Diaz Contemporary is pleased to present Toronto-based artist Kelly Jazvac’s first solo-show with the gallery.
Paper Towels and Hot Tub is an exhibition of new wall works and sculpture constructed from office supply materials such as laminated paper and tape. Through playful installations and laborious material construction the work references luxury goods and advertising vernacular, resulting in a humorous but critical exploration of consumer desire, marketing, efficiency and use value.
Hot Tub is a large-scale sculpture inspired by images of cruise ship hot tubs and an abandoned garden pond. Paper Towels are a series of works influenced by hotel hand towels and recycling bags of shredded paper. Both purport to resemble or represent their respective original forms. However, illogical materials combined with a certain failure to perform physically encourage new relationships of form and desire.
In both of these works, material, surface and form are manipulated to orchestrate a renegotiation of the nature and purpose of these objects and the ideas they inspire. The process involves a deconstruction but also a reconstruction. In Hot Tub, a garden pond is turned from a container into a pedestal, and its custom-fitted fake-tile veneer is piled limpidly upon it. In the Paper Towels, what should be soft and absorbent becomes stiff, shiny, and resistant, calcified almost beyond recognition.
Jazvac’s works aspire to be mass-produced luxury consumer goods, and accordingly they share a slick and glossy aesthetic. However they are also handmade with materials that are accessible, yet unconventional. The result is a unique strangeness that solicits questions about consumption and creation, needs and desires, surface and quality, and above all, value. These objects, like any consumer product, have the ability to both delight and disappoint, depending, of course, on ones expectations. Jazvac has created a space for those expectations to be confronted and perhaps, reformulated. Paper Towels and Hot Tub is not a simplistic critique: there is as much empathy in these arduous constructions as there is criticality.
Kelly Jazvac’s Upgrade exhibition is currently on display at the Toronto Sculpture Garden, running until 15 April 2008.
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