The installations of Toronto-based artist Georgia Dickie are composed from an ever-growing collection of found objects that she accrues in her studio. She selects and positions these according to an ulterior logic that eschews the values and meanings we usually assign to things. Staging, grouping, balancing, and placing are a primary focus of this artist's practice, activities that makes her presence integral to the presentation of the work.
Agouti Sky is a solo exhibition of new work by Dickie that transforms Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square into a landscape of sorts, made up of the bric-a-brac refuse of a society built to consume and discard. Dickie plucks objects—a lampshade, a satellite, boxing gloves, metal stands, baseball caps, tills, a pair of shoes, two carved wooden birds—out of this circuit, and sets them into new constellations. She rarely alters them, choosing instead to present them as they are, either singled out for individual attention or swept into a larger ecology of forms.
Dickie's objects are often dismantled at the end of an exhibition and then repurposed at a later date. This lends her installations a sense of material transformation that raises questions about a work's beginning and end. With Agouti Sky, as with each of Dickie's exhibitions, a new set of relations comes into view—the work coheres momentarily and then passes into other forms.
The artist wishes to acknowledge the support of the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council.
