Corin Sworn

Back in 5: Accessing the Back Story
July 10 - August 9, 2008
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 10 6-9 pm
Artist in Attendance

Blanket Contemporary Art is pleased to present a show of new works by Corin Sworn. Opening on Thursday July 10th, the exhibition is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery. Initially receiving a BA in psychology and art history from the University of British Columbia, Corin Sworn continued on to study art and design and integrated media at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (London, UK), and Emily Carr University of Art and Design (Vancouver, BC). Corin Sworn has exhibited at galleries around the world including the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Or Gallery, Artspeak, and Access Artist-Run Centre, Vancouver, BC; VTO Gallery, Cover Up, and Gasworks (curated by Goshka Makuga), London, UK; Wolfsburg, Germany; and ZieherSmith in New York, NY.
Moving slightly aside from her long-standing interest in utopian ideals relating to education and institutionalization, the artist has now turned her attention to the realm of design and the curiously elusive space between contemporary forgery and abstract traces of the past. Using found materials, sculpture, photography and drawing, Sworn examines the language of design as a strategy for producing and negotiating cultural and historic value.

In the work E.G./J.D., two large curtains silk-screened with the moniker chosen by the renowned Modernist Irish designer and architect Eileen Grey for her pseudonym Jean Desert are hung across the most northern windows of the gallery. The abstract pattern printed on the curtains was once part of a design strategy in which she used the abstract mark as a stand in for the abstraction of her own identity, allowing the designer to negotiate between herself and the cultural values of her day. Moving beyond these references to the designer’s original use of these objects, the curtains also work to adjust the conceptual space of the gallery, allowing it to become a site yet to be enacted and infusing the exhibition with the sense that it is not a conclusion, but rather a site to be performed endlessly though interpretation.

Sworn’s work has been described as containing elements of nostalgia while still tempered by a critical interest in the visual manifestations of modern and postmodern bureaucracy. This interest in the reification of the past is further examined in the piece entitled Some Books. In this work, the artist has installed a collection of popular mid-twentieth century paperbacks on a replica of a table designed by Grey. While the books maintain their original titles, Sworn alters other elements, changing the authors’ names and updating the covers, thus reconfiguring them for contemporary reading, and drawing attention to how their informative tone moves discreetly between naïvely absurd and poignantly relevant.

The strength of Sworn’s practice lies in her ability to combine precise references and oblique allusions, creating a body of work where ideas and symbols shift meaning to elaborate upon our reading of social structures. Ultimately, by uncovering some of the ways in which design functions as language, the artist calls up some of the contestations involved in readings of the past, drawing our attention to the embedded nature of cultural readings.