Artist-to-Artist

Deborah Margo/Uta Riccius
Thursday 2 October 2003 at 7 pm
Club SAW, 67 Nicholas Street

The Ottawa Art Gallery is pleased to present Artist-to-Artist with Deborah Margo and Uta Riccius. Artists and those interested in art will not want to miss these talks amidst the casual atmosphere of Club SAW located at 67 Nicholas Street. They are a chance to plug into the local arts scene and test ideas in a space of creative exchange.

Deborah Margo

Deborah Margo's art is based largely on specific places where she taps into the history of the buildings in which she works. Margo has been working with temporary site-specific installations and more permanent object-making for close to 20 years. Her visual arts practice encompasses a variety of media including, sculpture, drawing, painting, photography and writing.

Her site-specific installations, Nattering Rampage (with Cindy Deachman) and a pathway for Mutchmor Public School's heritage garden, probe the phenomenal aspect of architectural locations through a varied exploration of their temporality and material remains.

In The Longing in Continents Adrift Margo constructed a two-part map using light emission satellite photographs of the eastern coast of North America and Western Europe. Her altered geographical record is constructed from hammered and pierced paper sections, which situates a conversation between the two expanses containing Ottawa and Cardiff. The tactile quality of the materials emphasizes the nearness of a surface which slips away to suggest other dimensions underneath the layers, as if a hidden subterranean network is taking shape somewhere just beyond the visible part of the work.

Margo's sculpture Pages from a Grey Book is a rumination on shifting locations of near and far. Made from cement tablets and wood packing cases, each box contains a fictitious cast landscape of continents and rivers.

Deborah Margo was born in Montreal. She received an undergraduate Fine Arts degree from Concordia University in Montreal, and a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. For the past 19 years, she has exhibited in Canada, Mexico and the United States, participating in solo and group projects. She has lived and worked in Ottawa since 1990.

Uta Riccius

Maps form both figure and ground of recent works by Uta Riccius. She traces new geo-narratives by physically altering maps to create re-projections of existing world states.

By knitting a paper map of North and Central America, Riccius explores distorted personal and global realities. The Armchair Traveller began in Ottawa and set up shop on the streets of Mexico City. The artist's intention was to show the effect of free trade on North American borders by reshaping and re-knitting maps. Instead of using wool, Riccius ripped maps into long, thin strips, stitched the paper with invisible thread to strengthen it, then knitted “Mexico and the U.S. together leaving Canada unravelled.” Knitting needles were left poking out of the paper bundle.

Riccius has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Berlin, Montreal, Ottawa and Aylmer. She has also worked on various collaborative art projects and performances with other artists, including Wrapped Reichstag in Berlin by Christo.

In 1991, Riccius earned a BFA in studio art from Concordia University in Montreal, which was followed by a five-year stay in Berlin. She received a two-year DAAD scholarship to study painting at the Hochschule der Kuenste Berlin, where she continued by switching into the fibres/textile art program. She concluded the three-year program earning an MFA equivalent. Throughout her studies she had opportunities to study painting in Nimes, France and, with an Erasmus exchange grant, Riccius spent three months at the Hochschule der Angewandte Kunst in Vienna, Austria.