PLAY

Rachel Wong

July 2012

We are opening the summer season with a site-specific installation by Rachel Wong. A large, on-site created sculptural painting will be the main focus of PLAY, complemented by digital prints from Wong’s series Mapping Time.

Wong, a Toronto-based artist working in glass, paint and light, likes to play by her own rules, particularly as they relate to conventional approaches to logic and reality. Manipulating her materials in unexpected and perceptually ambiguous ways, she creates pieces that are meant to delight and to disorient the viewer. Her goal is to provoke the viewer into questioning assumptions about many of the things we take for granted, among them physicality, causality, awareness, boundaries, time and space.

Making creative use of gravity and the directionality of light, Wong constructs playful sculptural elements out of blown glass, and places them in solid fields of colour which break up into shapes that echo the form of the glass globules. Viewers find themselves second-guessing what initiates what, in a way that opens their imaginations to different spatial and structural possibilities. By her deft handling of colour, shape and form, Wong embarks on an exploration of construction and deconstruction, emergence and transition.