Rebecca Diederichs, FLICK, 2004/2005 (laminated digital print, 128 X 197 cm). Image taken from here.
Rebecca Diederichs is a close friend. She is also one of my very favourite artists. Her work is lush and eye-popping, yet she exercises such intuitive discernment that there is also tons of tension. Borrowed fragments are magnified and re-composed with precision. Her appropriations (these stripes above, for instance, are from the packaging on a box of tissues) tease us with the vague sense that they come from somewhere familiar, offering full-on colour-blasts of visual satisfaction but dodging the "ah-hah" of recongition that would collapse them into quotes. In her recent work, Rebecca introduces language, and treats it as yet another piece of the world. Text-in-art can be a deplorable device, but Ruscha-like, Rebecca pulls it off. The words adopt shapes, dissolve into form, but do not lose their sense nor their readability. Here the word "flick" and the concept of "stripe" carry about the same amount cognitive weight, so the piece rolls and folds and interacts with your neurons in a bunch of different ways. It's good for savouring.
Rebecca Diederichs has an opening tomorrow night at 8:00pm at YYZ Artists Outlet. She will be installing a new work called BLAZE. I'm looking forward to the exhibition, which also includes a show by Christian Giroux and Daniel Young, and another by Jeanie Riddle.
return to: sally mckay and lorna mills
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