Not To Be Reproduced

Gordon Lebredt

23 May - 5 July, 2014

Opening Reception: Friday, May 23, 6 - 9pm

Exhibition organized by Joel Herman

G Gallery is pleased to present Not To Be Reproduced, an exhibition of the work of Gordon Lebredt. Consisting of works produced between 1974 and 2010, the exhibition emphasizes Lebredts importance as an artist who combined rigorous critical thinking with the production of objects and images.

Not To Be Reproduced is an attempt to articulate the complex ideas around reproduction, reproducibility, and appropriation that appear as consistent concerns within Lebredts practice. Central to the exhibition at G are two works that reconstruct spectral objects, Lebredts facsimile of Robert Smithsons Enantiomorphic Chambers and Outers, a video from 1983 that addresses impossibility of representing the Bayview Ghost, an unfinished and vacant building that overlooked the Don Valley Parkway in Toronto for over two decades.

Enantiomorphic Chambers 1965 was a sculpture by Robert Smithson that was either lost or destroyed. In 1982, Lebredt submitted an exhibition proposal to YYZ Toronto titled l to r: to from Robert Smithson and to Paolo Uccello, which was to include the reconstruction of Smithsons sculpture. Although the proposal was not accepted, Lebredt produced his version of the Enantiomorphic Chambers regardless, and this effort, and the ideas surrounding it, expanded over many years of work, culminating in the publication of Afterthoughts: A monologue [to RS] YYZBooks, 2008, a text addressed to Smithson that acts as the philosophical ground upon which Lebredts facsimile can be seen.

Lebredt thought of Outers as a counterpoint to the difficulties I was having writing a script around Chambers. An audio-visual round-trip, it marked an attempt to rewrite Smithsons site/non-site dialectic, an operation that involved the superpositioning of two incompossible localities based on a reading of the game of fort:da recounted by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle 1920. In this sense, Outers can very much be seen as occupying the same ground upon which Lebredt's facsimile Enantiomorphic Chambers are situated, an earlier draft of the philosophical concerns discussed in Afterthoughts. Indeed, much of Lebredts work functions this way, sustaining rigorous intellectual engagement with ideas over time, each work an attempt at solving a problem that persists, only to be challenged and taken up again.

Gordon Lebredt 19482011 was born in Winnipeg and studied at the University of Manitoba, both in the Faculty of Architecture 19671970 and the School of Art 19721976. Before relocating to Toronto in 1980, Lebredt executed a number of important site-specific installations at the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the newly opened Plug-In Gallery. He exhibited extensively in Canada during his long career and was included recently in Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980 an exhibition that travelled across Canada between 2010 and 2012 as well as Get Hold of This Space: A Geography of Conceptual Art in Canada at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris 2014. Gordon Lebredt: Nonworks 19752008, a collection of Lebredts unrealized proposals, was published in 2011 by Plug In Editions and the Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art.

G Gallery wishes to thank Lin Gibson, the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and Hart House University of Toronto, Micah Lexier, Brian Groombridge, John Goodwin, Mercer Union, and C Magazine for their invaluable assistance in helping to make this exhibition take place.

For information about Gordon Lebredt and his work, please contact: Lin Gibson

416.536.9537 / 647.269.9537 gibson.lebredt@sympatico.ca