No opening reception

Doctor Kali Gehry’s Cabinet of (in)Curiosities & Ecstatic Nonsense — a Dream Theatre Display Spectacle of Chimera, Folly and Tears

Gibsons resident Matthew Talbot-Kelly presents his newest mixed media work, an Absurdist revisiting of the museum cliché, Cabinet of Curiosity. Playing on the root of “cabinet” as both a piece of furniture and a room, this Neo-Dada “Doctor Kali Gehry’s Cabinet of (in)Curiosities & Ecstatic Nonsense” collection combines multitudes of smaller cabinets housed within a room sized cabinet, standalone mixed media cabinets, video projections, AR (Augmented Reality) and interactive audio.

This endlessly evolving work re-presents fragmentary refuse, discarded paraphernalia and scrounged artifacts. These “memento mori” discards, evidences of our disposable contemporary lifestyle, are theatrically presented, elevated onto pedestals, carefully framed, their revelation choreographed.

In lieu of formally presenting a finished work, Talbot-Kelly is presenting this cabinet project as an informal work-in-progress open studio, based in the GPAG gallery space. Viewers are invited to visit and revisit the GPAG, to witness the projects development and speak with the artist.

Says Talbot-Kelly: “As developed during their Renaissance to Victorian heyday legacy, “Cabinets of Curiosities” (or “poetic theatres” or “memory chambers”) were the private amusements of eccentric aristocrats and the materially focussed nouveau riche. They were proto art galleries, proto natural history museums, and random memorabilia collections of questionable provenance. Like Cabinets of old, this Cabinet is an instrument of perception, an optical and philosophical device for framing a world view. This propaganda device is meant to be both calibrated and played, without beginning or end. My intention is for this work to be interruptive, discursive, elegiac, incongruous, and mischievous”.

The artist acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.