CARLA GARNET
David Clarkson, Ares Arcadia Mars Cave Complex, 2008
Michelle Gay, timer, blow, 2003 (detail - interface - screen shot C. Gay, computer build C.+ M.Gay)
January 19 to March 17, 2013
David Clarkson and Michelle Gay
Space and Time
Curated by: Carla Garnet
A recent graduate of OCAD University’s MFA program, Clarkson began work on his multi-media Mars Series more than ten years ago, exhibiting different aspects of this project as it has progressed in New York, Germany and Spain, but never before in Canada.
Michelle Gay’s work explores the parameters of programming, in what could be called ‘data space’ by visualizing spaces that are not, strictly speaking, inside the computer or descriptive of an imaginary inner journey. Her texts may be seen as set in a cultural or social spaces shared by others, as well as being individually internalized.
Such virtual, cultural and technological data spaces also appear in different aspects of David Clarkson’s Mars Series. Clarkson’s architectural Mars Models visualize a potential landscape on the border of scientific solution and sci-fi speculation, while his videos trace a cultural or social space of Mars in the popular imagination, as seen in films, novels or songs. Seen together, these two bodies of work open up an arena for speculative thought, experimentation, new observations and potentially new ways of imagining the temporal within real and fictive space.
Featuring drawing, painting and sculptural new media work by David Clarkson and Michelle Gay this two-person show explores networks of the technological, cultural, virtual, mythic and historical, substance nested in notions of space and time.
The intention of this coupling is not to create a simple binary, but to show how versions of inner and outer space operate in both artistic practices and how each practice works to unpack the other as well as the virtual/imaginary.
