Promising Objects

Alison MacTaggart is a Vancouver-based artist whose conceptually inspired installation work bridges the disciplines of sculpture, drawing and writing.  

Her recent work Promising Objects draws parallels between language and art further exploring her interest in inventors and artists and their respective quests to devise solutions to problems and ideas.

“To guide the early stages of the work, I decided on three parameters derived directly from The Guide to Patents from the Canadian Intellectual Property Office. Each artwork or solution to my proposal to explore language and the dialogic must demonstrate novelty, utility and ingenuity. To demonstrate novelty, each artwork must be “new” in some way. It could be an improvement on a previous artwork or the first such object in the world. With regards to utility each artwork must “work” or have a “useful” function. For example, the artwork could be an apparatus or it could be a process or a method that invites participation. Who says art can’t be useful? To demonstrate ingenuity each artwork must be a development that would not have been obvious beforehand and it would elicit a “why-didn’t-I-think-of-that” reaction from other experts or artists in the field—a challenge indeed, to say the least.

The resulting works are embodied solutions to my proposed idea. They make “vibratory” references to harmony and discordance, pitch, tone, amplification, elastic potential energy, and other forces and effects. They promise an encounter between the viewer(s) and the artwork, the viewer and his or herself, and the viewer and the artist by way of the artwork.”  -Alison MacTaggart

Curated by Nicole Stanbridge
The LAB Gallery