Still Water
Globe and Mail
April 30-May 30, 2009
By Gary Michael Dault
Andrew Wright at Peak Gallery
The installation is priced at $32,000. Until May 30,
23 Morrow Ave., Toronto 416-537-8108
Water moves as continuously as air. It is part of Andrew Wright's inventive perversity that he is given to building his work on the basis of water made still. Like a 19th-century photographer whose photographs of water look (because of long exposure times) like photos of milk, Wright's waterworks have all the solidity of crystal.
For this exhibition, Still Water, Wright has pushed watery stasis into the realms of the architectural, producing a series of five dark, narrow steles that curve up from the floor and ascend almost to the ceiling. They look identical at first glance, but you soon come to see there are photo passages of hurtling, splashing water at the foot of each tower-like structure, each of them different. It's like looking down over a dam at night (Wright took the photos at falls on the Grand River near Cambridge) - a dam momentarily frozen solid by darkness and the inhalation of time.