The Or Gallery is proud to present the first of a series of exhibitions to bring together two artists sharing thematic and formal links. Larry Krone and Corinne Carlson used both of the Or’s exhibition spaces to create an installation of multi-media works investigating process, memory and identity. The works chosen for the show centered on compulsively realized text pieces which acted as semi autobiographical portraits of thought. The artists share a concern with words and phrases which often get stuck in the head, with song lyrics which keep repeating themselves in the brain, and illustrate a process of identification which is outside of our ability to author. Their installation stress subjectivity as a complex process of abjection and determination

Corinne and Larry:

I’ve known Corinne for a long time and when Larry’s work was described to me I knew I wanted to do a show with the two of you. I’d always felt Corinne had been working in somewhat of a vacuum, at least when she was here in Vancouver, and that part of the reason why she hadn’t received the critical attention I thought she deserved was that there had been a lack of context for looking at her stuff-there had been no other artists working in a similar vein. Larry’s work was the first that I’ve seen that seemed to share similar methods.

There is a duality at work that I find difficult to describe. It isn’t lingual or textual, even though words play so much a part of both your practices. I think the words you use illustrate the words inside your head, the words that repeat themselves over and over in your brain, and this is why the ‘text’ pieces are neither oral nor ‘written’. I also think songs are so important in both of your work because they operate on this level. But the duality for me resides in the processes you use to illustrate the almost indescribably personal systems of ‘thinking’, of the processes of memory, of problem solving through daydreaming-basically the mechanics of thought. You both present these in terms of very public modes of address-advertising, songs, comic books-conveying your ideas in these commodified and depersonalized reference systems. This is heightened by the way in which the pieces are accomplished, through a compulsive realization of huge tasks Corinne’s spirals and Larry’s hair works and comic book beading-which turn each of you into these producers of your own administrative weirdness. There’s an echo of the systems you refer to in how you make the objects, you’re workers manufacturing your own obsessive ideas.

This is not an uncommon strategy, but I think your use of it is something different. You’ve each taken the old idea of how social and cultural worlds determine who we are (what we buy, how we dress, how we become identifiable, blah blah blah) and extended it by showing what a huge effect they have on how we think, how we construct ideas and how we realize those ideas. What I think is great about this is that what you’ve chosen to make work about is not censored notions of what you think you’re thinking, but those little phrases and songs that truly do get stuck in the revolving door. I think this paradoxically says a lot more about ‘identity’ (a word that should be taken out and beaten up) than anything we assume to be really personal could or would, that even through our abject and blatant conditioning by what’s around us we can’t help but subconsciously and consciously recombine, personalize and fetishize what we’re given.

Reid