Dowsing for Failure
Benjamin Bellas, Nate Larson, Gordon Lebredt, Daniel Olson, Mike Paget, June Pak and Anthony Schrag
Opening Friday, November 24, 8 pm
Until January 27

Dowsing for Failure is the latest in decades of Open Space programming intended to complicate the traditions of curatorship and presentation. Failure – as something that cannot be willfully coveted but must, in many ways, be "happened" upon accidentally and in most instances unintentionally – holds innovative and intriguing artistic and theoretical possibilities.

In exact opposition to the philosophy of the "happy accident" that forms much of the romance of failure as a legitimate element of artistic discovery, Dowsing For Failure will seek specific artists who have encountered ways of not succumbing to the optimistic and opportunistic mobilization of failure in the name of success.  Rather, our interest is in representing creative works in all disciplines that, through discourses of failure, open possibilities for informal discovery rather than mobilizing the proprietary claim to "originality."  By privileging inquiry over declaration, Dowsing For Failure is more aptly contextualized as a by-product and side effect of the works to be exhibited rather than an accusation of more linear and calculated political curation.

Consequently, Dowsing For Failure should be taken literally as a descriptive title and evocative declaration of the premise for the exhibit.  We neither condone nor dismiss the potential of dowsing proper as an allowable or legitimate activity.  Rather, here we are interested in methods for accumulating works of a certain sort that will fit within a certain parameter of meaning; one that might be seen as evocative rather than didactic, and which consequently requires an invocative method of selection rather than an explicit assessment of categorizable appearances. Proposals have come in from all over Canada, the US and the UK.

Dowsers: Doug Jarvis, Ted Hiebert