Pull Over Parade

Opening at 8pm on Friday, April 17

Artist talk at 2pm on Saturday, April 18

In Rio, a singular firework could signal the victory of a football team, a warning for drug dealers of impending raids, or the mischievous activities of neighborhood children. That one symbol fired high into the sky could have as many interpretations as it does viewers and is the premise for Suzanne Nagy's sculptural installation, Pull Over Parade. Through photographs, process based sculpture, and found objects Nagy documents and re-interprets fleeting communicative gestures, instances of speech outside of language common to her day-to-day experience, and casts them as figurative portmanteaus for her own conflicted attempts at public dialogue.

Privileging the act of utterance over the articulation of meaning the three works of Pull Over Parade reproduce site-specific occurrences outside of their original contexts. Re-creating a hitchhiker's attempts to obscure signage barring his occupation, improvised fruit picking gear festooned with ritual adornment, and the confluence of workhorses and fireworks as parking valets, Nagy generates a symbolic middle ground where discussions of formal sculptural themes are conducted according to the cultural diversity of symbolic representation. Rather than faithfully reproduce these scenes from memory, Nagy supplants practical material decisions with aesthetic ones, altering the artistic value of her objects while preserving their utilitarian function.

Suzanne Nagy lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. She graduated from the Emily Carr Institute in 2004, this is her first Canadian solo exhibition.