Cohesive Devices
June 24th, 2016 - September 1st, 2016
Graffiti Gallery and Synonym Art Consultation are pleased to present the group exhibition, Cohesive Devices.
Cohesive Devices delves further into our investigation of the cross-sections between photography and language, on a much larger scale. For this show, we seek to explore one of the structural building blocks of language: the cohesive device. Cohesive devices create relationships between clauses, sentences, and paragraphs, serving as both semantic and syntactic guideposts, leading us towards clarity. Beyond simply drawing concepts together, these words have the ability to paint a larger picture, creating a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Cohesive devices can be categorized in relation to their function, which provides a pre-existing curatorial framework to work within. The three main walls of the gallery will be wheatpasted with strips of recurring photographic images that speak to one another through one of the three following categories:
1) agreement/addition/similarity
2) effect/result/consequence
3) opposition/limitation/contradiction
Covering the walls of the large warehouse space of Graffiti Gallery, the repeated photographic images will create a meditative gradient of colour, which will serve as a backdrop for large-scale, hand-rendered text pieces. Each text piece will consist of a single cohesive device that corresponds to the curatorial theme of the wall on which
it is pasted. Isolated from the clauses they would normally link together, these words lose their textual functionality and semantic value. Somewhat formal, clunky, words like “furthermore,” “henceforth,” and “nevertheless” become beautiful poems in their own right, floating silently amongst a sea of pastel photographs. These compound words are themselves subject of their own cohesive power— two or three words smashed together as if by some chemical bond.
The photographers we have invited to participate in Cohesive Devices all possess bodies of work that are internally coherent and interact beautifully with one another. Karen Asher’s intimate, nuanced portraiture, Reza Rezai’s sparsely populated, vivid landscapes, and Graham Wiebe’s candid glimpses into his life are bound together not only by the thematic concept of the cohesive device, but literally, as well, by the wheatpaste that adheres these works to the wall.
With Cohesive Devices, Synonym wants to continue the dialogue about contemporary art and its place in our streets. After this show has run its course, the panels on which these works are wheatpasted will be re-installed outdoors, in their natural habitat, to start a new life, subject to the elements, other street artists, and the imagination of a whole new public viewership.
Full interview with the curators of COHESIVE DEVICES- Chloe Chafe and Andrew Eastman of SYNONYM ART CONSULTATION.
COHESIVE DEVICES - Full interview with the photographers.
Cohesive Devices opens on Friday, June 24th, 7 PM. The opening will not only serve as a showing of the new works but as a fundraiser to support new public art works focused in The North End & West Broadway for Synonym Art Consultation's Wall-to-Wall Mural & Culture Festival 2016.
The opening event will feature 15 of Winnipeg's best DJ's keeping you dancing all night long, local art for purchase, amazing silent auction prizes, food and of course, a bar.
We will be raising funds to execute "The Star Blanket Project" a street art project where artist Kenneth Lavallee will cover Main St walls with Star Blanket patterns to honour Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women as he mentors artists from Red Road Lodge. We will also
be bringing in artists from Cape Dorset and Toronto to paint massive murals on Main St & Sutherland while continuing to hire local talent to paint murals all through West Broadway.