Opening | Ryan Gander: Make every show like it’s your last

Ryan Gander
Make every show like it’s your last

September 11 to November 1, 2015
B. C. Binning and Alvin Balkind Galleries
Opening: Thursday, September 10, 2015 – 7-10pm 

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents an ambitious exhibition with UK artist Ryan Gander, his first solo presentation in Canada. Comprising a shifting selection of new and recent works, the show centres on the artist’s ongoing conceptual investigations and playful cultural cross references.

Gander’s complex and unfettered conceptual practice is stimulated by queries, investigations or what-ifs, rather than strict rules or limits. As alluded to in the title, the exhibition itself becomes a site for revealing or elliptical suggestion. We are thrown off balance perhaps or made aware of the underlying structures within the gallery as we view individual pieces. Appearing a seemingly discarded hand-written seating diagram for a special dinner, Career seeking missile (2011) lies crumpled on the floor, at once an informal gesture acting as a foil for the often unseen precarious mix of personalities and individuals invited to such events. Similarly the animatronic eyes, eyelids and eyebrows of Magnus Opus (2013), are triggered into differing expressions and responses in direct activation by our movements as we visit the show, consciously connecting us to the very act of looking.

Ideas of concealment, accessibility in every sense, and of a deliberate obfuscation to send our minds challenged and reeling, has been a constant ploy for Gander. Work produced is characterized most typically by an intellectual as well as formal rigour, often drawing together a layered range of sources and referents. Gander is a cultural magpie in the widest sense, his far-reaching curiosity in the world around us taking popular notions apart only to rebuild them in new ways.