January 19 – March 5, 2006
Quantal Strife
Works by Scott Carruthers, Crystal Mowry & Marc NguiCurated by Sally McKay
Art is an invitation. Art is for everyone. If you like art, video games, brain teasers, graphic novels, zines and thinking about how the world works, this is a contemporary art show for you. You’ll enjoy the catalogue too which is full of images from the show, conversations about art, and Marc Ngui’s inimitable illustrations.
Scott Carruthers draws... and draws, and draws. Working fast to bypass moments of self-censorship, he fills the walls with immersive, potent iconography. Crystal Mowry is creating her own miniature version of the gardens of Versailles. A small camera travels through the installation, broadcasting the hypothetical point of view of tiny people, riding in a tiny carriage, through this fabrication of a fabricated landscape. Marc Ngui, known primarily for his work as a graphic novelist, has been making drawings based on concepts in the hefty theoretical tome A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. All the works in this show are signposts to a thought process, a body of knowledge, or a frame of reference. Join us!
About the Artists
Scott Carruthers is an artist based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1995 and Sheridan College in 1999. Since then, he has been active in the Toronto art community. He was a cofounder and exhibiting artist in the Impure collective, a group of artists who organized exhibitions in Toronto between 1994 and 1998. In 1999, he and Tanya Read opened Fly Gallery, a storefront window which functions as an alternative exhibition space for artists. The Fly Gallery continues as an ongoing project. He has worked as a bike courier in Toronto since 1988. The artist is grateful to the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council.
Crystal Mowry is an emerging artist currently residing in Guelph, Ontario. She is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design (AOCAD, 2000) and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (MFA, 2002). Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Calgary, The Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax), Queens Park (Toronto) and the Klondike Institute of Art & Culture (Dawson City). Her recent projects include collaborations with Panya Clark Espinal (as Liminal Solutions) for the Manchester Letherium Ideas Competition exhibited at Cornerhouse Gallery (Manchester, UK) and “The Terrarium Project” at Harbourfront Centre (Toronto) in 2006. When not exploring subjective cartographies, she is the Curatorial Assistant at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Her work examines wonder, scale, and knowledge in fictitious versions of tourist-destination landscapes. Crystal Mowry is grateful for the Canada Council’s suppport of Ongoing Ideal Forms (After Versailles).
Marc Ngui (b. 1972, Guyana) is a graphic novelist and artist whose work is firmly rooted in DIY/zine culture. He recently realized that he is on a lifelong exploration into the mechanics of visual communication. In the past year he has worked in illustration, comics, storyboards, animation, video journalism, exhibition design, sign painting, maps, diagrams, pictograms, and icons — all for reputable clients (or so he says). He is currently trying to balance an overwhelming surge of technology-inspired optimism with an understanding that the polar ice caps will no longer be frozen in the winter time by the end of this century.
