Georgia Dickie
Jerky Out, Gnar In
March 6 – April 17, 2021
@
Cooper Cole
1134 Dupont St.
Toronto, ON
Artist Talk: Friday March 26, 2021 / 12pm
Zoom ID: 848 8831 6088
COOPER COLE is pleased to present Jerky Out, Gnar In, a solo exhibition of the work of Georgia Dickie.
For this exhibition, Dickie presents a space of precarity in which boundaries are flexible and tangled with our lived experiences. Over the past year, the artist’s short walk between her home and studio has narrowed the patterns in her collecting of discarded objects, and in turn shaped the way her new sculptures have evolved.
Dickie’s artistic logic is based in rebalancing and eschewing the values assigned to material objects. The artist uses found materials, collects them in her studio, and goes through a process of shaping assemblages that create a new set of relations between materials. Often appearing physically or conceptually precarious, Dickie’s works remain liminal, and intentionally question what it means to attain subjectivity. In some cases, this means the artist continues to adjust the works for a period of time, including during installa$on. By contrast, works with the most fragile appearance—for example made of shopping bags and cardboard— are in fact densely doused in adhesive and completely impenetrable.
Dickie’s artistic approach subverts the way we relate to familiar objects and sculpture. Her work transcends these boundaries both physically and conceptually, creating a space that counters capitalist growth models, essentializing categories, and linear narratives. Embedded in this methodology is a deep environmental consciousness that up-cycles the remnants of a hyper-consumerist culture. The title Jerky Out, Gnar In references the nature of consumption in relation to waste production, creating a somewhat arbitrary dichotomy that mirrors Dickie’s practice and its engagement with chaos, entropy, containment, and impermanence.
Georgia Dickie (b.1989, Toronto, Ontario, Canada) earned her BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design University in 2011. She was one of the recipients of the 2020 Sobey Art Award, and the 2014 recipient of the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Prize. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions internationally including Oakville Galleries, Oakville (2019), Rolando Anselmi, Berlin (2018), Jeffrey Stark, New York (2017), Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2017), Cooper Cole (2017), Springsteen Gallery, Baltimore (2016), Art Museum of U of T, Toronto (2016), The Power Plant, Toronto (2013), and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2012). In February 2015, she was the Canada Council for the Arts artist in residence at Acme Studios in London, UK. Dickie currently lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
