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Project Description:
In a kind of artist matchmaking scheme devised by curators Will Kwan and Peter Kingstone of Aspace, Balfour & Kasprzak were strangers brought together to collaborate on an artwork. Their first challenge was how to introduce themselves and then begin to work together. In discussing their previous art production, they discovered that each of them had engaged in personals projects. In 1992 Barbara McGill Balfour published a series of twenty-one anonymous rhetorical questions about the nature of communication in the Montreal Mirror personals column, eliciting numerous responses and some cases of mistaken identity. In 1998 Michelle Kasprzak published a personals ad in NOW magazine that was originally written, although never made public, by Glenn Gould. She also wrote a series of fictitious ads and produced an interactive game based on the information drawn from the voice mail responses.
In this current collaboration, Balfour & Kasprzak invited people to fill in the missing blanks in a series of open-ended statements. Despite the apparent generic and impersonal nature of the incomplete sentences, they provide a space for individuality to be expressed. All responses were included in a configuration that developed on the gallery wall that allowed for participants to tangibly indicate their preferences as well as perceived connections within the collection. The final result mirrored topologies common to computer networks that took on a very organic life of its own.
Collaborator: Barbara McGill Balfour
Past Presentations: A Space Gallery, Toronto, June 2001.
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