You are not your car
Julia Stephens and Kyle Topping
February 7 - March 10, 2009
Reception: March 7th, 6-8p | Artist Talk: February 12th, 3p

Kyle Topping

The exhibition ‘you are not your car’ calls to question how material objects can come to be signifiers of personal identity. We attach meaning to objects in an attempt to establish a sense of self. We look to texts, photographs, and possessions in hopes to understand and convey who we are. This show explores how through the processes of record making, collecting, and remembering we create and establish an identity. Displaying an arrangement of collected objects, prints and installations ‘you are not your car’, questions the motivations behind the processes we use as a means to define ourselves.

Julia Stephens
I am interested in examining the ways we as a culture define ourselves, our life stories, and our history with the aid of objects and texts, and also in the way we assign objects meaning by means of anecdotes and stories. My work explores the sense of nostalgia surrounding certain types of records and outdated forms of record-making and record-keeping; more specifically, photographs, texts, and memories. Photographs are an object that can represent a person, a place, or an object at a particular moment in time. They can help us to recall our own experiences, or give us insight in to the lives and experiences of others, both past and present. I am fascinated by the volumes of faces, mostly unidentifiable to my eyes, that comprise my historical lineage. I have been told many stories about a number of them throughout my life, and these stories and faces, whether recognizable or not, factor into my identity and the way I view my cultural roots, heritage, and genetic makeup.

I entered into this work because I had questions about my own habits of record-keeping, collection, and preservation. I wanted to know why I, along with most people I know, have trouble throwing away old items from my past, and why my sentimentally valued possessions have accumulated to a point where they now have to live in boxes, littering my living and storage space, nearly forgotten. I want to know what it is we are so afraid of letting go of, and why are we afraid of losing these material traces of our experience. When people in my life died and left me something to remember them by, I cherished the small trinkets left in my care. Maybe our possessions become part of our identity, or maybe they are a way of keeping track of the people and things that have drifted in and out of our lives. It may be a way of cataloguing our experience in order to preserve it. My aim is to use the materials I have found and collected to gain insight into both the cultural and basically human motives that drive the acts of record-making, collection, and preservation.
I believe that we as humans are initially very afraid of the possibility of nothingness after death, and as such, even with the blind hope of an afterlife, we don’t want the precious moments we did or do have on earth to disappear with us into a (possibly) meaningless void. Or maybe we pack-rat types are afraid of letting go of these objects which are so tied to certain memories, because remembering them and animating them with our stories is what helps us to situate our current identities. Without this grounding weight we would be lost and adrift, tied neither to time nor place, without a sense of belonging.

Julia Stephens is in the fourth year of her BFAH at Queen’s University. Her primary media has, to this point, included various kinds of printmaking, sculpture, and installation. Following graduation this spring, Julia will be returning to her hometown of Toronto, in hopes of independently continuing to build a portfolio for the application to graduate studies and for future shows in the GTA.


Julia Stephens

Kyle Topping
Nearly a decade ago I started high school, it was during those five years I became increasingly more interested with discovering and establishing my identity. Naturally this brought about an immense anxiety over the idea of death. To compensate I begun recording and collecting both thoughts and objects in hope to affirm my identity. I began to write in journals documenting my daily experiences and thoughts. Boxes began to fill up with nostalgic objects and tattered clothes. I found my self holding onto everything that I ever invested with a sense of self.

Identity is a concept which only the inadequacy of language can point a shaky finger at. I find it strange that I have invested meaning into objects in order to inform my sense of identity, when ultimately these objects can never truly be or accurately depict my identity. Yet I still feel compelled to continue with recording and collecting practices. Despite never being able to fully illustrate who I am, I do think it is important to investigate how I define myself.

My intent for this show is to explore the ways in which objects work as signifiers of identity and how the boundaries for defining identity can be expanded to include unfamiliar methods. What I own, what I buy, what I collect, what I preserve, what I wear, what I experience and so on. There are many different facets that come together to constitute an identity some of which are quite abstract. I find the most interesting facets to be those that we tend not to consider, such as; I am what I spend. A statement such as ‘you are not your car’ is both obviously true and surprising false. True in the sense that no, you are not your car, but false in the sense that what kind of car you drive, how much you spent on it, what color it is, and the fact that you drive a car does contribute to conveying who you are.

Kyle Topping is a graduating BFA student from Queen’s University. Kyle’s artistic interests include but are not limited to conceptual geometric paintings, sound installations, and self reflective works about identity. Post graduation Kyle hopes to start a printshop and artist residency program in the Bay of Quinte region.