Depth of Field | february 02 - february 24, 2007

Scott Wallis at Peak Gallery
Globe and Mail | Saturday, February 17, 2007
by Gary Michael Dault

The degree to which the works making up Scott Wallis's exhibition Depth of Field are chromatically spare and structurally severe, positions them, somehow, as purely metaphysical objects. These small, wall-mounted constructions, however tethered they may be to the generation of commentary on the tenets of previous forms of abstraction, are so breathtakingly clean, whole and fully resolved on their own that they are almost intimidating. Wallis may allude to canonical minimalists such as Don Judd and Fred Sandback, but you can feel the sheer joy the artist must have experienced in having contrived so much clarity, so much visual declaration, for its own sake. Wallis's little colour-filled concavities in paper, his cut-out squares, edged on their sides with cleanly installed linings of metal (copper, brass), his almost aggressive open-ness of ambition for his constructions, make for art objects that incorporate a charming sense of transcendence that almost reads as the equivalent of moral superiority. Are these works, in the end, better than we are?

about the exhibition