David Clarkson and Michelle Gay: Space and Time

Featuring drawing, painting, and sculptural new media work by David Clarkson and Michelle Gay, this two-person show explores networks of the technological, cultural, virtual, mythic and historical, substance nested in notions of space and time.

Michelle Gay’s work explores the parameters of programming in what could be called data space by visualizing spaces that are not, strictly speaking, inside the computer or descriptive of an imaginary inner journey. Her texts may be seen as set in a cultural or social spaces shared by others, as well as being individually internalized.

Such virtual, cultural, and technological data spaces also appear in different aspects of David Clarkson’s Mars Series. Clarkson’s architectural Mars Models visualize a potential landscape on the borders of science and sci-fi speculation, while his videos trace a cultural or social space of Mars in the popular imagination. Seen together, these two bodies of work open up an arena for speculative thought, experimentation, new observations and potentially new ways of imagining the temporal within real and fictive space.

Currently enrolled in the graduate school at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, Gay holds a MFA from NSCAD (Halifax, Nova Scotia). Her work explores the possibilities inherent in the ubiquitous desktop PC, as a site of intimate virtual or digital experiences.
A recent graduate of OCAD University’s MFA program, Clarkson began work on his multi-media Mars Series more than ten years ago, exhibiting different aspects of this project as it has progressed in New York, Germany and Spain, but never before in Canada.
David Clarkson will be present for Family Sunday, March 3, 1 to 4 pm to take visitors to Mars in workshops and through his exhibition.

Curated by Carla Garnet