For her exhibition Lost in the Supermarket, currently on show at Galerie Donald Browne, artist Valerie Kolakis places her artworks into an orbit around one central idea: architectural subtraction. Each object is a quote from the construction industry: an old photograph of Thomas Edison’s Concrete House, a jumble of steel reinforcement rods, a series of blueprints, a concrete plinth, a bare neon-light covered with a sheet of lace. However, each of these objects was subtly altered by the artist, and her sometimes imperceptible interventions infuse them with a poignant irony. The reinforcement rods, so casually strewn on the gallery floor, are in fact bronze casts of actual reinforcement rods, blurring the line between the profane and the noble. Upon closer inspection each framed blueprint turns out to be a multitude of superimposed blueprints, and instead of a sober set of instructions each drawing becomes an indecipherable cacophony of walls and doors, blocked exits and dead ends. The quiet tension between the functional neon light with its harsh artificial light and the romantic sheet of intricate lace which covers it is heightened by the fact that the lace itself is artificial – just a mere sheet of perforated plastic sheeting.

Each artwork makes a statement about architecture as a concept, a construct, a mind-game. Edison’s Concrete House was a failed idea, and his prototype was eventually demolished to make way for a supermarket. A sheet of adhesive vinyl carefully placed on a monolithic concrete plinth was torn by the artist off a construction site at the Berri-Uqam metro station, where the iconic tiled walls are being demolished to make way for advertisements. Our man-made environment is just as susceptible to change as everything else, and Valerie Kolakis’ exhibition makes even the solid walls of the Belgo feel a little more transparent.

Galerie Donald Browne, space 528
Valerie Kolakis,
Lost in the Supermarket
April 23 – June 4, 2011
www.galeriedonaldbrowne.com