Project description • Defered Audit #1

The overall project is titled Defered Audits #1-3 and consists of three distinct artworks (#1 - 3) that engaged the infrastructure of the gallery in different ways. It was commissioned by Ilga Leimanis, curator of the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University, Montreal as part of a group exhibition, Secret, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Gallery being in that space - 2002. The parameters were wide open - "to consider the past and the future of the gallery." In response, the concept of the "defered audit" was developed. An audit implies a surveying of past activities while a deferment is a form of postponement, hence implying the future. In truth, the term "defered audit" can be seen as an oxymoron or at the very least as the bringing together of two actions that, in a temporal sense, are contradictory.

Three "defered audits" were carried out. Defered Audit #1 involved the activation of the rather large front window space of the gallery that in previous exhibitions had been used only for exhibition titling and perhaps the installation of a "signature" painting, print or drawing. The distance from the glass window to the wall inside the gallery was only a little over a metre. I asked to rent industrial shelving, which was then installed to fill the entire window space, leaving only a narrow space, just enough for an individual to walk through, between the metal shelving and the window.

 

Placed on the shelves in random order were all of the file boxes brought out of the gallery's storage space and in use in its administrative offices. In this sense, the entire administrative history of the gallery was "visible" to anyone walking by the window. By reading the hand-written descriptions and dates on the outside of the file boxes, the viewer could get a sense of the day-to-day labour of running the gallery since its inception. In agreement with staff, the boxes that had been in use in the offices were also placed on the shelving, thus having gallery staff literally "perform" their jobs when they went into the window space to work with still-active files.