Three Performances for Interior Spaces – text and images.  Two Walking Performances in a City – text and images.

An Artist book.  Produced with the generous assistance of the BC Arts Council.

In the fall of 2000 curator Karen Henry joined the staff of the Walter Phillips Gallery on a one-year Curatorial Fellowship.  This publication and touring exhibition, Allyson Clay: Imaginary Standard Distance, are a result of her fruitful time in Banff.

The exhibition is a mid-career survey of the work of Vancouver-based artist Allyson Clay that incorporates aspects of several bodies of work made between 1988 and 2002. It demonstrates Clay’s flexible and studied use of a dive rse range of media and skillfully illustrates the juncture at which she moved away from painting towards more narrative and text-based performative works. Concerned with issues of identity, gender, and the boundaries between public and private space,the work in Imaginary Standard Distance negotiates the margins between seduction and intervention, curiosity and voyeurism. This catalogue provides an overview of Allyson Clay’s diverse artistic practice. Although a mid-career survey, it is in no way intended to be the definitive statement on the work of an artist with many years of artistic production to come.

The Edmonton Art Gallery employs a variety of means to communicate and interpret its programmes, in language that is appropriate to the art work presented . In this publication, Vancouver-based writer Judith Mastai discusses Allyson Clay’s recent paintings with reference to feminist visual art theory and practice as well as to anthropological and sociological texts.

Mastai describes the artist’s most recent series, Some places in the world a woman could walk as an attempt to synthesize and respond to conflicting ideologies of feminism (situated within the postmodernist project) and painting (rooted within the masculist tradition of modernism.)

This publication is one of three catalogues prepared to accompany a series of solo exhibitions of recent work by artists Mary Scott (August 7 – September 19,1993), Charles Gagnon (September 25 – November 7, 1993) and Allyson Clay (November 13, 1993 – January 3, 1994), who are producing art which questions and plays within painting’s histories and traditions.

Elizabeth Kidd – Chief Curator

ISBN 0-88950-128-9

Printed in Canada
Copyright 1993

Preface

A square labyrinth is based on a grid constructed with the same odd number of units per side. The inner space, or goal, of a square labyrinth is usually a minimum of three to five units square, although not all labyrinths have goals. A unicursal labyrinth can only simulate true symmetry, and when this is intended, the goal is usually located in the center. In the construction of this kind of labyrinth, not all odd number grids will work. The labyrinths on the following pages are based on grids of 25 and 39 units. A multicursal labyrinth is one in which there is more than one route to the goal or when the route(s) branch out, leading to dead ends or to other points along the route.

Stories and Labyrinths.

Accompanies the exhibition at Costin Klintworth Gallery, Toronto.

1989