A FEW SIMILAR THINGS: MAGGIE GROAT AND SIMONE ROCHON

RECEPTION: THURSDAY, MARCH1 6, 2017 FROM 6–7PM. REFRESHMENTS TO FOLLOW AT THE PALAMINO

LOCATION - ARTS COMMONS +15 WINDOWS

205 8TH AVENUE SE

Untitled Art Society + Stride Gallery + TRUCK Contemporary Art + The New Gallery

anya Lukin Linklater + Celia Perrin Sidarous

Maggie Groat + Simone Rochon

Scott Benesiinaabandan + Sanaz Mazinani

Vuk Dragojevic + Liza Eurich

Curated by Natasha Chaykowski + Alison Cooley 

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L: Simone Rochon, Le plein du vide no.3 (2015-2016) R: Maggie Groat, Proposal for a Monument (2013)

She once suggested to a respected, successful, and generous curator that a particular artwork be included in an exhibition alongside another. The curator dismissed the suggestion without pause: “those works are too similar, it’s too obvious” said the curator.

A Few Similar Things presents what its title suggests; it comprises four pairings of similar works, made autonomously by different artists. Mounted in vitrine spaces throughout the Arts Commons +15 pedway in Calgary, each installation is a coupling of works that in some way—aesthetically, conceptually, formally—are forthrightly alike. 

Curating often prides itself on revealing the esoteric connectivity of artworks: the potential for juxtaposition to illuminate as-yet-unseen kinships, to tease out subtle thematic and formal tendencies or progressions, to build bonds between disparate objects. In this way, curatorial authority is engineered and maintained. A Few Similar Things plays critically with this impulse, questioning the relationship between power and curatorial methodologies. 

In another vein, A Few Similar Things is situated in the context of a post-Internet ecology characterized by dizzying effluences of material—an environment that makes the avant-garde impulse of unique, novel creation appear impossible. How might artists faced with such a climate reckon with the act of creating? What can we understand from these similar works, made entirely independent from one another, each likely in complete ignorance of the other’s existence? How do art works become agents who operate outside of particular constraints of control, once unmoored from their artist's hand? 

Rarely are we afforded the opportunity to look at similar images alongside each other. Instead, images are contextualized within an artist’s body of work, within a movement, a style, a regional artistic dialogue—their uniqueness highlighted in variation, rather than in their particularities. In A Few Similar Things, obvious pairings of like with like open poetic confluences between works, but also trace the rhythm of their small differences. In the space of the Arts Commons +15 vitrines, these pairings might become a kind of experiment: how do we reckon with sameness? Can the foundational impulses of curating be undone or de-familiarized by gestures of obvious combination? What might aesthetic closeness lend to us for understanding each other?