Permanent Collection

Rodman Hall maintains a permanent collection of over 850 works of art, including paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings. While the primary focus of the collection is Canadian artists, 19th and 20th century American and European artists are also represented in the collection. A particular strength of the collection is work by the Group of Seven, Canadian Group of Painters, and the Painters Eleven. Several outdoor sculptures are on permanent display in the park-like setting of the Walker Botanical Gardens, and select works are exhibited in the historic house.    
 

RECENT ACQUISITION


DAVID ROKEBY
Plot Against Time #2 (flurry)
2008
hi-definition video

Rodman Hall is pleased to announce the addition of a significant work to the permanent collection titled Plot Against Time #2 (flurry) by Canadian artist David Rokeby who has focused on interactive works that engage the human body or involve artificial perception systems since 1982.

Plot Against Time is a series of works that explore patterns of movement over time. The second in the series, Plot Against Time #2 (flurry), tracks individual snowflakes whirling in the complex turbulence created by the rigorous and minimal forms of Mies van der Rohe's Toronto Dominion Centre skyscrapers and Al McWilliams' sculpture in the middle of the complex. The camera captures the snow against the background of the sculpture and the lowest of the buildings from within the sculpture. The video footage is processed to separate the snowflakes from the background, then the material has been reworked to draw out and highlight the complex paths that individual flakes follow. The artist plays with a kind of temporal depth of field in which moving objects are in focus and things that are still are blurred, and variously reveals and hides the snow's trajectories, with the flakes sometimes apparently inscribing their path, and at other times coursing through their future path like blood cells through arteries. The chaos of turbulent trajectories is in sharp contrast to the formal simplicity of the architecture and sculpture, but in fact, this complexity is largely a direct result of the encounter between these forms and the wind passing through them.

David Rokeby is an interactive sound and video installation artist based in Toronto.  Born in Tillsonburg, Ontario, he studied experimental art at the Ontario College of Art.  His work has been exhibited across Canada and Europe with notable projects featured in the Venice Biennale in 1986; Ars Electronica, Linz Austria, 1991 and a permanent site-specific installation at the Ontario Science Centre.  Rokeby won the first Petro-Canada Award for Media Arts in 1988 and the Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction for Interactive Art (Austria in 1991 and in 2002 he won the Governor General Visual and Media Arts Award.  On a final note, he spent his teen years in St. Catharines.

We look forward to featuring the work in our program in the near future.