O'Born Contemporary

Exhibition

Slapstick Meets Instances of In Finite

OBC: An Intervention

August 24 – August 30, 2013

intervention statement

In this latest body of interventional, interpretive work, Callum Schuster and Liam Crockard permeate the elegant, white walled confines of O'Born Contemporary in an effort to challenge the gallery's accepted, architectural space. 131 Ossington's composed edifice is questioned, teased and, ultimately, challenged by two cerebral and physical bodies of work.

In Finite

Callum Schuster aims to encourage the internal dialogues of gallery walls to render themselves externalized. Secrets are told. Instances of inspiration and creation witness this fact: substance seeps into the void--gallery air--as ideas cure in the hands of their maker.

The corollary to this suggestion is that external worlds become internalized. The synthetic landscape imbedded in a painting's ground is an illusion, a simulated world we see into from the static space of the gallery.

What happens when synthetic landscapes, once absorbed into the artwork's core, leak and pour back into the terrain of manmade materials, technological processes, and lived spaces? The reunion of the individual and the elsewhere captured within a piece of art is completed.


Slapstick

Liam Crockard's sculptural intrusion witnesses the re-orientation towards commonplace objects within the gallery context, disregarding the political and functional aesthetics of previous artists' expressions.

This body of work is inflected with humour--enjoyment of hypnotic routine, hardware-store fetishism, failed exercise, and frantic cinematography abound as you circulate through the artist's constructed space.

A video work replete with the awkward gestures of amateur martial arts practices tosses antic physicality against the stoicism of Crockard's recreation of succinct, pared down gallery furnishings. These replicas both abide by and refute their innocuous models--the mimicry adopting an object-centered ecology.

about the artists

CALLUM SCHUSTER was born in 1989, in Toronto, Canada and graduated in 2011 from O.C.A.D.U.'s Drawing and Painting Thesis program. Schuster's works exemplify an ongoing investigation into the praxis of painting and, further, how paint's tactility can represent various ways of seeing the world that surrounds us. By analyzing the material components of the painted object and the processes involved in making it, the artist is able to articulate his conclusions using the very medium he is questioning. Schuster's work has been represented in a number of solo and group exhibitions including Veil at Bulthaup Showroom, Praxis at TEN EIGHTY, Everything Is Going To Be Alright, Right? at Function 13 Gallery, and an Off-site Exhibition at the Havana Biennale. He participated in the group show, Translation, at O'Born Contemporary in the spring of 2013 and will have his first solo show with the gallery in the summer of 2014. The artist's work is in several private collections.

LIAM CROCKARD was born in Kitchener, Ontario 1986, and now situates his practice in Toronto, where he received his BFA at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Over the last two years Crockard has exhibited internationally in Chicago, Los Angeles and Berlin, as well as organized and participated in a number of successful local shows. Citing the countless examples of jury-rigged constructions and "making-do" he witnessed growing up in his hometown as a main driving force behind his sculptural practice, Crockard uses materially driven gestures to explore the collision of industry-driven-hometown nostalgia and modern art fetishism. Wandering the old neighborhood and flipping through an art textbook have become increasingly similar experiences. Ultimately this conflation of the personal and the referential sits at the core of his practice, be it articulated through collage, video or sculpture.