Navigation

Lee Goreas & Shelley Ouellet

April 1998

Lee Goreas - The installations and singular works I construct utilize; texts, pictographs and materials appropriated from; public and commercial advertisements, informational road signs and international symbols. I question the authority of signage by revealing its potential for a humorous reading through the simple manipulation of its context and physical arrangement within space and time. All of the works get their start in the outside world of public experience and are then transformed by their passage through my land of imagination. Out of this process of exchange I present to an audience what I consider to be sculptural poems that investigate my position within social and cultural hierarchies while designating them as subjects for play.

Shelley Ouellet - Images are created using positive and negative space. In the digital world, images, sound, movement and space are expressed with a language of on or off. This language and technology allow me to draw the image and place it within a particular space or medium. Digital technology also allows me to plan and mathematically organize the execution of an image on screen and three dimensional space. In this process, technology is a tool to enhance and promote the results of visible labour.

To execute a piece in three dimensions, a mind-numbingly labour intensive process is used. Toys, trinkets, baubles, sequins or junk are amassed and organized to create and echo the image. Sewing, pinning or gluing objects together by the thousands creates a dichotomy with the cool slickness and precision of the digital design. Using this process, value of digital technology is enriched by the apparent value of labour spent.

The three dimensional images are designed recognizing the individuality of the object and that object's metaphorical and physical relationship to the whole. This relationship to the collective whole reflects communal organization. In my work, technology and labour are used to organize and order a wealth of units to form a collective whole. The labour required to co-ordinate numerous components is obviously significant and technology becomes immersed within the process used to achieve the larger whole.