Echo Location
Mitch Speed

January 20 - February 16, 2013. By appointment only.
Closing Reception: Saturday, February 16, 1 to 5pm.

Echo Location (2013) follows wall scale drawing on paper entitled Interface for Template Matching (2012). In the earlier work, I produced a series of glyphic shapes which became the building blocks of a loosely gridded pattern. The shapes were developed intuitively, until they reached a state between recognizability and abstraction. I viewed that work as a device for some kind of non-monastic meditation – an interface between viewers and their own minds, formally analogous, maybe, to the coded interfaces of computer technologies. This work draws the immersive quality of its predecessor into three dimensional space. It is an experiment in engaging the body in pictorial experience. But I also imagine the former drawing percolating into this three dimensional experience, in much the same way that the codes and structures of technology linger in contemporary imaginations, like shadows separated from their templates.

Left Image: Echo Locate (Detail), Tempera on wall, 2013

Mitch Speed is an artist and writer from Saskatoon, currently based in Vancouver. In 2012, he graduated from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Shortly thereafter, he participated in the residency A Paper, A Drawing, A Mountain, led by Jan Verwoert and Silke Otto-Knapp at the Banff Centre, AB. He edits a journal called Setup, which is released by Publication Studio on an un-fixed schedule.