The Christopher Cutts Gallery is pleased to present Eldon Garnet’s “Amalgamation.”
“Amalgamation” features over 40 artworks, translating Eldon Garnet’s poetics into intellectually and aesthetically rigorous sculptures. Idea and object are equally present in Garnet’s artwork, with public sculptures imbued with social meaning and bronze statues conveying poignant narratives.
This exhibition features 13 maquettes of proposed public sculptures.
“MY PROPOSAL HAD TO CONTAIN EVERYTHING CALLED FOR IN THE BRIEF AND MORE. I HAD TO BE AESTHETICALLY SATISFYING WHILE BEING INTELLECTUALLY RICH. IF I HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFUL IN MY PUBLIC SCULPTURE, IT HAS BEEN TO BEGIN EACH WORK FROM AN IDEA AND THEN TO BRING THE IDEA INTO EXISTENCE IN A REFINED MATERIALITY.”
ELDON GARNET
Memorial To Commemorate The Chinese Railroad Workers In Canada, constructed 1987-89 (maquette in header)
When Garnet began creating public sculptures in the 1980s, he was conscious of the constraints of physically building the structures. But these maquettes represent the full breadth of the artist’s conceptualizations, relatively unburdened by material physics and engineering.
Garnet’s ultimate goal is to examine what sculpture and public space could mean together. But presenting these miniatures within gallery walls, while open to the public, reframes the work, balancing them between the public/private spheres. The ideas haven’t changed, but the objects are now seen out of their site, removed from their original context and scale, and created with alternative materials. Regardless of whether one has encountered Memorial To Commemorate The Chinese Railroad Workers in Canada or Artifacts of Memory in their full-sized majesty on the streets of Toronto, the maquettes present a completely new, and original, viewing experience.
Miniaturizing these monuments lends them the playfully elegant qualities of Garnet’s The Narrative Body -a series of small narrative bronzes- and the maquette of sculptures for his own tomb, which were developed alongside his public sculptures over the past four decades. The artist’s use of allegorical thinking, semiotics, and narratives in either body of work is poetically rich. The figures of the Railroad Memorial are involved in an allegorical narrative, as is the man carrying a book over his head towards a large staircase.
“Amalgamation” will feature Maquettes of Public Sculptures, Maquette for the Artist’s Tomb (2002), Critique of Judgement (2008), and The Narrative Body. This exhibition is an amalgamation of disparate sculptural activity and aesthetic exploration from throughout Garnet’s career.
