Excision

Michelle Bellemare, Robert Bean and Michael Maranda

23.2.08 - 23.3.08
Opening 23.2.08   4 – 7pm

twenty+3 projects is pleased to present Excision, an exhibition of text-inspired works by three visual artists from Canada - Michelle Bellemare, Robert Bean and Michael Maranda. This exhibition has been guest curated by Toronto artist/curator, Cheryl Sourkes.
  
One may see Excision as a response to an era where words have become manipulative tools, a cynical era whose values are dominated by commercialism and fundamentalism. These artists have responded with language that dithers or else with blank spaces that mark the place where text once stood.
  
Michelle Bellemare’s Edit is a time-based work. It shows an email in the process of composition. This message seems to be in response to a previous one, possibly of an intimate nature. Bellemare writes, “Every word is measured, tentative – attempting some form of guarded warmth. Phrases are typed then deleted, only to be replaced with another phrase which reveals less.”
  
Robert Bean’s Verbatim is in two parts, an eight-foot long image of a typewriter ribbon and a series of crumpled up typewriter études. These photographs are actually scans of found objects. Bean writes, “The prints are ‘contact images’ that remember and forget the earlier technological processes of photography and typewriting. As the unintended graffiti of a prior vocation, these marks register a presence and an absence.”
  
Michael Maranda’s bookwork Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard: Livre takes erasure a step further. In this piece it’s the negative space that has been inked, while the place where text once stood now lies empty. Maranda writes, “In 1914, Mallarmé’s poem, Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard: Poème, was published by the Nouvelle Revue Français. The poem ‘works’ only as a typographical object. Then in 1969, Marcel Broodthaers re-published a version of the poem as Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard: Image. Here solid black bands stand in for the text of the poem.” In Maranda’s iteration language moves into complete oblivion. The spaces once occupied by Mallarmé's text and later by Broodthaer's black bands are now blank areas set off by blocks of cream-coloured ink.

There will be a series of events connected with the exhibition. See below.

The exhibition is open 12 - 5pm Saturdays or by appointment.