Hatch is an exhibition of parallel investigations into notions of path finding and city building. Tammy Lu and Crystal Bueckert’s research and drawings address historical and imagined narratives of Saskatoon by tracing and layering events, characters, infrastructures and geography.

Using human and architectural characters of Saskatoon as a narrative code, Lu proposes a process of city planning that involves a continual personal re-configuration of local stories. Bueckert renders collected images into hybrid maps that explore the evolutions and revisions of city building. Employing a non-linear book format, the artists splice their imagined urban spaces to form permutations of possible mapping schemes.

March 30 to June 10, 2012

Mendel Art Gallery

untitled
Pencil on paper
20cm x 20cm
© 2011 Tammy Lu

Book cover for The Democracy of Objects by Levi Bryant
Illustration by Tammy Lu, cover design by Katherine Gillieson
Pencil on paper
65cm x 50cm

“Onticology proposes a flat ontology where objects of all sorts and at different scales equally exist without being reducible to other objects and where there are no transcendent entities such as eternal essences outside of dynamic interactions among objects.”

Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (2011)

I
Pencil on paper
65cm x 50cm
© 2011 Tammy Lu

Untitled 22
Pencil on paper
65cm x 50cm
© 2010 Tammy Lu

Quadruple Object (detail)
Pencil on paper
65cm x 50cm
© 2010 Tammy Lu

”Causation is vicarious insofar as two real or two sensual objects can not touch. Asymmetry merely addresses the other side of that story by pointing to another place where objects do in fact touch – a place where real objects meet sensual ones. Causation is buffered insofar as we meet an object that is not yet split from its own qualities, and alluring insofar as that split does eventually occur. If left unattended these quadruple structures might start to pile up like some New Age debris field. But handled skillfully, they cast repeated new light on novel various aspects of the quartet of basic structures at the core of the world.”

Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (2009)

Untitled (detail)
Pencil and gouache on paper
30cm x 42cm
© 2010 Tammy Lu

“It seems that reference is not simply the act of pointing or a way of keeping, on the outside, some material guarantee for the truth of a statement; rather it is our way of keeping something constant through a series of transformations. Knowledge does not reflect a real external world that it resembles via mimesis, but rather a real interior world, the coherence and continuity of which it helps to ensure. What a beautiful move, apparently sacrificing resemblance at each stage only to settle again on the same meaning, which remains intact through sets of rapid transformations. The discovery of this strange and contradictory behavior is worthy of the discovery of a forest able to create its own soil.”

Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope (1999)

Untitled
Pencil and gouache on paper
30cm x 30cm
© 2010 Tammy Lu

“Instead of the vertical abyss between words and world, above which the perilous footbridge of correspondence would hang, we now have a sturdy and thick layering of transverse paths through which masses of transformations circulate.

(…)

‘It refers to something there’ indicates the safety, fluidity, traceability, and stability of a transverse series of aligned intermediaries, not an impossible correspondence between two far-apart vertical domains.”

Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope (1999)