The Monte Clark Gallery Toronto is pleased to present a group show titled Decay: (n) (v).
Decay: (n) (v)

Decay: (n) (v)
October 1 – October 23, 2005


By bringing together a group of artists who share a concern for the dilapidated and the dying, Decay: (n) (v) explores the idea of decay (as both subject and action: noun and verb). Featuring images by Roy Arden, Karin Bubas, Chris Gergley, Greg Girard, Scott McFarland, Tony Scherman, Howard Ursuliak and Stephen Waddell, the works in this exhibition mix the organic with the inorganic to capture the 'landscape' in states of both literal and philosophical decay. These images of decay yield a field of forensic evidence ~ actual and implied ~ they testify to an object's, or to an environment's uncertain past, to its transitive present, and to its impending extinction.

In Arden's iconic black and white Crow and Gutter with Rags, the actual realities of decay and decomposition are in direct contrast to the beauty and the stark aesthetic of the photographic images themselves. Using a softer, warmer, but no less clinical eye, Karin Bubas' photographs of Ivy House portray a life lived. They follow the course of a London home in the process of being dismantled, with possessions boxed, bagged and catalogued. The juxtaposition of diverse objects from different decades and in various styles chart the end of an era ~ it is an exploration of decay as a slow change from a state of sound perfection to a state of scattered remains. On the eve of destruction, McFarland's decaying Boathouse is a vision of both disintegration/decomposition and corruption/alteration ~ a visual analogue to his own artistic process of blending photographic objectivity, or the natural, with digital distortion, or the unnatural. Rotting animal matter is offensive to civilized human sight and smell. Tony Scherman's paintings of decaying carcasses and other foodstuffs trigger visceral reactions within the viewer. Such reactions serve the artist's literal and philosophical ends. Decay, in the sense of corrosion ~ of wearing away, of gradual destruction ~ presents its human face in the work of Stephen Waddell. His portraits of the homeless pose a challenge to traditional notions of urban or social decay by making explicit the subject's own physical discomfort and social dissolution.

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