Opening
Saturday, May 3
Artist Present
2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

After moving often over a span of twenty-five years, I opened up several boxes that contained the photographs I’d accumulated and discovered hundreds of images: Places, buildings, landscapes, travels, museum displays, texts, animals, lights and studios; snap shots, forgotten moments and suspended projects. The subject matter was vast but there was one common denominator, my gaze through the viewfinder. This is where the story begins anew, not because a particular individual took such a variety of pictures — they aren’t particularly intimate — but because they are some of the billions, undifferentiated and unorganized images immediately circulating the globe today.

I began working with these pictures, which I’ve termed photographic cells, by first spreading them into a grid, without order, in a non-hierarchical distribution that obliterated an agenda and allowed unpredicted connections. This permitted my studio to become an extrapolation of my mind, after which I was able to progressively group the images into narrative and formal schemes that had less to do with nostalgia than with a kind of archival reactivation. I was making sense of the past now, rather than finding out what could have made sense throughout the years, turning the retrospective into the prospective, what “had been” into “becoming.” The exhibition is a mnemonic journey. It begins and ends in an apparently infinite processing of the past into the present.

Opening
In Gallery 2
Saturday, May 3
Artist Present
2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Yam Lau's computer-generated animation entitled Room: An Extension, is an attempt to create new forms of spatial expression and presentation. It involves the reconstruction of Lau's bedroom and living room in Toronto through the media of video and 3-D animation software.

In this work, representational space is complicated with other forms of spatial expression and gestures within the order of the virtual. That is, representational video footage of Lau's daily routine is composed, or distributed within an architectural schema in virtual space. This schema functions as a kind of shorthand, diagrammatical expression of the rooms.

Room: An Extension is intended to affect a new quality of appearance, one that signals the potential of the virtual by enfolding a complication between movement, duration and gesture.