Uncooperative / Biennial Emerging Artist Exhibition

Saturday, September 12, 2015 to Friday, October 9, 2015

Opening reception: Saturday, September 12th, 6 - 9 PM

Forest City Gallery is pleased to present its Biennial Emerging Artists Exhibition. This year addressing the theme of 'exhaustion,' Uncooperative will feature works by eight emerging artists from Southwestern Ontario.

FCG will host an opening reception for this exhibition on Saturday, September 12th from 6 - 9 PM.

Sarah Beck Alex Bierk Audrey D'Astous Taylor Doyle Jamie Dronyk & Faith Patrick Nathalie Quagliotto Niloufar Salimi

About the exhibition:

In his essay On Exhaustion and Exuberance, Jan Verwoert relates the problematic of exhaustion to the pressure to perform. In performing, cultural/creative workers must remain flexible and mobile. This itinerant lifestyle results in a collapse of the separation between work and leisure spheres, and often times to a state of exhaustion. To push oneself beyond the point of exhaustion is a strategy commonly employed to "relieve yourself of the burden of outside expectations; you simply incapacitate yourself to a degree that no-one can possibly still expect anything more of you".

To be uncooperative is thus a way of actively non-performing - of sidestepping the engrained protocols of what we should do, and instead act under our own agency, on our own time. Uncooperative speaks to creative workers' systematic exhaustion and the realization that we are collectively bound up in the same pressures to perform based on the unrealistic, counter-productive expectations of fast-food economics: quick, effective, more.

Works included in this exhibition consider exhaustion as either a physical process bound up in performances of repetition, interminableness, and depletion - or as a psychological mindset, which might symptomatically present itself through a lens of detachment, ineffectiveness, insomnia and apathy.