everything
needs everything
installation details from Engramme
installation
details from MSVU
installation shot from Eastern Edge
iinstallation
(detail) at Elora Centre for the Arts
160k
installation
(detail) at Open Studio
168 K
installation
at Open Studio
625 overall size 6 x 54 ft.
panorama at Loop
( 136 k)
Everything needs everything plays out in Toronto's business core, its condo corridor and under the Gardiner Expressway at an apocalyptic future moment. As an installation of woodcuts, it is both claustrophobic and immersive. Girls tumble from the sky to protect babies who, perfect and fearless, give them a reason to hope and to act. Shards of glass and chandeliers interrupt the central dramas by spilling into our own space to mark the fragility and extravagance of civilized life.
To paraphrase Susan Sontag's insightful essay - The Imagination of Disaster - science fiction attempts to reassure us with a happy ending that our anxieties about nuclear annihilation and mind numbing routine are not groundless but can be controlled by energetic, inspired intervention. In the process we get to experience the thrill of vicarious destruction. At the end of this work, in a cosmic shift, the chandelier motif reemerges as a newly forming and elegant rythymic pattern but one without human occupants. Nonetheless, Everything needs everything is concerned with the present and our mutual dependency. It is about not giving up and not giving up on each other.
An earlier version of this work was installed at Loop, in Toronto, Canada 2004 and in future will be exhibited in a touring exhibition with Yael Brotman.
The artist would like to thank the Ontario Arts Council for a Material Assistance Grant for the installation at Loop
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