Margaret Flood: More or Less
May 23 to July 19, 2009
Guelph artist Margaret Flood engages repetitive activities, common materials, and manufactured objects. Working by hand, Flood collects and accumulates, dissembles and reassembles pieces of things, performing identical actions onto like objects in an exploration of time and memory. This exhibition featured works on paper to which Flood had affixed fields of miniscule ‘periods’ extracted from published texts, transposing the ‘pauses’ and ‘inflexions’ from existing literary narratives to a new visual language.
Flood is drawn to objects with tasks—things whose function is to connect, contain, or unite other things; things that help us to communicate more effectively. She employs forms that are so common they go almost unnoticed, the most modest of manufactured objects, like books. The combination of a basic activity, common material and repetition are Flood’s way of considering the unexpected in the average. The concepts of time and memory are inseparable from touch in Flood’s art. The presence of her hand in the work connects the artist to those ephemeral, transitional states.
Margaret Flood undertook Foundational Studies at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (Vancouver) and engaged the Advanced Studies program at the Dundas Valley School of Art (Dundas, Ontario) before earning her Bachelor of Fine Art degree with a major in drawing from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2004. She is currently a Master of Fine Art candidate at the University of Guelph. Selected exhibitions include Retelling Anne at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Pocket Pilgrims at The Museum of Temporary Art (Tubingen, Germany), and Cumulous at Park Gallery (Toronto). Flood has received many awards including an Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2007/8) and a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (2008/9).
Images:
Left: Flood, Cynthia. The Animals in their Elements. Vancouver: Talon Book, 1987, 2009 (collage detail)
Right: Journey's End, 2008, (collage, detail)