Ingrid Bachmann Talking Walls: Dialogue, Ingrid and Plato
OBORO
Opening on Saturday, February 13, at 4 pm
With the collaboration of The Fabric Workshop (Philadelphia)
Current discussions around electronic technologies such as virtual reality posit interactive and immersive environments which engage the full human sensorium. I am interested in exploring these ideas through very basic hand technologies in creating rich physical and material environments. This project began as a re-thinking of the gallery space: to propose the gallery as a forum for ideas; as a site to create and initiate dialogue, and as an opportunity to work directly in and on the gallery architecture, both literally and metaphorically. The aim was also to question and critique in a somewhat theatrical and potentially humourous way certain assumptions of Western thought. Plato’s Socratic dialogues, with their emphasis on “ideal theories”, were used as a model.
Here, the dialogue is a multi-directional exchange between Western tradition, the gallery’s architecture, myself, and the gallery visitor.
For most people in the West, the chalkboard or blackboard has associations to authority and socially sanctioned or conditioned knowledge. But it also provides a surface which can continually be written upon, erased, and re-written, much in the same manner as our public histories, as well as our personal histories, are constantly being re-invented. This aspect of erasure and who wields the power to erase and to write is key.
OBORO
Ingrid Bachmann was born in a trailer park outside of Aylmer, in Southern Ontario. She was raised on a diet of TV dinners, Alphaghetti and Oprah, and her parents have the dubious distinction of being voted for two consecutive years “King