Georgia Dickie featured in Soanyway

June 15, 2021

Georgia Dickie – Jerky Out, Gnar In

By Derek Horton

Jerky Out, Gnar In was a solo exhibition by the Canadian artist Georgia Dickie at Cooper Cole in Toronto, 6 March – 15 May 2021

Although written over thirty years ago, the following observation by the writer and critic John Roberts describes very well an important aspect of Georgia Dickie’s current practice: “By creating the new from the old, by reworking that which has been consumed or discarded into new objects of delight, humour or pathos, the products of a passive relation to consumption are transformed into acts of conspicuous self- determination. By offering us metaphors of the practical remaking of our industrialised culture, they give imaginative life back to the dead world of the commodity” [1].

The gallery’s press release for Jerky Out, Gnar In suggested that in this exhibition, “Dickie presents a space of precarity in which boundaries are flexible, and tangled with our lived experiences”. This involves a very particular approach to space and time in the use and reuse of materials that she collects and reclaims. The components are assembled, adjusted during installation, and then taken apart and re-assembled in new configurations for new works, so that the multiple elements of Dickie’s work constantly shift and move in relation to each other over time.

There is a long tradition of using found and appropriated objects in collage and sculptural assemblage that generally involves reshaping material in new combinations in ways that fix them as new objects in the world, transforming their function and giving them permanence as artworks. Such permanence is denied by Dickie though. As she has said in an interview, “once I’ve ‘made’ the work, what follows is a series of back-and-forth journeys for the individual objects, destined to be reassembled or reintegrated back into my inventory. The borders of the work can only be temporarily defined, so the artwork’s existence itself is tenuous” [2].

Thus Dickie assigns new meaning and value to the mundane materials she collects and works with, but simultaneously she challenges assumptions of the fixed and permanent nature of art objects. She not only questions the values of the consumer culture that generates the remnants she accumulates for re-use, but also renders problematic the commodification of the artworks that they are re-used in.

[1] John Roberts, Postmodernism, Politics and Art, Manchester University Press, 1990 (p.112)

[2] Georgia Dickie, interviewed by Laura Henderson-Child, 2020, https://tankmagazine.com/tank/2020/01/georgia-dickie/

To view the full article visit Soanyway.

For more information about Georgia Dickie please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com

+1.416.531.8000

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