If All You Have is a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail

A new three-channel installation by Will Kwan

Dates: November 6December 17, 2014

Opening Reception: November 12, 2014, 57pm

Gendai, Reel Asian Film Festival and Trinity Square Video are pleased to present a newly commissioned work by Toronto-based artist Will Kwan. Titled, If All You Have is a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail, Kwans new work forms a part of Gendais Model Minority program.

For the premiere exhibition of this work, Will Kwan has created a new three channel video that itself responds to an early multi-channel video installation by the Toronto artist John Massey. Produced in 1982 Masseys work consists of three screens presenting a staged conversation between the artist and a hitchhiker as they drive down a stretch of highway between rural towns north of Toronto. The central screen is intercut with images depicting disparate mental impressions of the subjects arising in their conversation, capturing the instability of language and meaning.

Kwans artistic response to Gendais Model Minority project re-makes this work from the canon of Canadian video art, replacing Massey and his hitchhiker with a White real estate agent and an Asian home-buyer as the passenger as they travel to visit prospective homes for sale, driving from a suburban neighbourhood of tract housing in Markham, Ontario to Forest Hill, an affluent district in Toronto of primarily White homeowners according to the 2011 Canadian census. As in As the Hammer Strikes, the divergent mental landscapes of the real estate agent and his Asian client will unfold in incongruentand at times absurd or troublingimages as they strive to reconcile the identity, expectations, and motivations of the other.

The exhibition develops from Kwans ongoing examination of diverse cultural practices and histories of intercultural encounters that haunt contemporary political and economic relations. With If All You Have is a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail the artist complicates concerns and themes rooted in the aspirations of an East Asian diasporic community who are often cast as the model minorities. The work offers a refractive mirror for how perceptions of self, other, community, land and the image of a good life are culturally interpolated by the multiple actors, state apparatuses, and property dealers who in turn, actively reconfigure and capitalize off of them. Kwans work is a particular narrative mapping of such intersections and collisions. The question is what might be done from these webbed relations beyond reflection.

Please join us for the opening reception on Wednesday November 12 from 57pm. Trinity Square Video is located at 401 Richmond Street West, Suite 376 in Toronto.