Dean Baldwin

BUNK BED CITY
01.20–02.26.2011
Room 1

Extreme “environments”

CLARK is beginning the year 2011 with two exhibitions that resonate with each other in a surprising manner.Bunk Bed City, an environment by Dean Baldwin, takes up the main room while Virginie Laganière presents the installation Post Natural in the second room. Between Laganière, who has set up an installation inspired by the fact that Switzerland is the country with the most fallout shelters per capita, and Baldwin, who turns the gallery into a space evocative of summer camps with their bunk beds and communal kitchen, an interest for observing humans in “extreme situations” emerges.

Dean Baldwin is well known for his social events in which the artistic environment becomes a pretext for a party.Mini Bar, a social sculpture first “put into practice” in 2007 at the Mercer Union gallery in Toronto, is exemplary in this sense, since Baldwin here turned the art opening, this lofty socializing occasion where composure is part of the game, into a truly wild moment accompanied by plenty of alcohol and the consequent fuzzy mornings after. It is perhaps his ten-day stay in a Venice palazzo in 2009, during the Reverse Pedagogy 2that inspired him to add duration to his usually sporadic events—i.e. the preparation and ingestion of a dinner forDean’s Canteen (2010), or providing an occasion to grab a bite in an installation presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario with The Dork Porch (2010), to name but these most recent examples. Situated between the conviviality of group vacations and the hell that these cramped and flimsy installations can eventually lead to, the Bunk Bed City environment, which Baldwin built using recycled material, will serve as a space where interested viewers are invited to spend several hours, even an entire evening, with all the risk that the sharing of such a dwelling carries. With this new work, Baldwin draws directly on the collective imaginary to create humorous environments in which forced proximity leads to situations where anything is possible.

In combination, the works Post Natural and Bunk Bed City tell a story which goes beyond the confines of their respective worlds. It is as though Bunk Bed City became a fallout shelter reinterpreted by Baldwin as a summer camp dormitory, a place whose construction is driven by considerable anxiety and which now serves as a context for the zany activities dreamed up by a master craftsman of off-kilter humour. Ideally suited for this exercise, Gallery CLARK’s cement rooms make one feel cut off from the world since they have no outward facing windows. Nevertheless, a doubt remains: will we not be observed, or even closely watched?

Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre

trans. Bernard Schutze

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