andante [2007]

Secret Splendor
Andante : Multimedia installation by Josée Pedneault
Suitcases : Photographs by Patricio Davila
February 8 to March 10, 2007
Opening reception: Thursday February 8th 2007, 6 to 8pm
Gallery 44, Toronto, On, Canada.

"Secret Splendor includes works by Montréal artist Josée Pedneault and Toronto artist Patricio Davila. These artists explore travel, memory and the ostensibly mundane via distinctly different approaches. Focusing on the banality of daily life, Pedneault's Andante employs video, sound and over 400 images programmed to display randomly on three adjacent walls. Without any premeditated arrangement, we are immersed a dreamlike documentary of a life. Images of fireworks, snow, grass, toys, self-portraits evoke a sense of fragility, impermanence and imperfection. In Suitcases, Patricio Davila's eight large-scale portraits of abandoned suitcases from the 1960s and 1970s present a rapturously feminine aesthetic that celebrates glamour, perfection and order in an unlikely place. Finding beauty in abandoned consumer objects and in fragments of everyday life, Secret Splendor inverts our expectations about beauty, perfection and order." - Chanelle Gallant

Full essay by Chanelle Gallant