Point to Line, 2008
Point to Line, Blink Gallery, Ottawa, Ontario, 2008
Blink Gallery’s Header House is located in Major’s Hill Park, Ottawa. Built in 1920, Header House is the former potting shed and the sole remaining structure of Major’s Hill Park’s greenhouse complex. It has been designated a federal heritage building. The park has always been a public space since the early days of Ottawa. It has been used year round as a public gathering place since 1874.
The pod-like form: The centerpiece of the exhibition is a pod-like form made of dried branches bound together at points that create nodes. Metaphorically, these nodes sprout lines representing the branching of ideas and the crisscrossing of thought patterns that occurred in the structuring and creation of the exhibition
The floor: In botany, a rhizome is a horizontal stem of a plant that is usually found underground, often sending out roots and shoots from its nodes. They send out roots from the bottom of the nodes and new upward-growing shoots from the top of the nodes. In this exhibition there are no visible rhizomes. However, the creative process is rhizomatic in its dynamical production of ideas. In the exhibition the floor nodes featured a related word to indicate the growth of an idea. It will happen but where and what from it will take cannot be predicted.
The windows: Works presented in the three gallery windows offer the lines of research I followed in interpreting points of interest in the park. One window looks out over the shoulder of the indigenous scout statue; another images the Celtic Cross memorial, and the third references the Three Sisters Garden located at the end of a meandering footpath at the base of the escarpment.
