadian art of Toronto origin.

The full nature of this development cannot be illustrated in what is essentially an exhibition in process. For instance, the title suggests a development from sculptural object to the conditions of reference established by language or photography, or both together. Due to the circumstances of this exhibition the presentation is weighted to language or photo-textual works. This history, though, basically is a sculptural tradition, but sculpture mediated by language. Part of that mediation has been to direct sculpture from formal objecthood, or formal self-referentiality, to the complex issues of reference outside the work. The works in the exhibition are different tangents of that deflection, whether they establish referentiality by word or photograph or investigate it through the images and texts of media, whether they complicate it artificially or factually, express a subject through an individual voice or index the real.