| Janice Gurney | March 6 – April 4, 2014 |
This exhibition has given me the opportunity to reframe some of my earlier works. Stills and text from Antonioni’s films and works by Andre Jodoin become a shifting link between most of the works in the exhibition.
The exhibition has two centres around which works are gathered. Film director Michelangelo Antonioni is the first centre. There are four works that refer obliquely to his work: Plots and Themes, which uses a still from L’Avventura; Meaningful Work, in which the text is a phrase taken from the same film; The Newspaper, which uses a film still from The Red Desert; and A lovely article on colour, in which the text is a critic’s statement about Antonioni.
The second centre considers framing as structural issue. The works gathered around this idea are fig.1, in which a work by Andre Jodoin is reframed by me; Function, in which Andre reframes Daniel Buren’s article of the same name; and Plots and Themes, which includes a frame from the film L’Avventura and pieces of actual frames with no attachment to their conventional role in the display of photographs and paintings.
Portrait of My Mother, By My Father, By Myself relates to fig. 1 in that it has also been reframed, but here the frame is conceptual rather than literal.The work is a print with my mother’s name printed from a block of lead type that was made by my father. Below her name is my father’s signature, photographically reproduced, and below that is my own written signature.
As you enter the gallery the exhibition itself is “framed” by a work titled NON (Didactic Panel). This work is based on the didactic panel that introduced the work in my survey show Sum Over Histories from 1992-94. I made each statement about my work and myself that was in the original panel into a negative by the addition of the word “not”.
-Janice Gurney