Melanie Perreault: Cubicles Of Time Backflip Beyond Peppermint Enigmas Before Pungent Topiaries Portray Dreaming Mirages Into Intervals Of Brazilian Inquiries Of Elsewhere Orange…

November 15, 2012 – January 12, 2013
Opening Event: Thursday, November 15, 6-8pm

This event is free and open to the public.

Jillian never wanted to make another mistake for the rest of her life. If only she could spend an unlimited amount of time reading about an unfathomable variety of subjects, she would have enough knowledge to deal with every future uncertainty. And so she devised a plan. First she sat behind a library and rescued books from the recycle bin. Jillian worried about all of the information getting lost in the dawn of the digital era. What information would be left un-scanned and lost forever? She would have to read it. She collected boxes and boxes of encyclopaedias that were being discarded as analog relics. Then she set about reading them. But even reading all day, there was just too much information to process.

Narrative drives Melanie Perreault’s immersive and site-specific installations in which the artist performs her characters in their natural environments. Her artwork represents an attempt to save and savour both the tangible and intangible. She wonders about the human mind’s ability to organize and file everything. Can things be misfiled in our brains - completely mixed up - like the curious bytes of information littering her installation’s walls? She often dreams about some form of utopian filing system, somewhere to keep everything she ever enjoyed experiencing: a pungent quayside odour; vibrant lime images of Japanese moss; the texture of polished wood on bare feet…