LAST THINGS
Selected work by Niagara Artists Centre Members
at the FLEA MARKET GALLERY
Sunday 19 June 19 – Sunday 18 September 2016
Curated by Maggie Groat
This exhibition is a collection of LAST THINGS. Eleven imagined future remnants – a skateboard, an antennae, a multipurpose device, a kindling froe, an alarm, a postcard, an invisible print, a communication tablet, a weapon, a mold, a camera – objects, tools and visions, created from salvaged, second-hand and found material, and transformed into the shapes of peculiar and provisional future utility.
LAST THINGS includes the work of ten individual artists and one collective, a group of Niagara Artist Centre members living and working in, or those with strong ties to, the Niagara Region: Marinko Jareb, Ketu Kingston, Jimmy Limit, Daniel F. Manchego-Badiola , Jesse F. Matthews, Katie Mazi & Ben Mosher, Donna Szoke, Carrie Perrault, Bobby Ramos,Ryan Rivando, Amber Lee Williams. This exhibition is the result of an open thematic call to Niagara Artist Centre members, organized by Maggie Groat.
The title of this exhibition draws inspiration from the 1987 dystopian novel In the Country of the Last Things by Paul Auster. Set in a speculative future of an urban post-industrial wasteland, it follows Anna, a collector who scavenges and sells useful found objects and scraps. Coincidentally, the St. Catharines Factory Outlet Flea Market—Niagara’s largest flea market and the site of this exhibition —opened its doors the same year that In the Country of Last Things was published.
Image by Katie Mazi & Ben Mosher, Tourist Pick, Postcard, 2016
