Container

Container brings together six artists who have content and the problem of content in post-minimal conceptual art as a central theme running through their work. Conceptual and minimalist art were movements in 20th-century art that relied, in part, on the draining of content from art. Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Richard Serra and others stripped their work down to the barest elements of form, material, texture and color and left expression or any trace of identifiable specificity out of their work. The generation of artists included in Container have all returned to some of the fundamental methods of conceptualism and minimalism, but have put the content back in, sometimes in poignant and humorous ways. All of the artists in Container are from Canada, where a potent neo-conceptualist movement has developed.

Gerard Choy

Gerard Choy exhibits 279 plaster casts of won ton bowls in his installation, "One Ton of Won Ton." Choy dyes the plaster the same color of blue as the traditional won ton bowl, a design dating, from the 13th-century that sometimes features swimming fish. This abstraction — combined with the fact that in Chinese “won ton” means "to swallow clouds" — points to the humor in Choy’s installation. The finished form of the won ton bowls becomes an illusion of lightness that belies the actual heaviness of the plaster casts, a heaviness echoed in the cultural weight Choy carries from his native Singapore to his current home in Canada. Though invoking minimalist and ready-made vocabularies, Choy’s installation refills modernist, (universal) formalism with culturally specific content. One ton of clouds.

Thierry Delva

Thierry Delva’s installation, "Life’s Good" consists of a plugged-in and running LG brand refrigerator in the gallery, decorated with a fridge magnet, only a fridge magnet of Michelangelo’s "David," carved of Carerra marble, the material of the original. Courageous gallery goers who brave opening the fridge will see on the top shelf a dozen eggs, also carved of Carerra marble, bought by Delva in the gift shop of the museum in Florence where Michelangelo’s "David" is exhibited. Like Choy, Delva’s work speaks to questions of content in post-minimal sculpture, in this case the art-historical significance of Carrera marble set against the most mundane of cultural artifacts, the souvenir, designed to stand in for the cultural experience of visiting a sacred site of one of sculpture’s greatest moments. The content of culture, Renaissance culture or tourist culture, or our own, collides with the quotidian.

David Diviney

In David Diviney’s installation, "The Coin," a taxidermy bobcat seemingly leaps through a wall, lending in the spirit of its title, heads and tails. The two sides of art, the high and the low, the conceptual and the physical, the disturbing and the humorous combine as two sides of the same coin. Diviney’s work installed directly into the wall of the Main Gallery also serves to implicate the gallery and the art system in the work, mocking curators on the hunt for the trophies of big names (big game) and not yet discovered (exotic) artists, the work of which hangs in the curator’s gallery like trophies on the wall of the 19th-century gentleman. Using the technique of the readymade, Diviney’s simple gesture is disturbing on many levels – for the viewer, the animal lover, the curator and the bobcat.

Micah Lexier

One of Canada’s best known artists, Micah Lexier’s pieces in Container focus on his ongoing project dealing with numerics and spatial equilibrium. In "All Numbers Are Equal", large black-coated aluminum letters hang consecutively on the wall. Each number is a different size, but they, in fact, all have exactly the same surface area. Though the numbers’ face value differs, their mass and surface area is identical, thus rendering the ‘difference’ between them null and void. The numeric value is neutered by their physicality, their content ambiguous and confused.

Kelly Mark

Kelly Mark’s piece "I Really Should" is a 58-minute audio loop of the artist expressing 1000 things she really should do, many of them having to do with her insecurity and doubts. One of Canada’s best known neo-conceptualists, Mark’s work is minimalist in some ways, but takes on its real meaning only through the power of almost mystical repetition, a mantra of 1000 sentences beginning with "I really should…" and ending with everything from the mundane to the personally painful. By overwhelming the listener with simple, guilt driven imperatives, the particularities fall away and by a process of reverse minimalism, her work loses content and become a single statement of guilt expressed 1000 different ways.

Colleen Wolstenholme

Wolstenholme makes monumentally scaled, carved plaster replicas of Valium, Zoloft, Xanax, Dexedrine and Paxil pills. Their enormous scale (weighing 150 pounds and standing 40" high) references not just the massive use of these drugs in contemporary society, but the incredible weight they come to bear on those that come to use them. Mimicking an elegant post-modernist sculptural idiom, they also could be seen to draw an equivalency between the tranquilizing effect of the current obsession with over-scaled artwork and the overblown prescription of these drugs to an ever growing number of us showing signs of depression.