VICTORIA, BC.- The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria presents Promising Objects, artist Alison MacTaggart’s recent installation work that explores her interest in inventors and artists and their respective quests to devise solutions to problems and ideas.

The exhibition runs from Oct. 28, 2011 to Jan. 15, 2012 in the AGGV’s LAB gallery and is a contemporary response to the themes of design and invention that are explored in the exhibition The Modern Eye: Craft and Design in Canada on display in the Gallery’s Pollard Gallery until Nov. 27.

Promising Objects features functional wooden sculptures and their design drawings that meet three parameters taken directly from the Canadian Intellectual Property Office’s A Guide to Patents.

Artist Alison MacTaggart explains, “Each artwork or solution to my proposal to explore language and the dialogic must demonstrate novelty, utility and ingenuity. To demonstrate novelty, each artwork must be new in some way. It could be an improvement on a previous artwork or the first such object in the world.”

“With regards to utility each artwork must work or have a useful function. For example, the artwork could be an apparatus or it could be a process or a method that invites participation. Who says art can’t be useful? To demonstrate ingenuity each artwork must be a development that would not have been obvious beforehand and it would elicit a “why-didn’t-I-think-of-that” reaction from other experts or artists in the field—a challenge indeed, to say the least,” continued MacTaggart.

Alison MacTaggart is a Vancouver based artist, she currently teaches in the Fine Arts
Faculty at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey. She received a BFA from Simon
Fraser University in Vancouver and an MFA from York University in Toronto. She has
exhibited extensively across Canada.

The LAB is a contemporary experimental space designed specifically for presenting
challenging and dynamic projects within the AGGV.