THE FOX

July 14 - August 20, 2011
Opening reception: July 14, 7-10pm

THE FOX brings together the work of four artists—Oskar Hüber (Germany),
Yam Lau (Canada), Sophie Nys (Belgium) and Kevin Rodgers (Canada)—
under the simple proposition: that thinking is always out of order.

It is only when thinking interrupts our ordinary activities—and is in turn,
interrupted by them—that we can say thinking is out of order. In 1961
political theorist Hannah Arendt published Between Past and Future, and
in the preface she drew attention to the temporal ‘intervals’ within our
daily continuity determined by “things that are no longer, and by things
that are not yet.” This opening or ‘gap’ between past and future is full of
potentiality; for Arendt, it was a metaphor for the activity of thought itself.

Through engagements with language and its subtraction, parables and
sculpture, Hüber, Lau, Nys and Rodgers directly explore this notion of the
interval. Additionally, the exhibition indirectly examines the relationship
between two controversial figures of twentieth century thought: Hannah
Arendt and her former teacher and lover Martin Heidegger. “Nobody knows
the nature of traps better than one who sits in a trap his whole life long,”
Arendt once said of the philosopher. He, in turn, never wrote a public word
on her.

In this exhibition, the artists do not describe nor attempt to explain this
‘intellectually toxic relationship’. Instead, their works set up a relation
between a philosopher of withdrawal and a theorist of the public. Questioning
the mutual opposition of retreat and engagement—or of formal content and
discontent—the artist’s works operate in the interrupted space between.
They speak two languages simultaneously: the language of the hermetic
and that of the direct.