Arranged as a series of nested diptychs, One through the Other is a commissioned site-specific video, photo, and sculpture installation in the fashion and lifestyle showroom San Sheng Art Space. Taking its context as content, the exhibition opens with an appropriated image from San Sheng’s Instagram account of an influencer holding the 2009 Mark Lewis Venice Biennale catalogue. The catalogue, as prop for a marketing campaign, establishes the working thematics of the exhibition: the tensioned position of art as, and in the service of, commodity.
Searching this tension, One through the Other oscillates from its consideration of San Sheng Art Space to engage the neighbouring floral shop as site of reflection and refraction, pursuing the question of art’s relation to commodity through colocation—where, to borrow Biennale Commissioner and Curator Barbara Fischer’s observation on a Mark Lewis work, “both pictorial spaces are beheld equally, one through the other, perceptually pulsating back and forth in tension.” [1]
Throughout the exhibition, half of the site will continue to function as fashion showroom, welcoming customers to observe, browse, and shop alongside the adjacent installation. In addition to the daytime viewing hours of the exhibition, a rear-projected video will play on the window of San Sheng Art Space at night.
[1] Fischer, Barbara. “On Location.” Essay. In Mark Lewis: Cold Morning: Canada 2009: 53rd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale Di Venezia, edited by Barbara Fischer. Toronto, ON: Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, 2009.
Exhibition text by Kate Whiteway (PDF)
The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of 333 Industrial Arts (Arbutus Real Estate Ltd.)
Photography by Brandon Poole.