Secondhand
Kyla Mallett and Allison Hardy, Zin Taylor
Curated by: Reid Shier
Secondhand brings together recent collaborative works by Vancouver based artists Allison Hardy & Kyla Mallett alongside works of Toronto based artist Zin Taylor. Curated by Vancouver based artist Damian Moppett, the exhibition showcases artists who work at the intersection of reality and fiction, and who create new narratives through a reworking of popularized sources.
Hardy and Mallett have been working collaboratively for the last three years, during which time they’ve developed a quasi-anthropological investigation into aspects of Lower Mainland youth culture. Their photo/text works employ verbatim transcriptions of events remembered by friends and acquaintances, alongside unselfconscious images of the event’s locations. The recounts of these various situations shift in tone between embarrassing, ritualistic and sometimes perverse. Over time, and through insistent retelling, these recollections become distorted and mythic. Storytelling, and the desire to pass on recounts of events, is also documented in a found video work included in the exhibition. The video documents the exploits of a drunken partygoer. The video was subsequently copied and distributed hand to hand by the filmmakers. A portion was even posted on the Internet, and achieved a level of notoriety that transcended its original audience.
Zin Taylor’s work grows out of a desire to formulate a meeting between ‘reality’ and cinema. Taylor creates imagined communities and individuals who construct environments in which to live out cinematic narratives. One video work depicts a friend ‘auditioning’ for the role of himself in a fictional movie. In A Conversation with Marilyn Siligail, another video Taylor will exhibit, the artist acts the role of a fictional costume designer auditioning for work in the same fictional movie