from November 14 to December 13

opening :: Friday November 14 at 6pm
artist's presentation :: Friday November 14 at 5pm

Gwen MacGregor :: Toronto
main gallery and project room

My Place, Around, 7pm
image and sound installations

photos :: Sandra Lynn Bélanger

presse release :: Gwen Macgregor

Gwen MacGregor is interested in the way we register the passage of time. She sees the ordinary and overlooked moment as raw material for her work. By shaping it, repeating it over and over she heightens and transforms its value. She “messes with time,” allowing the future to be consumed by the past and as it slowly seeps into the audience and offers a kind of present-tense travelling.

Three works are being presented at La Centrale.

My Place (2000) is an installation of 1200 photographs and a video projection. The snapshot sized photos are a portrait of her possessions, each numbered sequentially. This is accompanied by excerpts of The Prisoner, a 1960’s British TV series. Together they offer a self-reflexive mockery of our relationship to our possessions.

Around (2000) is a video projection of a woman walking up a hill of snow with only the sound of her breathing accompanying the image. When she is visible on the screen the sound is backwards and when she is absent the sound goes forward. This endless loop suggests a Becket like suspension of time and space.

The third work 7pm (2003) is a collaboration with Lewis Nicholson. For a year and a day MacGregor and Nicholson carried the video camera with them shooting whatever they were doing at 7pm. One continuous minute has been chosen from each day and shown sequentially. The assembled content offers a range of mood and activity at the same moment everyday

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biography :: Gwen Macgregor

Since graduating from York University in 1984, Gwen Macgregor has exhibited in gallery exhibitions as well as projects that have used unusual sites. She has had solo exhibitions at The Oakville Galleries (2002), The Art Gallery of Ontario (2001), The Koffler Gallery in Toronto (2000), The Ex Teresa Art Actual in Mexico City (1999), The Art Gallery of Southern Alberta in Lethbridge (1997). Recent group exhibitions include: ‘Flywheel’ at York Quay Gallery at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto, ‘Centrifugal’, an exhibition of site-specific installation in parking lots, curated by Eileen Somerman for the Hamilton Art Gallery (1999), ‘Flywheel’ at The Nunnery, London, U.K. (1998). She has participated in several residencies including the Canada/Mexico Program through Canadian Foreign Affairs and the Atlantic Centre for the Arts, in Florida. She will be spending 4 months at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York in 2004. She has been a member of several artists’ collectives including Spontaneous Combustion and Flywheel. She recently received the 2003 Friends of the Visual Arts Award for a Toronto artist.

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