MAIN SPACE EXHIBITION
JANUARY 5 – JANUARY 27, 2001
RECEPTION: FRIDAY, JANUARY 12, 2001 AT 8 PM
ARTIST TALK: SATURDAY, JANUARY 13, 2001 AT 2 PM

LOCATION – STRIDE GALLERY
722, 11 AVE S.W, CALGARY, ALBERTA

 

EXHIBITION INFORMATION

During his residency at the Stride Gallery, January 5th to 27th, 2001, Calgary artist Mark Dicey will work on a multi-media installation, sound and music.

DR(AW)UMMINGSEQUENCE 2001 encompasses the spirit of free improvised music and open undefined concepts of drawing. Dicey has been exploring these areas for many years and believes that pure exploration in both music and visual art forms require chances to be taken and rules/traditions to be broken. In conjunction with the ongoing multi-media installation that will develop in the space, he will collaborate on selected days with 15 chosen artist from the music and visual arts communities. These “sessions” (approximately one hour in length) will be video recorded and available for viewing throughout the exhibition while he uses traditional and not to traditional materials (found objects, junk store materials, etc.) within the space. Like the studio, the Gallery will become a work environment providing freedom for exploration. Dicey’s work over the years has taken a multi-media approach including performance art, music, installation, static sculpture, painting, and drawing. During his residency at the Stride Gallery, Dicey will be able to further pursue his exploration in sound, music, and visual art.

 

ARTIST BIO

MARK DICEY is an artist that has contributed to the Calgary arts community for over 15 years. Graduating from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 1983, Dicey has been active in many disciplines since. His work is represented in several collections around the province, including the Nickle Arts Museum and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

 

EXHIBITION TEXT

UNWRAPPING REALITY

It’s always those unsaid things that count the most
For children whom we’ve whispered secrets
–whispers they’re to hold like sacred text

Private– in these quiet confines of secrecy
Bursting at the lips to unravel nostalgic tales of confidence
This jurisdiction of infinite potential

Those images, the catch in the corner of your eye, these most startling half
heard echoes of something possible
Their greater manifest when coming together a tiny sum of tinier treasures

Now who’s got secret, you’ve got, we’ve got something to share

Half remembered somethings—- placed in the hands of the guild —— an
artist sketch
Rooms without walls, borders without domain

Slow time opaque pavilions moving in and out of this natural flux

Curved air, pursed lips, hot breath over frostbitten ears
Hands exploding in sync with a forgotten algorithm

Linen stretched across cool floors coated in dust and skin binding together
walkways of lives and hearts

I got me something
Something Comprised of half heard anecdotes and cerebral causation,
rumors beget rumors

Coming together, something possessed, momentary snapshots of
Misnamed faces, unlearned lessons and accidental transmission
Get something that resembles this that and the other

Children mumbling spells and adults queuing to fill coffers with promises
In line with some kind of parallel realm, those of distant memories of what it
is to piece, install our beings with something bigger for the mind

How one builds the other, how we accumulate the most minute perception of
memory,
of cracked sidewalks and novel obsessions

Turning rocks, rummaging streets and people to uncover the blind worlds,
shaded
manuscripts
These accomplices in those sotto voce miracles

They got caves filled with distance and darkness
New fantastic submersible cathedrals, temples, synagogues symbolic of
these higher
order ever promising maybes.
And for I the disconnected, gravity bound malls, outlet stores filled with
identical identity manufactured on the backs of those from who we withhold
the means.
Conscience connects constantly— dots between the horizon of who we want
to be and
who we are, where we buy it and where we treasure it. Mansions made of
long extinct
forests spread out like virus fuelled by the antiquated notions of what it is to
have.
What is it to want to know something? What it is that rummages through the
impeccable catacombs of our dreams, bubbles through our understanding,
creeps to the catch of our eye?

A crisis of human condition, to want to know how the story ends before we
live it, to
want to understand something before it understands itself.

Stories without structure, word bites, point form beacons of where to look
and what to
find when we get there. I understand something because I know what it is to
not
understand something else, a life long process of deduction, eliminating the
possibilities
of what it could be by deducing what it ain’t. Gathering your small tribe
around an
object that has fallen from deep space, extraordinary encounters in an
ordinary world.
Imposing meaning on cosmic shrapnel, those claustrophobic confining
spaces of
conformity, stuffing identity into the other, close quartered colonialism,
defining the other by what we want to see.

Found objects, formerly valuable potential, strewn amongst the concrete and
suburbs,
out of fashion and out of time refitted from a memory. The fortune of liquid
transistors
firing at the appropriate intervals engineering some internal electric wonder.
An image
entered, a thought returned. Sounds like this, a broken melody from an
internal jukebox, spinning lavish dervishes in random order, sticking and
reverberating from all manner of sensory drive.

Generating a collective pool of senses combining for the many grand links of friendship. Mark Dicey, Mark Dicey, Mark Dicey, Mark Dicey a union of all things immeasurable and something known, bounces in from his great beyond astride gallant old world drums humming life’s jingles, dangling art from this new world’s walls, pictures of an exhibition, held outside. It means what you want it to mean. Something other is there and at the same time, here. Our juggernaut drifting from an internal hemorrhage of time, as alive as you want it to be as limitless as you are able to imagine…this is it, all it ever will be, the glamour of disposable dreams and anonymous hopes.

Faust

FAUST: Diagnosed with a brain tumor in his youth, he survived a lengthy ordeal of radiation and surgery to earn a double degree from the University of Calgary in Chinese Buddhism. His preference is for word bite, thug poetry and prose, linking images and streaming meaning, as a tour guide would direct tourists, believing the reader has capacity with his/her own internal structure to fit the blocks of words, the layers of data, as they see fit. This is underpinned be a deep seated belief in Sunyata, the essential nothingness/emptiness of something, vast oceans of things that only shadow the essential truth that everything is manifest from our desire to impose meaning and form but in itself it does not exist.