children see everything
Good medicine, Torontoniensis
University of Waterloo Art Gallery
Oct. 16 - Nov. 20, 2003

In childhood, there is an easy porosity between the imagination and the external world. With less dissembling and emotions new and close to the surface, kids impress us with their capacity for good and bad, their ferocious sense of justice and energy. We hope that they might get things right, succeed where we fail. "Children see everything" is an ongoing series drawn from childhood recollections. Adults are hardly present and less real looking than the kids but everyone lives in an out-of-register , slightly blurred world. This exhibit groups together about 30 clusters of prints in a manner that echoes comic book cells. While there is no plot, there are incidents like the suicide of a friendıs mother, and small acts of cruelty and kindness. Boredom is punctuated by emotion. Dotted throughout the gallery, some of these "real" and masked characters also appear in more sculptural contexts. They perch confidently at the edge of an abyss, hide under inadequate shelter or peer at us from mini stages and revolving platforms. Anxious and naive, they coexist in a variety of shifting relationships whose power dynamic keeps changing with the actual or implied potential for movement in the pieces. Cumulatively, "Children see everything" tries to create the texture of childhood.