A Review of Loop Member Sandra Smirle's Show at WARC by R.M. Vaughan

R.M. Vaughan of the Globe and Mail wrote a review of Loop member Sandra Smirle's show at WARC. The article was published on Saturday, November 27, 2010 and can be read in its entirety here.

Sandra Smirle at the WARC Gallery

An extract of the article is included below: 

Sandra Smirle at Women’s Art Resource Centre Gallery
Until Nov. 27, 401 Richmond St. W., Suite 122, Toronto; www.warc.net

Today (Saturday, November 27, 2010) is your last chance to catch Sandra Smirle’s haunting shadow puppetry at Women’s Art Resource Centre.

Using table-sized, laser-cut circles of Plexiglas, thick creamy paper cut by hand and a huge 10-foot by 14-foot sheet of Tyvek (an industrial polyethylene that resembles canvas), Smirle crafts topographical cut-out maps of random street corners. She then projects lights through the maps, creating a dancing interplay between the lit surfaces and their crisp shadows.

Mapping, Smirle’s wispy shadows argue, is an inexact science – one as susceptible to the vagaries of perception as any other decoding process. To wit, Smirle culls her maps from imagery gathered by satellites, a system that sells itself as indisputable. But by metaphorically and literally putting the technology under the spotlight, she turns these allegedly infallible geographies into fluttering, ethereal speculations, questions their reliability.

No space is wholly knowable, no matter how many angels we can now count on the heads of pins.