Message in a Bottle Exhibition at Zalucky Contemporary, 2018

In Message in a Bottle, artists create hybrid arrangements out of materials that have been thoughtfully scavenged, collected and culled. These materials carry information and transmit messages as they traverse space, criss-cross time and shift context. Indus-trial, natural and domestic ephemera take on new forms, which reveal each artist’s considered regeneration of the material world.

Erika Defreitas turns to the “Deaths, Memorials and Obituaries” section of the Toronto Star newspaper for her source material. While reading the stories of the recently deceased, the artist searches for words that stand out to her and preserves them on the page. The remainder of the text is meticulously trimmed away, leaving only a skeletal layout behind. The work reflects on memory and loss, while giving presence to absence and perhaps even a momentary pause to things left unsaid.

For Qendrim Hoti, working with objects is a way to connect with places or people from his past. The artist hacks and re-designs handheld objects that bear certain emotional or cultural significance to him, such as tools passed down from his father or small ob-jects carried across the ocean during his immigration from Kosovo to Canada in 1992. Once fused with consumer products found in Canada, his adopted home, the work asserts a hybrid identity that, in the words of the artist, “relive the psychological tension caused by my dualistic identity”.

Ginette Legaré has an uncanny ability for finding significance in curbside cast-offs. She takes apart and redeploys found objects into sculptural configurations that suggest a kind of visual language. In A Rhetoric Without Words, delicate metal components are linked together to create elegant structures that are evocative of signs and symbols. Once removed from their original context, these objects become curiously unfamiliar, which introduces the possibility of new and unexpected meaning. Hung from the gallery ceiling, the forms are suspended both literally and figuratively in a state of flux.

Jennifer Murphy immerses herself in nature; studying and gathering from the incredible abundance of the natural world around her. Feathers, insects, petrified wood, wolf bones, nests and dried flowers are selected from among the worldy offerings and delicately assembled to appear like faces on the wall. Here, allusions to life and death are made in equal measure and it is quite remarkable how this menagerie of natural elements, once arranged on the wall by Murphy’s deft hand, seem to speak to us. So much, afterall, is communicated by a glance, a look, or a wink.

Laura Moore’s Plywood Circuit Boards are sourced from discarded plywood sheets the artist scavenged from neighbourhood alleyways. Stacked one against another they lean seamingly haphazordly along the gallery wall, much like the way they were first found. Carved into each surface is the image of a different circuit board the artist sourced from computer monitors also found on the streets of Toronto. These vestiges of modern yet dated technologies, with their intricate lines and networks, read like hieroglyphic etchings of an ancient language.

Jacob Robert Whibley’s collages are culled from an extensive archive of books and paper ephemera stretching back several decades. Thoughtfully excavated from their original source, these fragments are trimmed and then composed on the remains of gutted book covers and aged maps. In these new configurations, strange topographies emerge as the layering and resequincing of material from different eras offers a playful contradiction on a linear understanding of time.

- Kristiina Lahde