Next Stop, Jamie Drouin and Lance Olsen multimedia installation, 1999 + 2001

The work exhibited in Spectacles of Intimacy shows us worlds that are both intimate and public. This binary can be present in our everyday lives, from riding a packed bus next to a couple having an intimate conversation (Lance Olsen and Jamie Drouin’s Next Stop) to observing how tools of a trade will be used to express deeply personal work (Megan Dickie’s The Assistants). This exhibition “explores the role of artist as social spectator: one who witnesses intimate spaces and moments and transports them into the public sphere for debate and dialogue.”* Within Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle as “a social relation between people that is mediated by images”^, the artists exhibited take it upon themselves to subvert exploitations of intimacy and turn their view inward. Suzanne Mir’s doll photographs are able to capture the collective pain felt by families who have lost their children and indicate efforts to memorialize lives that have been cut short. As private as the pain of loss may be, it has been brought out to the public as a way of healing. d. bradley muir’s photographs take a more global approach to the idea of private vs. public, as he illustrates how the desire to take part in Western consumerist rituals and aesthetics should not be isolated from its consequences. Finally, Ingrid Mary Percy’s drawings focus on the relationship between the body and biological processes that reveal its fragility at the hands of diseases. “[Spectacles of Intimacy] explores the power of the artistic gaze and unravels the concept of spectacle”*

Artist Links:

Lance Olsen

Jamie Drouin

Megan Dickie

Suzanne Mir

d. bradley muir

Ingrid Mary Percy

Sources:

*Text from Spectacles of Intimacy 2007 Exhibition Catalogue, Grunt Gallery Archives

^ Guy Debord The Society of the Spectacle, 1967 (Online here)