Patrick Mahon
Water and Tower

Patrick Mahon’s new wall-based and floor-dependent printed sculptures extend the artist’s longstanding commitment to intersecting art and design, decoration and expression, and the singular with the multiple. Invoking water as both a natural and socially inscribed material, and towers as paradigms of human enterprise, the artist has set about creating works where structure and flow, solids and liquids, interplay to produce provocative new forms. Mahon’s materially intense objects, printed on wood in deep hues and with subtle references to the grid, are mounted on plexiglas such that they appear to float off the wall. Other pieces run across the floor in surprising and poetic configurations.

Mahon’s interest in describing “a liquid with a line” is longstanding, and the presence of fluid passages and architecture-inspired approaches is not new to the artist. Here it is renewed with fresh and often urgent conviction. In preparation for this work, Mahon recently travelled in India, where he photographed water towers, often in areas where the 2004 tsunami had devastated the countryside. He was also a participant last year in a residency in Boussan, France, where he installed Chateau d’eau (Water Tower), a purpose-built, patterned sculpture.

Patrick Mahon’s work is embedded with historical narratives and modern “texts” but is, fundamentally, a contemporary expression that invokes the tensions, contradictions and visual intrigues of the present moment.

Barbara Balfour
The slightly sad color of an early winter P.M.

Barbara Balfour’s new body of work, The slightly sad color of early winter P.M., grew out of her experience with David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. A few pages into the thousand-page novel, she was so overwhelmed by Wallace’s vocabulary that she began to make note of certain words. A pattern evolved: she collected words and phrases that intrigued her, and then made notes on her collection. In addition to idiosyncratic spelling and phrases, she discovered outright fabrication of certain words and terms.

A list of the vocabulary drawn from Infinite Jest could engender various specific word lists, relating to tennis or pharmaceutical drugs, for example. One such spinoff list, of the colours mentioned by Wallace, led to From DFW – qualified colours. In addition to a preponderance of instances of the word black, usually regarding depressive moods, Balfour noted idiosyncratic references to colours, qualified by adjectives or short descriptions. Examples such as “anachronistic white,” “mature-eggplant-skin purple,” and “the slightly sad color of early winter P.M.” give a sense of David Foster Wallace’s nuanced colour references, which encompass the succinct, elliptical and even cryptic.

Looking over her collection of colour references from Infinite Jest, Balfour imagined what each colour would look like and began mixing printing inks. She then made “draw-downs” (a printmaking term used to describe the process for testing the tone and luminosity of a mixed ink on paper prior to printing) of each colour, exemplifying the imagery in David Foster Wallace’s language. Creating a playful dance between the written word and the imagined colour, each group of seven “draw-downs” are delicately displayed, encased like specimens, records of Balfour’s journey through Infinite Jest.