at the Convenience Gallery

58 Lansdowne Avenue.

by Gary Michael Dault, Globe and Mail, Dec. 30, 2006

This initially almost unnoticeable piece by photographer, writer and curator Vid Ingelevics is nevertheless one of this protean artist's most devastating, caustic, bleakly funny and sociologically acute works. It's called Inconvenience Store, and consists of a slow, filmed crawl, up the plate-glass window of the Convenience Gallery -- which was once a convenience store -- of a list of familiar, corner-store items which, unhappily, are not any longer available at this particular "store."

You stand there on the street -- the work is best viewed, says a notice on the front door, "from dusk till midnight" -- watching this dispiriting list go by: "No gum," "Out of licorice," "Out of popsicles," "No AA Batteries," "No Bottled Water" and so on. It's funny at first. You feel sort of superior to the now-disappointed people who want all that junk. (No licorice, indeed!).

But then you start to see the store as the locus of the shut out, of non-compliance, of deprivation. At which time, the piece turns darker and begins to read like a commentary on abundance and its withdrawal, on dependence and its fragilities.