Ian Carr-Harris: Tracings

A book as a work, the work thanking the book for its time.

We measure time by the markers of our presence. In Tracings, Ian Carr-Harris measures fifty years of close attention to what an artwork can perform, and what can be said about that performance.

Conceived as a project in response to the forthcoming release of his anthology "Tracings: writing art, 1975 – 2020" by Concordia University Press, the exhibition references two works from 1973 and 1995. Linked to excerpts drawn from the anthology, we’re lead into the history of Ian’s work, as well as his writings on artists whose practices he valued and explored. Bound together, they invite a reading that dissolves the space between text and work, between a book and an exhibition.

As a project, this exhibition is itself a model for the artist's long-held conviction that it is what we encounter that holds value, or as he wrote in 1997, "…the general condition of my work is relatively simple: to look at something that we already know and in that looking to discover something we took for granted".