entitled: SIMON FRANK AND DAVE HIND

entitled is an exhibition of new installation work by regional artists Simon Frank and Dave Hind. Frank lives and works in Hamilton, ON, and Hind lives and works in Brantford, ON. Each artist has a functional and an artistic practice. In their functional mode, they make furniture; Frank out of found wood and Hind out of metal. In their artistic mode, the artists create objects out of similar media to their funiture practices. Often the works are individual stand alone pieces, more recently they have become large-scale installations. Frank is also a poet, Hind is also a musician.

Simon Frank has constructed a new tree work for entitled. Sketch for New Forest is a huge 45ft oak tree, resting on the floor of the Gallery. The tree is created out of the shavings gathered from a Millgrove wood lot where sawdust is the detritus of wood product production. The great trunk of the tree greets the visitor as soon as they enter the gallery. The bulk of the tree is not vertical but horizontal, therefore it does not act as an object blocking visitor entry, but rather lays flat and still, like a cut down tree. From this vantage point the the trunk is inviting, warm and cushioned; mounded like a hillock or meadow. In this manifestation, the recumbent sawdust oak tree mimics the fragility of living trees -at the mercy of human gardening, development and economic interests. For its part, the New Forest could disappear with little more than a strong well-placed breeze or the pressure of a misplaced footstep. In documenting resource use and misuse, Frank's installation is part of a long history of landscape-based environmental art produced in the last 40 years which pose questions regarding the give and take and social responsibility of those of us living an urban, industrialized life.

Responding to various aspects of climate, geology, vegetation, and other life forms, many of today's prominent environmental artists - David Nash, Karen McKoy, Andy Goldsworthy, Giuliano Mauri, Jane Balsgaard, and Bill Vazan, among others - express these concerns in various ways: creating natural constructions, installing plantings, welding ice assemblages, making dandelion chains, grafting tree forms, arranging patterns of berries and leaves in natural settings far from the urban centres where many of us live. Other artists such as Doug Buis or Reinhard Reitzenstein skilfully work with the inter- connectedness of urban and natural worlds by producing works that are socially-oriented. While some of these artists oppose the alientaion and confused reality of our cities and make a deliberate attempt to rediscover nature on its own terms, others make the effort to enter the social and cultural landscape and redefine human culture within the context of nature.

Excerpted from Madill & Lukasisk-Foss, The Gallery that went for a walk in the woods, Art Gallery of Hamilton, 2000.

Dave Hind's work is related to a similar environmental preoccupation as Frank. His new installation for entitled - tied to the ground - is comprised of 88 hand-made drums. The artist built the rims for the drums out of salvaged pine, and used the remnant hides from the fall hunt in Elliot Lake to form the drum surfaces. A landscape vista was then painted onto the drums, forming a complete vignette only when all of the drums are together. The drums, however, are not all present. There is both a performative and shared aspect to the installation. The drums are to be played, the drums are also to be given away. Empty nails and gaps in the landscape narrative inform us of the missing components of the picture. The gaps also provide the structure by which movement is suggested in the work -are the drums streaming together, colliding into place at the end of the gallery wall, or are they spinning away from each other - only to be dispersed and lost beyond the gallery's confines? In the creation of the piece - in the communal process of hide production and in the ritualized distribution of the drums over the course of the exhibition's run - a body of grass-roots community work first initiated in Canada in the mid-1980s is acknowledged.

In addition to their environmental interests, both artists' works are also related to the body and issues surrounding its sustenance and survival. Frank's tree echoes the structure of the respiratory system, a notion strengthened by the tree itself as a cleanser of carbon dioxide. Hind's drums echo the shape and movement of molecules or DNA strands shifting, realigning and dispersing throughout the body. The relationship of body to environment encourages a read of the work as metaphor for the symbiotic relationship between ourselves and the land we inhabit. In this analysis, the body refers to the environment we inhabit individually, the land to that which we inhabit collectively.

Carol Podedworny,
Director/Curator, University of Waterloo Art Gallery