Right Now, Not Yet – Brigitte Lochhead

Press Release
The Maillardville Cultural Appreciation Society is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Brigitte Lochhead. The works in the exhibition focus on multiple iterations of materials, asserting their own construction within the gallery and on the surrounding terrace. With both raw and manufactured mediums, the sculptures present their material as a form of knowledge that can only be understood through an engagement of labour. Mixing the familiar with the foreign, the exhibition points towards a depth of information that cannot be accessed by a recourse to language. Lochhead’s work also intersects with the industrial history of Maillardville as a mill town site and its transformation into a city dependent on post industrial economies. The work is at once demanding yet physically present in a way that places importance within its own form not its referents.

Doing every drug I could find
Knowledge is gained through ignorance towards danger; things put in new proximity to one another without concern for the outcome. A lot is at stake when ingesting a new possibility because when done right it yields a glimpse of something beyond bland repetition. This glimpse is usually of another language, which at best we manage to stumble through because of its shallow similarities to our own. The bits that we do understand though have an uncanny permanence.
In drugs and art alike, the information that comes out often remains stuck outside the world of concrete words. These experiences can return to childhood, to a base, and allow the past to be recreated in a way that has never before existed. As hard as others may wish, it remains impossible to create a working placebo for experience. What is learnt is without quantifiable findings, can only contain for others an incentive to begin their own procession forward, but perhaps somewhat more safely. Experimentation doesn’t always mean self-destruction.