Marginalia

Marginalia

Marginalia is both a long story and a continuing one.

Marginalia is a collaboration, correspondence and conversation between two artists on opposite coasts of Canada. In an early Artist Statement, Dragu and Hall said –

MARGINALIA is about creating discourse: both between the artists, who have undertaken this committed correspondence, and between audiences who experience the work both virtually and in real-time. Our process engages new technologies and old manual practices to explore the ground between art and life, between one coast and another, between two strangers deciding to “make a relationship”. We are, like most Canadians, exploring how it might be possible to forge deep connection, mutual understanding, and complicity across great distance.

MARGINALIA: getting out of the house

Marginalia: Getting out of the House was presented at Richmond Art Gallery (RAGA) in Richmond, BC, in 2008 as an installation of two flying houses suspended from the ceiling accompanied by the artists’ square-correspondence printed on 4″x6″ recipe cards and hung on gallery walls like multiple clotheslines; the artists invited members of the local community to help them “make meaning” by putting the squares into new conversations with one another. 

MARGINALIA for Studio XX

Marginalia for Studio XX festival HTMlles in Montreal in 2010 was a site specific installation created by the artists in the form of a multi-layered archive or “soft-library”.

MARGINALIA action 1

MARGINALIA: Aktion 1 was first presented to the public for 2005 LIVE! Biennale in Vancouver as an installation and performance at grunt Gallery; covering 3 walls entirely with squares from floor to ceiling and employing squares/paper/flour and recorded audio in a live aktion-performance.

MOD (Modern Art Forgeries)

FORGERIES  is series of Dragu’s paintings of Male Modern “Masters” re-maid by a woman untrained in painting on cloth (originally from MARGINALIA project with Pam Hall). Reproduced in various iterations on paper, postcards, and framed limited editions