PROJECT SPACE
JANUARY 3 – JANUARY 26, 2003
RECEPTION: SATURDAY, JANUARY 3 AT 8 PM

LOCATION – STRIDE GALLERY
1004, MACLEOD TRAIL S.E, CALGARY, ALBERTA

PART OF THE HIGH PERFORMANCE RODEO EXHIBITION
CURATED BY LISSA ROBINSON AND MARK CLINTBERG

EXHIBITION INFORMATION

PUT ON is a video screening & exhibition that speaks of theatricality. The featured videos mimic qualities and methods of theatre, and laud traditions of performance. Each work proposes players. They transcribe modes of portraiture – even disingenuous portraiture – the stuff of characterization where screen is practice mirror, vanity prop and device for staging and gazing. Using the body as both site and signifier, all six artists employ idioms of popular culture and the everyday familiar to explore, conflate and contort issues of self or social identity, sexuality, death and interdependency.

MOUTH TO MOUTH is a single projection installation that depicts a fully dressed Stewart lying in a bathtub, underwater, while Smith intermittently aids in her partner’s breath by breathing into his lungs. This work provocatively depicts an intimate working device or system that reinforces the roles humans play in their relationships, sexual, political, or otherwise.

ARTIST BIO

Partners and collaborators since 1993, Glasgow-based SMITH & STEWART’s work explores themes of love, sex and death. Their psychologically charged videos are staged with episodic metaphors that explore ways of relating through the senses.