Friday 9 July 2004

That Obscure Object of Desire: A Group Exhibition of Visions of Delight, Fascination and Desire

"That Obscure Object of Desire" begins with the title of the 1977 Luis Bunuel film  the title being a point of departure for a collection of otherwise unrelated work. In Luis Bunuels film That Obscure Object of Desire, one man obsessively pursues the love of a young woman. The film is made strangely compelling by the fact that the director used two different and dissimilar women to play the leading role. In doing so, Bunuel generalized the object of his protagonist's love, making the focus of the film instead the character's obsessive behaviour and the shapeless and shifting identities of our objects of romantic longing.

It is said that the desire to connect goes back to the infant's separation from the mother's breast. From that grows a life-long search for love and the creation of a system of language and symbols to express that desire. Prose and poetry, music and art are inexact yet necessary means to evoke, however directly or obliquely, the goals of our longing. The works in this exhibition address fantasy, play, consumption, memory and mystery as identifiable characteristics of that obscure object of our desire.

Featuring work by Jane Adeney, Sara Angelucci, John Armstrong, Santo Barbieri, Dianne Bos, Gabrielle de Montmollin, Phil Delisle, Evergon, Lee Goreas, Catherine Heard, Clarissa Schmidt Inglis, Amelia Jimenez, Dan Kennedy, Anda Kubis, Kristiina Lahde, Bonnie Lewis, Joe Lima, Jennifer Linton, Gwen McGregor, Michael Morris, Lisa Neighbour, Reinhard Reitzenstein, Kris Rosar, Mona Shahid, Joanna Strong, Diana Thorneycroft, Philip Vanderwall, and Rhonda Weppler.

Exhibition runs from July 9 through August 14, 2004.