TAKE OUT?? or just edit out photos

Six Ghosts Spell Unknown Alphabet

A transcontinental collaborative exhibition between Matt Shane (CA), Jim Holyoak (CA), Cathrine Dahl (NO), Ørjan Aas (NO), Gowara Minsa (DE), and Ola Jonsrud (NO). Most pieces were exchanged for collaboration by mail. The show was collaboratively mounted at Norway's Drawing Association, Tegnerforbundet, in Oslo. Artists were present and working for a month during the exhibition. A second exhibition took place 3 months later at Galerie Donald Browne, in Montreal, QC.

Show statement:

All six of us work between drawing and installation. Many of us work in other media as well. In the past we have all drawn and installed collaboratively, all of us with some of us, but none of us with all of us. Some of us have just met. The title for this exhibition originated from the first sentence of a game of ‘Cadavre exquis’ played between Catherine Dahl and Jim Holyoak during a residency at the Nordic Artists’ Centre Dale, in Norway. The sentence inadvertently describes the role of chance and lost individuality in collaborative creation, as well as drawing as a common but non-spoken language. We are intrigued by collaboration because of the unexpected detours and perversions it throws into individual patterns of art making. Collaborative drawing becomes a visual documentation of relationships and conditions, blurring of the seams between art and life. The exhibition was a hybrid between a group show and a collaborative project, in which all the artists made drawings with each other, sent by mail, between Dale in Sunnfjord, Trondheim, The Hague, Salt Spring Island, Montréal, Toronto, Hønefoss, Oslo and Berlin. Drawings of all scales move over, under and into one another, meeting and separating, crawling up the walls. Added up in untold sequence, they spell our shared, but unknown alphabet.