Over the past several years, London, Ontario-based artist Kelly Jazvac has worked primarily with discarded adhesive vinyl gleaned from the printing industry. While the vinyl will never degrade, the advertising messages it carries—and thus its value—quickly expire. She transforms large-scale, glossy images into creased and bulging—yet strangely seductive—sculptures that drape and droop across the gallery, poignantly reflecting on obsolescence, the false promises of consumer culture and the pleasures of “dumb” abstract forms.
In PARK, her first solo museum exhibition, Jazvac responds to the distinctive context of Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens with a suite of recent sculptural works, video, found objects, and a new site-specific wallpaper installation. The wallpaper results from a photo shoot that Jazvac undertook in one of the Gairloch Gardens ponds, with key props from that shoot reconfigured into another new installation also on view. Jazvac’s exhibition wittily reflects on the artifice inherent to environments like gardens and parks, sites which, despite their contrived relationship to nature, provide spaces of beauty, contemplation and reprieve. With unrestricted views of the carefully manicured Gardens visible through the galleries’ windows, PARK stages a dynamic interplay of colour and shape, interior and exterior, organic and manufactured, real and virtual.
First and last installation shots by Dave Kemp, view all others by Toni Hafkenscheid.
Press:
Magenta (long review)
Akimblog (short review)
Magenta (on Jazvac, 2016)