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To begin with the exhibition’s title, I consulted The Canadian Style: "A Guide to Writing and Editing," article 7.05, "Ellipsis points." This is what it had to say: "Use three ellipsis points (. . .) to indicate a silence in dialogue, hesitation or interruption in speech, a pause in narrative, or the passage of time. Used this way they are sometimes referred to as suspension points:
‘What is your approach to self-actualization?’
‘...’
‘Let me rephrase that.’
A couple of entries later, this verboten: "Do not use ellipsis points to imply hidden meanings or to separate groups of words for emphasis, as is often done in advertising."
Rules for usage notwithstanding, the sample dialogue provides an appropriate lead-in to this cramped exhibition. Upon entering the gallery, to the left, The following . . .: a 104" x 65.5" canvas, the first hundred words of Foucault’s reading of Velázquez’s Las Meninas hot-foil stamped (letter by letter, sans punctuation and spacing, in English) into a grid-like formation over various layers of gel medium. Is the artist’s use of text a sly response to Foucault’s then-shocking use of painting, not literature, to illustrate the nouvelle critique of representation? Perhaps. But most compelling here is the lack of separation between words, and the primacy that absence gives to each laboured letter, the effect of which frees the viewer to confuse said letters into new words, much like the mirror in Las Meninas confuses the subject position of royalty and spectator.
Moving right, a new grid, this one made up of 12" square mirror panels, arranged eight-high and five-across. Printed on each mirror, a city map. Upon closer inspection (my own reflection looming larger), key intersections, significant buildings. Some of these buildings belonging to government, some of which are . . . restaurants? What begins as a collection of contested sites destined for aerial intervention suddenly turns generic. These could be Any Cities, Anywhere. And what of the elliptical relationship between this work and The following . . .? Could it be found in the mirror in the centre of Las Meninas?
The remainder of the gallery space is dedicated to book works. Here the artist has taken classic literary and analytic texts and drawn on the book’s fore-edges. These drawings, for the most part, can be read as responses and/or sub-texts (in contrast to the literal illustrations manufactured onto the fore-edges of children’s books of yore). Notable examples include masturbation and cigarette smoking (Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own), auto-fellatio (Bataille’s Les larmes d’Eros), and bestiality (Keats’ The Complete Poems). Freud, of course, is also represented (in Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria and, at face value, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious).
The book works appear more splayed than displayed; their longitudinal attachment to the walls facilitated by one-inch wide strips of plastic. This process, in some cases, creates an exaggeration of the drawings’ original scale, an exaggeration that at first glance appears to run counter to the standardizing effect of the mirror work, where cities of different size are rendered over same-sized panels. As for The following . . ., it remains somewhere in middle: while the (standardized) absence of spacing reduces words to the letter, these letters avail themselves to further exaggerations, new words . . . new meanings. But standardized or exaggerated—is it not the same thing?
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