TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA.- The Power Plant presents "Liam Gillick: Communes, Bars and Greenrooms," on view through November 16, 2003. One of the 2002 finalists for the prestigious Turner Prize, the transatlantic British artist Liam Gillick, who works between London and New York, has been a creative force on the European scene. The Power Plant exhibition will be his first exhibition in North America. Gillick’s ambitious installations combine the look of corporate architectural design and office supergraphics with the colouristic formalism of minimal art. The sculptural environment of screens and objects made of anodized aluminum and coloured Plexiglas physically engage the spectator and offers itself as an open site for dialogue or discussion, informed as Gillick’s work is by an examination of the ecosystems of art and the management theories of business.

Philip Monk, the curator of the exhibition, wrote: “The name of this exhibition, communes, bars and greenrooms, is also the subtitle of one of Liam Gillick’s recent books, Literally No Place. This coincidence points to a couple of important issues to consider in approaching Gillick’s work at The Power Plant: firstly, Gillick’s practice is divided between a number of different pursuits and, secondly, each exhibition is only an installment in an ongoing investigation.
 
Sometime Gillick’s artworks are only the slightest of interventions or modifications of spaces. Sometimes they overwhelm the space, combining the look of corporate architectural design and office supergraphics with the colouristic formalism of minimal art. In the case of these larger installations, we might think that Gillick’s work has the look of another space out of place in an art gallery, that it seems more design than art. At this point, we might recall the title of his book: "literally no place" means the nowhere of utopia. The temporary architecture Gillick installs at The Power Plant then is an occasion to speculate on what Gillick calls "functional utopias" as well as on how "shifting concepts of ethics and conscience find form in the built world . . . when speculation becomes the dominant tool in defining our urban environment." As Gillick writes about the exhibition, the spaces of "the commune, bar and greenroom are specific locations for planning, speculation, reflection and constantly renewed forms of social interaction." While Gillick does not intend to make the individual spaces represent these environments, "the exhibition makes use of the social dynamic that is unique to each type of space, taking it as a base model for new forms of quasi-architecture and decoration."