The Box is a window box at Gallery RAG that is being used as an installation space for artists to try innovative experiments in installing and creating artwork. Presently the artist, Tracy Hayes, has created an installation of her scroll works.
"skim, dip and dive"
Installation by Tracy Hayes
What lies beneath the surface? What might happen if we access it? These questions are central to Hayes’ work.
The scrolls are very personal. What began as a desire to have unlimited access to paper and to indulge in a work preference of drawing in intimate settings, morphed alongside with my other discoveries into an interest in the fickle nature of language and story. Looking to poetry as an “accepted” text-based example of subversion to the dominant social structures which set rules/norms, I sought clues of what was unsettling, destabilizing and… potentially threatening as a way to mature the syntax within my personal visual language.
Because of the nature of obscuring much of what I’m working on while proceeding into the next section I imagined that this exploration of freedom within my visual language might be a version of a book, though not one to be taken literally.
A few of the scrolls were executed in what I termed “Quarantine Residency”, during a weirdly productive period when I was forced to remain alone in a hotel In Pointe Claire, QC for 14 days in order to be released in time to attend my mother’s burial services. I have included pictures below of that stay.
There is a need to uncover a space which is anticipated as welcoming yet sensed as simultaneously repellant and sets up a visceral tension between anticipation and access, seduction, and danger. These juxtapositions become meditations on larger psychological states, examining the submerged darkness within.The dialogue between the work and environment includes a consideration of the metaphorical space of above, below and behind the making site/surface which allows for the resonances of the installation environment to enact its influence both literally and figuratively.
