The Mechanical Self
Cathy Daley, Micah Lexier and Patrick Traer
January 24 - March 23, 2012
Kenderdine Art Gallery
Curated by Leah Taylor
This exhibition highlights three artists drawn from the University of Saskatchewan Art Collection, reflecting the diversity in the collection’s contemporary acquisitions. The selected works collectively refer to the body as site. Cathy Daley, Micah Lexier, and Patrick Traer each investigate subject matter that is inherently referential to the self, illuminating thematic threads that are arrived at through the material content as much as the conceptual content. Together their works create an illusionary history of our contemporary culture, imbued by commodification, production, and consumption. as seen through the lens of personal experiences.
In the seminal essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin posits, “In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art." In locating one’s self in contemporary culture, the idea of “self” is not as much seen in these works as it is imagined by what is not visible, the artists utilize technological mediums to mechanically produce and reproduce (in the case of Lexier’s multiples).
Cathey Daley’s large scale drawings rendered in pastel and charcoal, investigate the powerful gestures that provoke memories of the feminine form within Western culture. Micah Lexier has focused on elemental themes of time, mortality, language, and systems, using industrial everyday materials, in this instance, cardboard boxes, to visualize autobiographical measurements. Patrick Traer “investigates questions of gender, sexualities, the psychosocial dimensions of anxieties as aspects of the contemporary zeitgeist.”
Through the constraints of limited choice materials, the artists in this exhibition complicate the work by conceptual investigations, unpacking their personalized interpretations of contemporary culture through rhetoric, fetishization, melancholy and systemization. The viewer is left to consider the alternate modes of representing the “self” by considering the suggestive and subtle cues being offered in these works.
