Andrew Wright’s videos and photographs that document his time in the CFAP look to traditions in Canadian war art while seeking out contemporary truths about the military. Wright presents the daily events, people and sites aboard the HMCS Toronto in an attempt to expose human elements and banal details, as well as real-time military drills eerily reminiscent of jarring news footage, Hollywood dramaturgy and constructed environments found in video games. The imagery incites provocative questioning and exchange about civilian understanding of reality and representation concerning the military, including tacit references to the propagandist undertones of traditional Canadian war art.

While aboard the frigate, Wright was given access to material usually reserved for the media, finding a parallel with the contemporary practice of embedding journalists within military operations – a venture that often assumes a human-interest angle, preying upon our emotions for sympathetic responses. Wright approaches representation in a different way; while he detaches himself from overt political signification, he employs documentary traditions in his photographs and video series. Works such as Mike Grace, Able Seaman, Cook (2008) and Casualty in the Fridge Flats (2008) invite the viewer to import their own approaches toward an understanding of the military-real.

Another facet of Survey is the work Untitled Rocket Launches (2008). In this video installation, Wright uses the camera not as a tool to document, but as a means of experimentation. While the HMCS series privileges the subjective eye of the artist for image selection and framing, Untitled Rocket Launches assumes the viewpoint of the rocket – at once chaotic and methodical. The spiraling lens thrusts the viewer within and about an open space and yet familiar patterns appear. By juxtaposing these two bodies of work, curator Chantal Rousseau invites the viewer to examine the ways in which unpredictable and obscured imagery generates our own understanding of unseen and unfamiliar sites and events.

A summer party for Survey, featuring an exciting array of summer treats, will be held on Thursday, June 19 from 7 to 10 PM at Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, located at 401 Richmond Street West, Suite 124, Toronto. The exhibition continues until July 26, 2008. Admission is free.

Andrew Wright is an artist who lives and works in Waterloo, Canada. His work is described as multi-tiered inquiries into the nature of perception, photographic structures and technologies, and the ways we relate to an essentially mediated and primarily visual world. He has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, and has also participated in various residencies. In 2007, he was named a semi-finalist for the Sobey Art Award. Wright is represented in Canada by Peak Gallery (Toronto).

Chantal Rousseau is an artist and arts administrator. Her practice includes painting, drawing, video and animation. She has exhibited in various artist-run centres and galleries and was a board member of YYZ Artists' Outlet from 1999–2003, where she curated the exhibitions Trophy (2001).

twenty+3 projects is pleased to present Excision, an exhibition of text-inspired works by three visual artists from Canada - Michelle Bellemare, Robert Bean and Michael Maranda. This exhibition has been guest curated by Toronto artist/curator, Cheryl Sourkes.

One may see Excision as a response to an era where words have become manipulative tools, a cynical era whose values are dominated by commercialism and fundamentalism. These artists have responded with language that dithers or else with blank spaces that mark the place where text once stood.

Michelle Bellemare's Edit is a time-based work. It shows an email in the process of composition. This message seems to be in response to a previous one, possibly of an intimate nature. Bellemare writes, "Every word is measured, tentative - attempting some form of guarded warmth. Phrases are typed then deleted, only to be replaced with another phrase which reveals less."

Robert Bean's Verbatim is in two parts, an eight-foot long image of a typewriter ribbon and a series of crumpled up typewriter études. These photographs are actually scans of found objects. Bean writes, "The prints are 'contact images' that remember and forget the earlier technological processes of photography and typewriting. As the unintended graffiti of a prior vocation, these marks register a presence and an absence."

Michael Maranda's bookwork Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard: Livre takes erasure a step further. In this piece it's the negative space that has been inked, while the place where text once stood now lies empty. Maranda writes, "In 1914, Mallarmé's poem, Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard: Poème, was published by the Nouvelle Revue Français. The poem 'works' only as a typographical object. Then in 1969, Marcel Broodthaers re-published a version of the poem as Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard: Image. Here solid black bands stand in for the text of the poem." In Maranda's iteration language moves into complete oblivion. The spaces once occupied by Mallarmé's text and later by Broodthaer's black bands are now blank areas set off by blocks of cream-coloured ink.

There will be a series of events connected with the exhibition. Please see website for details.

twenty+3 projects is a contemporary art space, run by artist Heidi Schaefer, located in the converted front room of a terraced house in Manchester. It can be found at 23 Bury Avenue, Manchester, UK M16 0AT.

Peak Gallery is proud to announce the major purchase of Lyn Carter’s installation entitled, Courting Entasis, by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Courting Entasis, is a large site-specific work that plays off the classical columns of
the Albright-Knox’s architecture. The piece consists of three 14 foot high fabric structures, held under tension between the floor and the ceiling. In each structure the form collapses and swells thereby animating the entasis feature of the surrounding marble columns, with the striped fabric chosen to reflect the verticals of the carved fluting. The work was created, at the request of Albright-Knox Curatorial Assistant Anna Kaplan, for the recent exhibition Beyond/ In Western New York 2007, held throughout Buffalo from August through October. Due to the unprecedented enthusiasm for the work by the curators and museum visitors alike, it was decided by the acquisitions committee, on O! ctober 30th, that the work should become part of the gallery’s collection.