Task-Negative
Ghazaleh Avarzamani, Caroline Cloutier, Sameer Farooq, Angela Grauerholz, Dominic Musa, Laurence Pilon, Devon Pryce, Kylan Sattler, Joseph Tisiga, David Yu
October 1 to November 5, 2022
Performance October 8 and 22, 2022
Galerie Nicolas Robert Toronto is pleased to inaugurate its new space with Task-Negative, a group exhibition of works by Ghazaleh Avarzamani, Caroline Cloutier, Sameer Farooq, Angela Grauerholz, Dominic Musa, Laurence Pilon, Devon Pryce, Kylan Sattler, Joseph Tisiga, and David Yu.
Using a wide range of materials and disciplines, the artists in this exhibition are unified by an interest in uncovering malleability within the tyrannical certainty of time. Whether through acts of routine and repetition, a fluid merging of space and memory, or an awareness of the magnitude of geological and ancestral time, each artist is engaged in extending, compressing, holding, or coming to terms with an expanded conception of the temporal.
Taking its title from a neurological term used to describe the behavior of the brain while idle, Task-Negative argues for the importance of a radically impractical state of wakeful rest. Released from external obligations and not driven by tasks, the brain becomes better suited for free association. It is in this open-ended space where daydreaming resides and the skills required to locate the profoundly mundane are unfocused and lingering. This is the romance of creative practice, and staring at a wall is its discipline.
On October 8 and 22, during regular gallery hours, David Yu will present Thrice the sapien, a new doppelgänger performance that plays with ideas of engagement, disengagement, viewership, banality, and the very idea of performance itself. Performer: Bo Hong Fu.
We would like to thank Bradley Ertaskiran and Olga Korper Gallery for their collaboration, and the Bureau du Québec à Toronto for their support.
