Void
Sue Lloyd
May 31 - July 4, 2008
Reception: May 31, 6-8p

Lullaby, archival digial print, 2007

Lloyd’s digitally produced images use almost exclusively “found” source material, what the artist describes as commonly available cultural material that we live and breathe. She then adapts the material, blending and combining, painting and drawing in the digital environment.

“I have been increasingly, steadily drawn towards the confounding of what seems clear and decisive. With the sureness of a magnet being drawn north, over and over again, I am called to dwell in and deal with places of thought, culture, and emotion, that confound the binaries through which we organize and clarify. This is neither a frivolous nor contrary exercise, but a very necessary journey: an investigation of other ways of knowing and understanding.”

Lloyd works with image-icons: figures, landscape components, elements and objects that are equally image and vocabulary, juxtaposing scenarios to suggest narratives. This body of work began as an exploration of the sky, and grew to embrace things in the sky (clouds, winged beings, flying machines, weapons), as well as the chroma (blues and blacks) of the day and night skies, of the heavens. The work expanded into the “void” (darkness, emptiness, nothingness) and that which is longed for, imagined, found in the darkness. Depending on the cultural context, embracing and eradicating darkness may have opposite significance, or may be identical processes.

“The darkness presses against us and yet has no boundary….the fear of the darkness is the fear that the darkness will not end….the poet undertakes the task of recognition in time – the unending tragic Orphic task of drawing the figure of the other – the figure of the beloved who reciprocally recognizes one’s own figure – out of the darkness. To make something where and when before there was nothing.”

Susan Stewart, “Poetry and the Fate of the Senses”, University of Chicago Press: London, 2002, pp 1-2

“What is the goal of the world?” asked Silaka Salavara.
“Space,” said Pravahanda, “for all these contingent beings originated from space, and to space do they return. For space is greater (and more ancient) than they: space is the final goal.”

(from the Chandrogya Upanishad, selected by Betsy Warland, as a “post script” to her essay on VOID.)

Sue Lloyd is visual artist who lives and works in Toronto. Her work has been exhibited locally and nationally; past solo exhibitions include Presentation House in Vancouver and Kamloops Art Gallery. Her visual work has also appeared in publications including BRICK, Public and Harper’s. She has received Council grants from all three levels of granting programmes and her work is represented in private and public collections. She is a past member of the Red Head Gallery, and the Out of the Frame and Giant-S Collectives. She received her M.F.A. from York University and teaches in the Visual Studies Program at University of Toronto.