Pardon Me

Pardon Me is an exhibition about intervening into the everyday lives and activities of others. It presents works in which the boundaries between private and public, distance and proximity are collapsed as the artists inserts themselves into the existence of another through a variety of performative strategies. While some of the works by Canadian and international artists in the exhibition are produced within a collaborative framework with their subject, others are more furtive and clandestine.

Mathew Sawyer is an artist and musician from the UK who engages in subtle interactions such as putting notes with song lyrics into the pockets of strangers or removing letters from apartment mail boxes, adding a postscript to the contents, resealing and returning them. Montreal-based Clément de Gaulejac also enacted anonymous interventions which he has turned into comics including a piece where he straightened the personal effects of swimmers on the Paris “Plage”. Like Sawyer and de Gaulejac, Vancouver artist Ron Tran shares an interest in working in the public realm although he attempts to forge a connection with strangers no matter how fleeting. In his Walking Strangers Home series, Tran documents a project where he approached strangers at night offering to walk them to their destination. Spanish artist Jana Leo also creates moments of intimacy with people she doesn’t know in a number of her works including Love Letters Project in which she paired people off the street with writers stationed in her studio in order to compose letters to the stranger’s loved one telling of things they were never able to express on their own.

Breaking the conventions of neutrality between anonymous strangers is at the heart of London-based Shizuka Yokomizo’s photographic works. In her Strangers series, Yokomizo left a letter for residents in ground floor apartments asking if she could take a picture of them through the window. If they agreed they were to pose in any way they chose at a given time. Beside the letter and their implicit consent, no other communication existed between the photographer and the resident. This rudimentary relationship becomes more deeply established in the work of Hadley + Maxwell who perform a temporary redecoration or installation in their subject’s home, collaborating with a member of the cultural apparatus such as a curator or gallery board member in their ongoing Décor Project. While situated within a similar residential context, Andrew Dadson’s interventions are performed without the consent of the occupant. For his projection work, Roof Gap, Dadson jumped from roof to roof, while in another work he moves a trailer an almost imperceptible amount each day until it is no longer parked in front of his house.

Pardon Me is part of a series of exhibitions at the Liane and Danny Taran Gallery curated by Cate Rimmer that look at representations and modifications to the mundane within contemporary art practice.