Critical Distance PROGRAMMING EXHIBITION: Erratic Room

One wants a room with no view, so imagination and memory can meet in the dark.
— Annie Dillard

Featuring works by Lyla Rye
Curated by Shani K Parsons

Featuring an immersive video installation and new limited edition photo series by Lyla Rye, Erratic Room is an exploration into spatial perception and its often hidden physical and psychological effects.

Throughout human history, dark rooms have occupied a spectral presence in our imagination and memory, and even in today’s brilliantly illuminated world we continue to spend a significant portion of our lives within them. From the theatre to the bedroom, we enter or invest these anomalous spaces with feelings of anticipation, trepidation, fantasy or fear. In the dark, where space becomes boundless and untenable, our most imaginative selves take centre stage, enacting our innermost desires and deepest dread.

Featuring altered projections of architectural and urban apertures, enclosures, edges and experiences, Erratic Room’s imagery constitutes an off-kilter vision of the world just beyond our walls. Out-of-sync sounds, unmoored from the images and actions they originally corresponded to, reverberate with an echo or foreshadowing of past and future uncertain events.  Simultaneously delimiting and expanding the boundaries of the space it occupies, Erratic Room begets a similarly confounding effect upon our imaginations and memories. From our cloistered vantage point within the darkened room, the enveloping projections assume the form and function of apparitional windows on an unsettled world.

The Erratic Room Print Series is the physical embodiment of the ideas Rye explores in the ephemeral installation. Conceived as a sculptural photo edition, the series features four light-filled moments from the Erratic Room projection sequence, each of which has been carefully selected, printed, and mounted between curved supports within a custom wood box frame. Like the installation, the edition hovers between two and three dimensions, playing with the viewer’s spatial perception in its warping of both image and support. Printed on glossy fine art paper, the works are highly reflective and responsive to ambient light and the surrounding environment in a way that makes them truly site-specific: the constantly changing reflections and shadows playing across the photographic surfaces are considered by the artist to be integral to the images.

Programs, Events, and Public Art

Exhibition Opening And Catalogue Launch
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
5:00 pm: Exhibition opening and catalogue launch to be held in conjunction with the grand opening of Artscape Youngplace, Toronto’s newest community cultural hub comprising 75,000 sq ft of vibrant creative space. 

Buster Keaton Film Screening And Artist’s Talk
Saturday, November 30, 2013
1:00 pm: Join us for an informal artist’s talk and family-friendly film screening, featuring the two Buster Keaton shorts, One Week and The Electric House, which inspired Lyla Rye’s Erratic Room installation. Bring your own pillow (chairs available as needed); popcorn will be served!

Erratic Room: In Conversation
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
7:00 pm: Curator Shani K Parsons and artist Lyla Rye discuss the process behind Erratic Room, TYPOLOGY’s inaugural exhibition. A Q+A and reception will follow.

Holiday Button-Making Workshop With Lyla Rye
Saturday, December 14, 2013
1:00 pm: In this family-friendly workshop, learn principles of collage using found imagery culled from newspapers, advertisements and magazines. Through play and experimentation, we will explore how collisions of imagery or unexpected image/text combinations create new associations and ideas. The finished small collages will then be made into unique art buttons, perfect for stocking stuffers and holiday gift-giving.

Exhibition Closing and Holiday Happy Hour
Thursday, December 19, 2013
5:30 pm: A festive year-end celebration of exciting new beginnings at TYPOLOGY with mulled wine, prosecco, local beer, and lots of cheer. Delicious snacks will be served; cash bar proceeds will go toward supporting project space programming and community outreach in 2014. Featuring music performances courtesy of Small World Music Centre, another wonderful organization at Artscape Youngplace.

Publications

Erratic Room: Lyla Rye. Exhibition Catalogue.

Critical Distance Centre for Curators (CDCC) was founded in 2013 under our former name, TYPOLOGY. Established as a not-for-profit space devoted to curatorial and artistic experimentation, we devoted our first three years to providing opportunities for curators and artists to mount fully realized exhibitions within a critical framework. In 2016, we relaunched under our new name (CDCC) with a new Board of Directors and a commitment to meet the need, voiced by local and national curators, for a truly vital curatorial community—one that both supports emerging and underrepresented curators, and advances curatorial practice and inquiry. Erratic Room took place in CDCC’s exhibition space in 2013 under our former name, TYPOLOGY, and was curated by CDCC’s Founding Director, Shani K Parsons. TYPOLOGY Projects was originally located at 180 Shaw Street, No. 302, Artscape Youngplace, Toronto.

Image: Lyla Rye, Erratic Room, 2013, (installation view), installation with 2-channel video projection (DVD), mirror apparatus, stereo audio, duration and dimensions variable.