A two-part exhibition presented at Plein sud, centre d’exposition en art actuel in Longueuil, from February 17 to April 7, 2018, and at EXPRESSION until April 22, 2018.
The work of Denis Farley has long been remarkable for its sustained attention to visual systems. Darkrooms, remote surveillance devices and astronomy observatories have constituted the thematic underpinning for an art practice highlighting observation sites and optical “instruments.” Photography, itself a sort of vision machine, has also undergone considerable scrutiny. Farley’s approach to art-making is motivated by a desire to question the visible as it pertains both to his subjects and to the forms in which he chooses to represent them.
More recently, Farley has built on his previous achievements with a modified approach focused on the world of the infra-visible: data streams, waves, algorithms and other electrical pulses involved in instantaneous communication and the cross-platform sharing of images are his new objects of inquiry. But how is it possible to represent such intangible elements? Transmission, relay and information-capture systems, along with data management and storage apparatuses (e.g. the cloud), are amenable to representation in the same way that the strength of the wind is conveyed by the trees it bends. Farley has decided to represent them, to help us see—or at least envision—what is concealed from sight.
This exhibition will focus Farley’s last decade of work with these phenomena. While it is not a retrospective it will reframe, by presenting works that plumb the limits of the visible, the paradigm of vision so implicit in Farley’s early works.
Saturday, February 17, 2018
Opening at Plein sud at 1 p.m.
Opening and guided tour at EXPRESSION at 3:30 p.m.