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Penelope Stewart is an artist, curator/writer and publisher whose multi-disciplinary practice encompasses expansive architectural installations/interventions, alternative photography, artist books, and works on paper. Re-current themes address notions of cultural memory, of time and space and a considered approach to the relationship between objects, architecture, gardens, landscape and the places between – places to intervene, inhabit and above all activate. Whether it has been historic sites such as Musée Barthète, a small museum in France, or a museum like the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY or the deconstruction/reconstruction of a 19 th century book of botany using cyanotype, her intentions are to create sensory spaces, haptic experiences, transforming our perceptions and possible readings of space, time and memory.

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Sentinels (2001)

Sentinels (2001)

Sentinels, 2001-2002

Façade, photo silkscreen on organza, double layer, sewing 13’h x 14’2”w

façade features the front façade of the Department of Household Science Building at the corner of Queens Park and Bloor Street in Toronto, a neoclassical building (1908) which housed the first female students at the University of Toronto. It seemed a fitting subject for the study of spatial memory as a building with revolutionary roots is now shared by the Club Monaco retail store and the Ombudsmen’s office, twin services of commerce and government. The photo screened image is constructed of two identical layers placed one in front of the other with a small space between the two. Excess fabric crumples as it meets the floor, contradicting the impression of stable columns and supporting walls. The doubling of the image creates a strange moiré or hologram effect, which, paradoxically, grants it volume and physicality only to undermine that appearance as the fabric sways at any breeze. In this installation, the interplay of stability and instability, permanence and ephemerality operates in the perceptual space between the mobile fabric and immobile trace.

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