167 portraits of access,
2006-07

Using the physical site of the gallery as a collecting point, I have been taking a closer look at Access within the framework of a photographic catalogue. Dust, dirt, and other bits of filth, collected and sent on by gallery staff, became the subject through which an examination and mapping of the site from a macroscopic level was undertaken. Upon magnification of the residua, any assumptions of neutrality within the space gave way to consciousness of an immense variation in form quietly residing within the walls of the gallery. Images of hair, glass, lead, paper, or a fingernail clipping began to construct complex narratives that could in turn construct a portrait of the spatial and historical use of the site.

While suggesting a form of archeology, this process has become an exercise through which the collection and imaging of seemingly insignificant random bits could collectively animate or give form to a vacant site. As much an investigation into processes of cognition and how meaning might arise from a seemingly meaningless subject and context, this project has become in a way an attempt to comprehend processes of perception and how that process might trace a topology of the site as a unique space filled with potentially infinite spatial narratives.

access ARC, Vancouver