Gallery 44 Database
of Contemporary Canadian Photography

Exhibitions: Finder

Exhibition Name: Finder
From: Mar 6, 2009
To: Apr 11, 2009
Gallery Space: Main Gallery
Curated By: Peggy Gale
Curator Bio: Peggy Gale is an independent curator and writer specializing in media-related and time-based works by contemporary artists. After studying art history in Italy and graduation from the University of Toronto, she worked at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada Council for the Arts, A Space, and Art Metropole, before turning fully to freelance projects in the early 1980s.

International exhibitions with which she has been involved include Canadian representation at the São Paulo Biennale (1977) and Biennale de Paris (1982), as well as OKanada (Berlin, 1982), the first Biennale of the Moving Image at Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid, 1990), and Northern Lights at the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo, 1991. For TV Ontario in 1994, she was curator and on-screen host for the ten-program series Video Art Vidéo, and in 1998 she presented Igloolik Video: A Clear Light at Le Fresnoy (Tourcoing, France), revised as Icelight with Su Ditta for the Oakville Galleries (2000). As visual arts curator for La Biennale de Montréal 2000, she organized the exhibition Tout le temps/Every Time in Montreal; most recently, she was curator for three online exhibitions and principal writer for Video Art in Canada, a website launched in February 2006 as part of the Virtual Museum of Canada. In 2000, she was honoured with the Toronto Arts Award for Visual Art, followed by the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts, 2006.
Artists: Jan Peacock
Description: Jan Peacock presents three new works in this exhibition: Finder, there there, and Account. Each work performs a particular form of scrutiny, stepping away from immediate events in order to tease out the sometimes obtuse and often contradictory aims and methods of the ‘authorized search.’ Small, embedded screens and projections preempt and replace what is most immediate and local in the gallery space, overlaying it with staged or found video material. These works are rejoinders to a culture of forensic obsession and optical precision, both rendered absurd by an unspoken – and often unconscious – attitude of selective accountability. The objects of and motives for the search are slippery.
Media & Techniques:

ethnic/cultural identity:

Canadian

subjects:

travel
technology
psychology
digital technology

themes:

gesture
time
perception
identity/self
freedom/restriction
existential

This database record last modified: Thu, Mar 19, 2009