On Air zooms in on screen culture, mass media at Surrey Art Gallery, opening January 22
Visitors can pull a lever on a slot machine-like installation by late media artist Nancy Paterson that pulls up hundreds of random images from TV clips
Still from Nancy Paterson, Garden in the Machine, 1993, multimedia installation. Collection of Surrey Art Gallery SAG2018.14.01.
Surrey Art Gallery presents On Air from January 22 to March 20. Admission is free.
SCREEN TIME, POP culture, consumerism, and mass media: they’re all themes in the new exhibition On Air at Surrey Art Gallery.
Drawn from the gallery’s permanent collection, the show centres around Garden in the Machine, an interactive installation by the late media artist Nancy Paterson that invites visitors to pull a lever on a slot machine-like styled device that manipulates images on display on a series of surrounding monitors. Each screen cycles through various TV clips pulled from news programs, cartoons, game shows, religious programs, advertisements, and more. The footage ranges in tone from light-hearted to gravely concerning. Every time the lever is pulled, the resulting display is random, producing a possible 729 different combinations of images.
Though developed in 1993, Paterson’s installation is timeless in its distillation of popular media, the artist anticipating today’s never-ending stream of content available to consumers through the Internet.
Other exhibition highlights—most of which, like Garden in the Machine, have never been exhibited before—include an unusual two-sided print by 1970s video and media artist Michael de Courcy, photographs of the sprawling West Edmonton Mall by Vikky Alexander, and a colourful silkscreen print by Robert Davidson.
“Over the years, Canadian artists have produced some of the world’s most articulate insights into the effect that the mass media has on our mind,” Surrey Art Gallery assistant curator Rhys Edwards said in a release. “Though many of these works were made decades ago, they are extraordinarily prescient.”
The exhibition is open Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays from 4 to 7 pm and Saturdays from 10 am to 3 pm.
See Surrey Art Gallery for more information.
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