04 November to 23 December 2005

Zin Taylor & Allison Hrabluik
Nub

Allison Hrabluik is a young Toronto-based artist with an extensive national exhibition history, known for her captivating and gorgeous animations that she laboriously constructs. Her animated videos feature sets recreated from stills printed from previously captured video she shoots of the locations—both homey and industrial—that fascinate her. These sets are peopled with fi gures also cut from stills, which she then animates into life using traditional stop-motion techniques. In Nub Hrabluik presents a series of watercolours on paper that chart the equally detailed and labouriously imagined and constructed inventions of an ingenious farmer. The drawings pull us into the complicated machinations of his mind and daily agrarian needs, solutions for which he has fashioned from modifi ed tractors, oil drums, clamps and stands. These works are testaments to parallel projects of the imagination—the farmer’s, Hrabluik’s—and also serve as prequels to future animations. Zin Taylor, recently included in the Powerplant exhibition ‘Dedicated to you, but you weren’t listening’ complements Hrabluik’s work with his own drawings, included in Nub. His works are delicate accretions of pencil marks, charting the meandering and delicate forms of dirt clumps arranged to form words, phrases. Spelling out the names of tracks on the album by a Japanese musician to whom Taylor created a video homage, these drawings marked the inception of that video piece. Studies, preludes, companion works, the careful suggestion of a biological material ushered into the realms of the linguistic and the aural, Taylor’s drawings record different levels and means of interpretation.