Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre
13 June - 21 July 2007
Opening reception: Saturday 16 June @ 7 pm

POST-CAMP
Shelly Bahl, Ben Darrah

"Camp is (to repeat) the relation to style in a time in which the adoption of style-as such-has become altogether questionable." (53rd note on Camp)

Following Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp" (1964), Modern Fuel's upcoming exhibition Post-Camp establishes connections between the work of Toronto-based artist Shelly Bahl and Kingston-based artist Ben Darrah, and proposes that they be considered in terms of the sensibility "Post-Camp." This exhibition asks if the Camp relation to style is still tenable today, in an age where the questionable is subjected to an even closer scrutiny.

Both Bahl's new series of photographs of a group of South Asian women at an international airport "A Day in the Life" (2007) and Darrah's suite of paintings and assemblages are underpinned by similar concerns that arise through their individual explorations of what might be called a National identity, while practicing a form of citation that dislocates their subject matter. Bahl has pursued throughout her career a Post-Colonial interrogation of the issues of cultural displacement and appropriation by highlighting the hybrid and stereotypical nature of orientalist fantasies, colonialist histories, and multi-culturalism. Darrah refashions the representation of the Canadian landscape by setting it afloat, thereby disconnecting nature from an unexamined ground and pinpointing its status as a cultural construct.

Just as the Post-Modern has been understood as both a disruption and a continuation of the Modern, Post-Camp should be understood as both a disruption and a continuation of Camp as defined by Sontag.

Shelly Bahl is a visual and media artist born in Benares, India, and based in Toronto and New York City. She received her B.F.A. (Visual Art and Art History) from York University, Toronto and her M.A. (Studio Art) from New York University. Bahl is a founding artist member of SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Collective) and ZEN-MIX 2000: Pan-Asian Visual Arts Network in Toronto.

Born in London, England, Ben Darrah immigrated to Canada with his family in 1968. He graduated with a BFA from the University of Alberta and received his Masters of Fine Art at the University of Windsor. He lives in Kingston, Ontario and currently teaches at St. Lawrence College. As well as teaching, Darrah curates and writes about art.

In the State of Flux Gallery:
A YEAR IN SHANGHAI
Dave Gordon