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ARTS
FOR SOMEONE LIKE ME, who agonizes over writing just about anything, speaking with installation artist
Georgia Dickie feels more like attending a TED Talk than conducting an interview: She’s competent
and motivating. Dickie approaches her art, which relies on “found objects,” in a happy and seemingly
effortless way. It’s not what one expects in this age of solastalgia. Maybe that’s why Hedi Slimane’s team
at Celine chose to install one of the 30-year-old’s pieces in the new Rue Duphot boutique in Paris’ most
fashionable shopping district. That piece, called Smile (2013), is composed of salvaged wood pieces
connected by rubber stanchions (those ropes we see in airport or VIP lines) that are strung between
them to resemble a droopy grin.
We’re in the middle of a summer heat wave, and Dickie, who is working on a new exhibition, Agouti
Sky, which opens on October 6 at Oakville Galleries in Ontario, has no air conditioning in her studio.
It’s a good thing, though, she reasons, because it forces her to work in the mornings, when it’s still cool. “A
piece might take me a year to complete or it might take me five minutes,” she explains. “My best works
are the ones that were made really quickly because I didn’t have as much time to worry about them.”
Dickie is not one to intellectualize her art yet concedes that she feels a need to aestheticize garbage.
“I think we’re going to have to figure out a way to discover the potential of waste as opposed to trying to
get rid of it—because it’s not going anywhere,” she says, explaining that the “found objects” used in her
work are anything from a scrap of Christmas gift wrap to rusted metal found on the street.
Despite having been raised in a creative family—her father, Ron Dickie, works in film, and her
mother is designer Judy Cornish of Comrags—Dickie says she never imagined becoming an artist
The Canadian arts scene is expanding to include more
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in the thick of the movement.
Visual Display
GEORGIA DICKIE
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