Some more or less distant realities

Some more or less distant realities

July 11 - September 5, 2016
Walter Phillips Gallery, Satellite Space
Eric Harvie, West Lobby

In describing the Surrealist idea of the formation of an image, André Breton in Le Manifeste du Surréalisme (1924) said that, “it cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities.” Some more or less distant realities takes up this framework of unified disparities and extends it as mode to think about the nature of permanent collections and the medium of the exhibition writ large. At their formal cores, is this not precisely what a collection and an exhibition respectively are—a grouping of things, variably disparate in their individual realities?

The exhibition comprises works from the Walter Phillips Gallery permanent collection, which was founded in 1977. Echoing the logic of Breton’s idea of the image, Some more or less distant realities is curated using the exquisite corpse method—a Surrealist technique employed to create (poems, images) collectively. Multiple individuals such as curators, artists and arts workers have selected the works in this exhibition through a process of sequential choices.

As an embrace of curatorial contingency, how might this exhibition query the elusive processes of curatorial decision making? In what ways might it illuminate the particularities, the ebbs and flows, of Banff Centre’s history of institutional collecting, particularly in relation to its long-standing artist-in-residence program? By mining the history of a collection that has been assembled via multiple curatorial voices, shifting institutional mandates and historical creative climates, Some more or less distant realities proposes new ways of thinking about knowledge production through collections and within exhibitions.