DON GILL: "Erratic Space: Bowmanville," Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, Bowmanville, Ontario, April 24 to May 22, 2011
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"Jetty"
Don Gill, "Jetty," Inkjet on canvas, 2011, 30" x 45". PHOTO: Jean-Michel Komarnicki.
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"Lower Gallery Installation view"
Don Gill, "Lower Gallery Installation view," Inkjet on canvas murals, scrapbooks in vitrine, 2011, dimensions variable. PHOTO: Jean-Michel Komarnicki.
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"July 14 Bowmanville 9.4km"
Don Gill, "July 14 Bowmanville 9.4km," Digital Image, 2011, dimensions variable.
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"GPS Drawings, Erratic Space – Bowmanville"
Don Gill, "GPS Drawings, Erratic Space – Bowmanville," Digital Image, 2011, dimensions variable. PHOTO: Don Gill.
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"Jetty"
Don Gill, "Jetty," Inkjet on canvas, 2011, 30" x 45". PHOTO: Jean-Michel Komarnicki.
DON GILL: "Erratic Space: Bowmanville"
Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, Bowmanville, Ontario,
April 24 to May 22, 2011
By Gil McElroy
The small community of Bowmanville is known today for being home to one of Ontario’s nuclear reactors. But its history dates back to the eighteenth century as a busy harbour and grain mill site. It also was the site of Camp 30, a WWII facility used to imprison captured Nazi officers, including Otto Kretschmer, the most successful U-Boat commander of the war.
While temporarily teaching at Trent University in nearby Peterborough, Lethbridge-based artist Don Gill focused on Bowmanville to give shape to the most recent incarnation of his Erratic Spaces series of exhibitions. In them, he tries to aesthetically upend the rigid, spatial organization of urban centres by randomly meandering through them and accumulating imagery of his encounters along the way. The artist tries to capture the tension that exists in our everyday urban world between order and chaos. We are reminded of the second law of thermodynamics which bluntly reminds us that everything falls apart unless we put in the energy needed to maintain some sense of order.
We encounter this tension everyday and everywhere - if only at the very mundane level of unmaintained roads and cracked sidewalks with grass growing up between. Like many cities, Bowmanville has made no attempt to maintain or preserve its old POW camp, preferring instead to wait for new urban development that has no interest in referencing the past. And so the site has inevitably succumbed to entropy. The roadways around and through the site denote order, while the site's broken buildings and overgrown lots say disorder.
Based on a series of walks he took through Bowmanville over the course of a year, Gill gathered and assembled digital and video images en route, making maps documenting the stages and visual shapes of those walks - to create the largest component of this show at the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington (the exhibition also included other works from his Erratic Spaces series but these will not be discussed in this review).
Gill used the gallery’s airy third-floor loft as a working studio to create his Bowmanville project. The walls were replete with evidence of his activities: the computer-made maps of his walks in and around the community; scores of images documenting the typically un-photogenic reality that makes Bowmanville indistinguishable from virtually anywhere else; and national newspaper clippings from the time period of the walks detailing events going on in the larger world at the time (including the debate over showing Osama bin Laden’s death photographs).
Lying by itself atop of a desk in the centre of the loft was the singular piece, the aesthetic end of all this activity in the form of one completed component of the Bowmanville project - July 14 Bowmanville 9.4km. This work comprises two digital images printed side-by-side on a small rectangle of paper, the shattered glass panes of a window juxtaposed a map of the artist’s walk that day complete with scale and compass markings but which (in this instance) made for a visually interesting drawing in its own right. We’re at what was Camp 30, at the decaying remnants of a POW camp renowned for the daring escapes by prisoners once held here. Gill has walked the space of its disappearance. The map of his movements details the shape of an order imposed by city streets and the larger intentions of urban planning, the juxtaposed image of a broken window, the inevitability of disorder and destruction.
Erratic Space: Bowmanville is a compelling work that articulates the subliminal tensions that make up the everyday urban spaces we inhabit.