Monika Grzymala Distortion 2008 and Kelly Wood Binary Sound Systems 2008 Installation view Courtesy Catriona Jeffries Gallery
Curator Jessie Caryl makes the incommensurability of sound, space and imagery the central theme in an exhibition of new works by artists Kelly Wood and Monika Grzymala. While Wood’s most famous series—Continuous Garbage Project—examined how the formal qualities of trash could be an index for human activity, the artist’s new work attempts to translate improvised sound into a visual symbolic system. The result: a series of near-monochromatic photo images that depict the binary code formats of digital song recordings. Using songs from Canadian avant-garde musical groups like the Nihilist Spasm Band and the UJ3RK5, Wood pushes the logic of binary code to its extreme, creating illegible documents that resemble snow on an idle television set.
Hamburg-based artist Monika Grzymala’s work likewise capitalizes on unexpected glitches of digital translation in a site-specific project that employs seven kilometres of adhesive tape. Attaching gingham-like sculptural patterns to the gallery’s walls, floor and ceiling, the artist makes physical the random errors and pixelation that occur in electronic imagery. In conversation with Wood’s two-dimensional images, Grzymala’s intervention explores ongoing tensions between intention and accident, order and chaos. (274 E 1st Ave, Vancouver BC)
Gabrielle Moser is an independent curator and writer based in Toronto. A founding member of EMILIA-AMALIA, she is assistant professor of aesthetics and art education in the Faculty of Education at York University.
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Monika Grzymala Distortion 2008 and Kelly Wood Binary Sound Systems 2008 Installation view Courtesy Catriona Jeffries Gallery
