Kate McQuillen, Dead Reckoning, installation view. Courtesy of O’Born Contemporary.
Kate McQuillen’s Dead Reckoning, on now at the O’Born Contemporary, transforms the traditional commercial gallery space into an artfully abstracted information center. The showcased works manipulate large black and white monoprints, which are cut into smaller squares and reassembled to render the original image indecipherable. A series of five columnar structures simply titled “Data Column 1” through “Data Column 5” are dispersed throughout the space, where the slightly deteriorated condition of the squares reveals the incandescent glow of the support underneath. The substantial title piece, a mural that covers an entire wall within the gallery, is a more streamlined companion piece to the stacks, featuring a curiously anonymous silhouetted figure amidst the visual disorganization of her squares.
Kate McQuillen, Data Column 1 – 5, installation view. Courtesy of O’Born Contemporary.
Conceptually, the artworks embody the mystification of singular, human identity within the digital realm. Data becomes consumed within the anonymous and digitized abyss of the Internet, where personal information rapidly circulates from server to server, network to network. Aspects of one’s individuality becomes cut-up and disseminated when shared within the infinite reach of the Internet, and human beings become inanimate codes and alphanumeric symbols. McQuillen’s works explicitly address this loss of self, as her original images are fractured into pictorial “data” that lose any semblance of a uniform identity when rearranged beyond comprehension. Thus, her squares inevitably “float” on the surfaces they are applied to, similar to how data itself hovers within the digital realm. The silhouetted figure on the wall piece furthers this notion of anonymity, presenting an identity-less person consumed within the myriad of data that surrounds it. Furthermore, the stacks resemble structures containing an innumerable amount of digitized information, coyly referring to organizations such as the NSA.
Kate McQuillen, “Dead Reckoning”. Courtesy of O’Born Contemporary.
Kate McQuillen, “Dead Reckoning”, detail. Courtesy of O’Born Contemporary.
McQuillen’s installation provides an interesting dichotomy between presence and absence. The individual is forever present within the digital world through recorded data; however, a singular image and likeness becomes forever abstracted and absent when said data circulates throughout the boundless depths of the Internet. Concrete identities become fragmented and deconstructed, similar to the intriguing works displayed within the gallery.
David Saric
*Exhibition information: November 7 – December 20, 2014, O’Born Contemporary, 131 Ossington Avenue, Toronto. Gallery hours: Tue – Sat 11 – 6 p.m.