On the Road

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September 12 –October 26, 2013

 

Opening Reception:
Thursday, September 12, 6-9 pm Artist present

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Pari Nadimi Gallery is pleased to present On the Road a solo exhibition of lenticular photographs by US-based Canadian artist George Legrady.  

All artistic works belong to a cultural moment and context, and over time an interesting challenge emerges: How might the artist bridge past work with the present? Legrady attempts to bridge this gap by creating a new work through the juxtaposition of early images he produced in the 1970s. 
On the Road presents a series of eight panels, each consisting of multiple photographs interlaced together through the lenticular process. This process results in the illusion of movement between images: When the viewer changes the angle from which the panel is viewed, motion and a morphing effect seem to occur. This non-linear, multi-layered format is a transformative one and, furthermore, explores the cinematic narrative potential of the photographic image in non-electronic form. 

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The exhibition title, On the Road, cannot escape reference to the defining work of the Beat Generation: Jack Kerouac’s portrait of the search for personal meaning during the Cold War. But a referential title is just the beginning. Over forty-years ago Legrady embarked on a yearlong journey, searching for meaning himself, during the Vietnam War, October Crisis and hippie counterculture movement. He explains: 

“I boarded a plane in Montreal on October 7, 1970 to Paris with $200 in my pocket, two jean shirts in my backpack, my Nikon F and Kerouac’s On the Road in my hand. I lasted a year by quickly getting down to the Middle East, spending time in the Negev on the border of the Gaza, old Jerusalem, the Sultanahmet in Istanbul where I met a Turkish artist who took me to his town near the Syrian border. After running out of money, I took a train to Budapest to revisit the country where I was born.” 

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George Legrady is one of the first generation of artists in the 1980’s to integrate computer processes into his artistic work, producing pioneering, prizewinning projects in the early 1990’s such as the Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War, Slippery Traces, Sensing Speaking Space, and more recently the internationally traveling Pockets Full of Memories and Cell Tango.  His work has been exhibited at a number of prestigious institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, the SOMArts Center in San Francisco, the National Gallery of Canada, Poznan Biennale, Lawrence Hall of Science, Berkeley, Wellesley College, Wellesley, East Michigan University, Ypsilanti and National Academy of Sciences, Washington.  His recent lenticular work “Refraction” has been included into numerous private and public collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the 21c Hotel/Museum in Cincinnati.  Legrady’s installation Swarm Vision will be in exhibition Drone:The Automated Image, Curated by Paul Wombell, as part of Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal (Montréal, Canada), September 5-October 5, 2013. 

 

 

Project Space

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ELLE KURANCID & ASH MONIZ 
Reputations 

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In the Project Space, Pari Nadimi Gallery is pleased to present Reputations an exhibition featuring Toronto-based artists, Elle Kurancid and Ash Moniz.  

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If it takes x amount of years to build a reputation and y amount of minutes to ruin it, might it also take y amount of years to ruin a reputation and x amount of minutes to rebuild it? In Reputations, Elle Kurancid and Ash Moniz respond to the aforesaid Warren-Buffet-derived and word-problem-inspired query with works that suggest “it sure might—but that’s only the beginning of the maze of reputations.” In other words, Kurancid and Moniz manipulate a selection of texts, devices and environments to underline the malleability of identity and opinion. For example, Kurancid muses on convenience and inconvenience in her redesign of the 7-Eleven logo, and Moniz uses plaster bandages to support and immobilize the ruins of condemned buildings throughout the city of Nanjing, China.

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Special thanks to Elliot Vredenburg and Markos Teshome.

Elle Kurancid, born 1988, in Peace River, Alberta, Canada, graduated from Ryerson University’s School of Journalism (Toronto, Canada) and briefly studied Sculpture/Installation at Ontario College of Art and Design University (Toronto, Canada). Recent exhibitions include The Kitchen Party, a three-part series respectively mounted in a living room, bedroom and hallway (Toronto, Canada), Groaners, Videofag (Toronto, Canada) and Gifts By Artists, Art Metropole (Toronto, Canada); she also co-curated the group exhibition Semicolon Hyphen Bracket, MKG127 (Toronto, Canada). Early October she is performing in FREE LAND, an intervention by artist Maggie Groat, Nuit Blanche (Toronto, Canada). Kurancid’s work of literary nonfiction, “Where The Creamazon River Meets Venice Of The Prairies” will be published in The Lake, an interdisciplinary book to be launched at Art Metropole early 2014.

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Ash Moniz, born 1992 in Wawa, Ontario, Canada, majors in Sculpture/Installation at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (Toronto, Canada). For the past year he has been enrolled in Nanjing University of the Arts (Nanjing, China) as part of a scholarship exchange program. While in China Moniz exhibited his work in two solo exhibitions: Boxes, Bazaar Compatible (Shanghai, China) and Volume, First Floor (Nanjing, China). Moniz’s work also exhibited as part of Toronto’s Nuit Blanche in 2012.