Enclaves

Sandra Rechico

November 2001

Sandra Rechico has been creating site specific installations for the last 15 years using domestic materials like candles, floor tiles, discarded glass or wool to produce an engaging and subversive body of work.

In 1999 she participated in the Waste Management exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario where she covered the floor of a room with 4000 pounds of broken glass shards to a depth of several inches. Visitors were invited to step into this space of light and sparkle. The physically threatening and psychologically unnerving experience of treading this aggressive carpet was in sharp contrast to the auditory splendour of crunching a path through the gleaming field of diffused light. In Floor Show (1995), an installation of 1000 square-foot floor tiles covering a gallery floor, the viewer is first attracted by her colourful, abstract images only to recoil at the realization of what they are about: the pathology and diagnosis of gastrointestinal disease.
In Stranded Flurries (2000), Rechico used finger knitted wool to make vast lengths of fragile cord to create planes that transformed the gallery into a veiled ambiguous space where the usual reference to architecture becomes blurred and obscured.

Sandra Rechico will create Enclaves as a site-specific installation for the Durham Art Gallery. The audience is invited to visit her at the Gallery during the installation of her new piece between Wednesday, November 28 and Friday, November 30.