Michael Mahalchick
IT, Mar 7 – Apr 22, 2012

CANADA is pleased to present IT, Michael Mahalchick’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. In this exhibition, Mr. Mahalchick presents sculptural arrangements, fashioning pieces from cheap and discarded items.

THIS EXHBITION is a walk-in manifesto, a book of the dead about the psychic place where mysticism, modernism, mayhem and terror collapse into one another. Many will find this show revolting. Not because it's bad or resembles a parade float from perdition, or weakens on repeated visits, but because of "a puerile addiction to the macabre and the scatological." Mr. Mahalchick wants to unleash the explosive power of art, remove boundaries and create a constellation of meanings.

Harvesting, fusing and re-constructing references from myriad sources, he takes an anything-goes approach to thematerials he uses to convey multiple meanings in unexpected ways.Consciously, they fall desperately short of the iconic, becoming vestiges posed as emblems for that which cannot be conveyed; a gaping magnitude of impotency, dull tones, vague, nondescript scenes, stripped of emotional propaganda. In Mahalchick ‘s works, the faded language of nostalgia is strangely empty: void of sympathy or moral, a scene twice-removed, making it impulsively human. Without context of history or source, the viewer is left to engage with the sculpture on a purely instinctive level; familiar, distant, like haunting memories.

His art reveals the diverse emotions—from treasured to unwanted—inherent in everyday objects, serving as a link to personal connections and the ambiguity of language. His work helps to develop a viewer’s awareness and understanding of social themes, through wordplay as well as juxtapositions of technology and other found objects. No object is out of place and each contributes to the greater whole. The narrative built from each element’s associations, is disjointed and open-ended.

The entire installation seems provisional or still under construction, abandoned or frozen. The absence of the body IS FELT amidst this detritus. Indeed, although everything included is in some way man-made, the lack of a living presence speaks to our dissociation from what we have produced. The inanimate world brims with longing and memory waiting to be coaxed forward...

The pieces in this exhibition serve less as a reminder of a vibrant life, than a lingering forbearance of death; ghost - faded and shrinking, sinister and anonymous, lonely relics without sentiment or intimacy.

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