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Networks by Jen Hutton and Troy Ouellette
Truck
Friday, January 9 - Thursday, February 12

More in: Visual Arts

Truck Gallery receives about 150 artist submissions annually, but only eight exhibitions are shown per year in the main gallery space. In order to give more artists the opportunity to show their work in Calgary, the team at Truck began programming two-person and group shows on a regular basis. Networks, Truck’s current exhibition, pairs work by artists Jen Hutton (Toronto) and Troy Ouellette (London, Ontario), who share an interest in exploring language and code through materials and sensory experiences.

One of these explorations in communication is Ouellette’s Echosystem, which is hard to miss with its several suspended tentacles filling the back section of the gallery, probing its surroundings. One limb squeezes over the ceiling’s suspended air ducts, bringing attention to the exposed structure of the old building above the gallery’s pristine white walls. At the end of each tentacle, created from hundreds of identical plastic Coca-Cola bottles stripped of their labels and joined together, is a blue plastic funnel, which serves to amplify the strange beeping noise that can be heard throughout the gallery. Visitors are hearing recorded sounds of grocery barcode scanners emanating from three small tin boxes at the feet of the hydra-like machine.

For Ouellette, the barcode scanner serves as an echo of oneself in today’s consumerist society, the purchaser’s interests and buying habits in sound. With every beep, our personal information is collected and stored in a network of databases to be statistically analyzed by companies. “Echosystem is my echo as it pertains to economic activity — an object dependant on and within the society in which it is placed,” says Ouellette in an interview.

In constrast to the clear and seemingly weightless Echosystem, Hutton’s three-dimensional, anthropomorphically sized wooden letter S, rightly titled Ess, sits heavily in the centre of the gallery space. Since its only contact with the ground is an arête, it must rely on another form of support to prevent it from falling over. Filling the void between the bottom of the letter and the floor are paint cans, coffee cups, a toilet paper roll and other random discarded items Hutton found in the gallery while installing her piece. Like Echosystem’s high-reaching tentacle, Ess’s improvised pedestal reveals a part of the gallery that is usually ignored.

Hutton’s Ess also catches those who want a closer look off guard. Peering into the tail of the hollow S, the viewer is struck by what appears to be a bottomless pit hidden under the sculpture rather than the expected wooden innards of the letter. Like a periscope, mirrors inside the sculpture disconcertingly shift the gaze of the viewer a few feet in front of the letter and create a stimulating optical illusion of depth. The artist was inspired to create Ess after seeing Paul McCarthy’s Dead H (1975), with its cold, metallic H lying prone on the floor. “I don’t think that the letter S is the antithesis of H,” argues Hutton, “but I like how turning it into a periscope subverts McCarthy’s sculpture by laying bare its interior.”

The installations in Networks have an undeniable esthetic quality that draws people into their space. Once inside, their conceptual nature and partially hidden attributes keep viewers captivated. For instance, not only is Hutton’s other sculptural work, Chance Operation (holes in the Calgary Herald headlines, Thursday, January 8, 2009, pages A1 and A12), delightful to look at, with its wall-protruding, gravity-defying jumble of white paper sticks, it also has an interesting conceptual core. As the lengthy title states, the artist created the piece not so much by chance, but rather, by following a set of rules. Hutton determined where the sticks would protrude by placing that day’s Calgary Herald on the wall and making holes through the letter O’s found in the headlines. Once the first sticks were installed, the artist freely expanded the work until all the sticks were used.

Also included in Networks are two digital prints by Ouellette titled Echosystem I and II, as well as Ends (Red-Orange), a wall piece by Hutton. The two digital drawings of Echosystem lack the visual impact of its sculptural counterpart with their documentary feel. However, Hutton’s collection of flesh-toned wall stickers of words, sayings and fonts is captivating and meshes well with the stronger works in the show.