coming & going: the erotic life of property

LAIWAN
coming & going: the erotic life of property (drawings for water closets)
2009
liquid paper & toilet paper

Process images for the Vancouver Art Gallery’s exhibition How Soon Is Now curated by Kathleen Ritter in 2009.

The How Soon is Now exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery opened on February 6 and ran to May 3, 2009. The following description is from the didactic label for my site-specific project in the exhibition:

[drawings installed in the Vancouver Art Gallery washrooms]

Small, subtle, nearly invisible drawings on discrete squares of the Gallery’s standard toilet paper are attached, without preciousness, onto the back of each stall door of public washrooms within the exhibition space. If a drawing disappears it will be replaced with another. The drawings, rendered in liquid paper, play on ideas of intimacy, disposability and the values we hold.

1. Title derived after Georges Bataille’s Visions of Excess and Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property.

Thanks to curator Kathleen Ritter for persisting with me, and to the Vancouver Art Gallery for their generous support and with supplying me with the TP.

An exhibition catalogue for How Soon is Now is available.

coming & going: the erotic life of property has lived in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Permanent Collection since 2013.