Leftovers: Topographies of Chance
Trapp Projects, Vancouver BC, 2019
Housed in a leftover space, this exhibition gives a nod to the shifting, gentrifying elements of its building and neighbourhood, and fits nicely into the serendipity inherent in the mandate of TRAPP Projects.
Since its inception in 1997, TRAPP Projects has been inspired by the SnarePicturesof the Romanian/Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri who, in 1959, began trapping the leftovers from breakfasts, lunches and dinners to make his own psycho-geographic reading of everyday life. Similarly, this exhibition maps out a series of relations between social, economic, political and aesthetic interests. Leftoversis also a term meant to evoke material and intellectual concerns of the artists shown. From Ryan Quast’s meticulous documentation of the leftovers of his artistic production, to Parvin Peivandi’s mobilization of tattered Kurdish rugs that occupy the leftover spaces of the gallery, the exhibition traces art production that has been glanced over, left behind, or explores the very idea of leftovers.
Not unlike Daniel Spoerri’s book An Anecdoted Topography of Chance(1962), this exhibition is organized to be experienced like a stroll taken in every direction at once. Or, like Robert Smithson once said about the space between his Sites and Nonsites, it may open up a space where “one may lapse into places of little organization and no direction.”