Under Everything Walked Over
Jerry Ropson
Jo Cook
David Diviney
Dates Showing: November 1 - November 28, 2003
This exhibition presents three emerging artists whose work is poignant, and skillfully humorous. Their work playfully wrestles the notion of the conceptual in contemporary art.
Jerry Ropson (St. John's)
Focusing on the strong narrative element throughout his practice, local artist Jerry Ropson is interested in exploring actavism in its relationship to conceptualism in art creation of art itself. After having collected found correspondence for five years, Ropson will create a text based and narrative installation based on this correspondence, whereby he intentionally leads the viewer in frustrating circles of random detail in seemingly mundance meta-narratives. Ropson's whimsical images and found object installations invite the viewer to piece together the overflow of ordinary pieces of narrative to become intrinsically intertwined within the work.
Jo Cook (Vancouver)
Jo Cook's drawings portray a world where the subconscious revelations of play and the oblique truths of humor collide with our conventional expectations about art. The visual language Cook uses draws on the meandering and improvised narratives of children, the banality of comic books, and the simple, though trenchant, subjective innocence of the idiot savant whose knowledge is arrived at by processes totally antithetical to the rational.
Cook writes that "I've begun to make installations that are a kind of contemporary Memory Theatre with multiple voices, angles, and points of view. The walls of the gallery become an exchange zone where fragments, details and gaps can links and overlap: the quotidian alongside the mythological; the abstract with the visceral; the comic and the embarrassing beside sacred cows."
David Diviney (Alberta)
"David Diviney's sculptures evoke a strangeness, suggesting charged spaces where our sense of mastery over the world is called into question."
Ray Cronin, Contemporary Curator Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.
The high and the low, the conceptual and the physical, the disturbing and the humorous collide in the sculptural work of David Diviney. "My work sets up an oblique comparison between art making and hunting (the quintessential masculine pursuit?) where practice, precision, aim, and ultimately the rophy (the object) dictate success. Within this I am interested in object relations that suggest narrative structures." Using the technique of the readymade, Diviney's sculptures are simultaneously ridiculous, a little distrurbing and highly compelling.
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