2013 Flips Folly, Latitude 53

TUESDAY–FRIDAY 11–7 SATURDAY 12–5

10242 106 STREET EDMONTON ALBERTA

WWW.LATITUDE53.ORG 780 423 5353

Images courtesy of the artist

Megan Dickie’s work uses play and physicality to expose the human tendency to indulge in spectacle. She has exhibited across Canada and in the United States, with recent exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Stride Gallery, Calgary and Touchstones Nelson: Museum of Art and History. She holds a BFA from the University of Calgary and an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan. Dickie has been awarded grants from both the British Columbia Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. She teaches sculpture and printmaking at the University of Victoria.

Megan Dickie is currently working on a large scale sculpture and video project which investigates the activity of pitting the human form against structures for the sake of competition.

MEGAN DICKIE

F L I P S F O L LY IN THE MAIN SPACE FROM MAY 24–JULY 13, 2013

OPENING RECEPTION MAY 24 AT 8:00 PM

ARTIST TALK MAY 24 AT 7:00 PM

HAPTIC TRUTHS: THE FOLLY OF ARTIST MEGAN DICKIE In our virtual age, we live in constant negotiation between the three-dimensional

thetic and cultural signifier. As her titles suggest, something funny is going on,

nature of our lived experience and the two-dimensional realm of the repre-

though Dickie transcends this metaphor of folly through her actions, making

sentational worlds we wish to inhabit. Art, too, is a negotiation between these

her work all the more powerful and compelling.

forces of dimensionality, and sculpture, as a medium, specifically challenges our perspectives about the nature and politics of objects, their multiplicity of surfaces and how our bodies co-exist in time and space with them. With this exhibition, Victoria artist Megan Dickie presents a dynamic composite of works that not only speak to the complexities of these dynamic interrelationships, but to their corresponding tautologies of meaning, reason and order, which she counters with humour, bravery and boldness.

By appealing to our tactile sensibilities, Dickie’s work engages us, not just as passive spectators, but as witnesses and participants to the deconstruction of the architectures of power that sculpture connotes. In this way, too, perhaps alluding to Dickie’s role as an instructor in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Victoria, her work is instructive, and invaluably teaches the viewer to re-read not just the object, but to physically experience its materiality and meaning. Dickie’s generosity as an artist to her audience gives them

Whether it is by wrestling with them, fighting with them, or playing with them,

the opportunity to learn through their own discovery, while engaging in a very

Dickie physically interacts with her works in a way that is both simultaneously

serious discussion about art and the object, power, and reason.

interrogative and possessive. In works like “The Tangler” and “The Gleamer”, these interactions are not just animations, but rather, restless interventions that pervade with haptic truths, invoking questions not just about the surface and materiality of things, but about the struggle of art and art making and its associated traditions. In “Submission”, Dickie’s intervention is an act of transgression and has the power to provoke controversy, contention and disapproval.

Never static, Dickie’s sculptures bristle with the resonance of past participation, and with our imagining of them as the site of future possible interceptions.

Ultimately, Dickie’s restless persistence to fight, to play, to punch, to invite us to watch or engage in these sculptures is emblematic, not just of our own negotiations beyond the ephemerality of our daily lives, but as we seek meaning within the multiple dimensions of time and space to bring ourselves closer to being in the world.

— Christine Walde

Christine Walde is a librarian who has published her poetry, fiction and

Creating her work from a position that recognizes her own faults and vulner-

non-fiction in a variety of print and online publications, including Border

abilities while poking fun at the powers-that-be, Dickie employs humour, impul-

Crossings, Carousel, The Fiddlehead, Hunter and Cook, The Rusty Toque and

sivity and risk in positing herself against reason. By interposing her body into

Vallum. Born and raised in London, Ontario, she now lives in Victoria, BC.

the arena of the work, before an audience that favours novelty, gadgetry, and entertainment, Dickie’s sculptures and her performative responses trigger a complex association of feelings about art and our relationship to it as an aes-