Neighbourhood
An Installation by Diane Borsato
September 20 - 30, 2007
Presented in the Cambridge Galleries Design at Riverside window gallery
In conjunction with CAFKA.07 | Haptic
Curated by Ivan Jurakic
Diane Borsato is a pleasing enigma. In
person, she is affable and stylish but her
performances and interventions have
a quietly clandestine aura. Things are
seldom as they first appear, and after
consideration one can sense the artist’s obsessive
precision at work. Borsato is an observer of everyday
phenomena and she has a sharp eye for the quirks
and absurdities that define our daily rituals. Her
work mines familiar yet often overlooked aspects of
urban life as the creative grist for her explorations.
Whether composing a score based on architecture
(Songs for Hart House, 2006), staging an unlikely
street performance (How To Respond In An
Emergency, 2006), or presenting a lecture (The
Practical Applications of Math, 2007), each work
takes an unexpected turn that one can’t help
but quietly marvel at. Although her practice is
predicated upon its level of conceptual clarity, the
works themselves exhibit an openness and lack
of pretence that makes them both refreshing and
accessible. There has been a resurgence in interest
in performance art and intervention in recent years,
at least in part due to a growing awareness of
the formative bodies of artwork relating to Fluxus,
Minimalism, Conceptualism and Feminism during
the 1960s and 70s. To this end a growing field of
artists have taken up performative, participatory or
relational artforms as creative means of engaging
the audience in a more direct and immediate
manner. From this standpoint, Borsato’s body of
work fits snugly beside predecessors like Adrian
Piper and Sophie Calle, and there is a similarly
uncluttered immediacy to her projects. They are
alternately engaging, self-effacing and humorous,
while maintaining a softly subversive stance as the
artist peels away at conventional expectations.
Neighbourhood is a site responsive installation
presented as a satellite of the larger CAFKA.07
biennial. The working theme of the biennial, Haptic,
infers the sense of touch, a theme seemingly tailor-
made for Borsato’s investigations. Inviting the
artist to develop a new work, we took a long stroll
around Queen’s Square, a civic plaza bordered by
the central branch of the Cambridge Libraries and
Galleries on the north side, and the University of
Waterloo School of Architecture on the south. The
area is a microcosm of the community at large, a
vibrant hub bustling with students, instructors,
pedestrians, and library and gallery visitors.
At face value, Neighbourhood is a shift in direction
for the artist, who during her site visit candidly
expressed an interest in making an artwork that
was more sculptural. Despite this move away from
a purely performative method of artmaking, the
installation proposes the same sort of awkward
intimacy found in Borsato’s performances. Situated
inside the window gallery at Design at Riverside,
the installation occupied a street level space along
a pedestrian thoroughfare on the north face of the
School of Architecture. Visible 24/7, the vitrine-like
quality of the window space proved to be an ideal
site for a sculptural installation.
Inspired by the School of Architecture, Borsato
commissioned an architectural rendering of her
home in the Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto, and
subsequently had a scale model built out of Baltic
birch and bass wood. Upon completion the artist
summarily documented the model, then counter-
intuitively took a sledgehammer and destroyed it.
She then commissioned a painstaking reconstruction
of the model from the ruins. The final result, Home,
was displayed in one of five window niches alongside
before and after photos of its destruction, a new
panel Skyline 1, Toronto, and a reprise of an earlier
intervention simply titled Bouquet.
Home is a sculptural deconstruction. As an object,
the model suggests multiple readings: dollhouse,
broken home, home renovation, home invasion,
homelessness. In fact, Borsato was greatly influenced
by recent visits to London, Munich and Berlin, cities
with a long architectural heritage of being destroyed
and rebuilt, particularly in the wake of World War II.
The traces of the original buildings have over time
been reduced to structural ghosts, palimpsests
written over by their own facsimiles. These unseen
disjunctions prompted the artist to consider the
inherent meaning of destruction and reconstruction
in a city like Toronto, a relatively young metropolis
that has been spared the deprivations of warfare
and terrorism. What might it be like to build, destroy
and recreate a facsimile of one’s own home?
Home is followed by a photo-panel simply titled
Skyline 1, Toronto, which features a view of the
city skyline with the artist’s arm strategically
blocking out the CN Tower. This seemingly harmless
architectural obliteration says volumes about
unspoken wish fulfillment – a secret dream of
eliminating overbearing and overtly phallocentric
public monuments from our cities. The casual nature
of the document is yet another example of the artist
employing a simple gesture, in this case using
her own body to block out part of the composition,
to suggest a radical, potentially violent, public
transformation.
The installation sequence is completed with Bouquet,
an arrangement of flowers that reprises an earlier
version of a similar work. The artist writes: I stole
a selection of flowers from my neighbours’ gardens.
When I finally accumulated a nice combination of
colours, and varieties of flowers, I arranged the
entirely stolen bouquet and brought it to my mother
as a surprise gift. She was delighted. 1
Bouquet sweetly subverts the function of this
ubiquitous housewarming gift, dinner offering
and still life, by presenting the bouquet itself as a
sculptural object. Presented alongside photographic
evidence of the artist’s theft of the flowers, the piece
begs us to consider whether the object and the
intangible nature of the crime merits a reprimand or
a polite chuckle. The flowers are pretty but have little
value, and they will inevitably wither until replaced
with yet another stolen arrangement. Despite the
seemingly harmless nature of the trespass, one
can’t help but wonder what the neighbours think?
Neighbourhood suggests a surprising violence. The
selection of objects and documents that make up
the body of the installation are evidentiary traces
of the artist’s complicity in a series of marginally
criminal activities. At heart, the installation elicits a
troubling sense of anxiety since the illicit behaviour
is unexpectedly directed towards the artist’s own
home and immediate environment.
Borsato uses these transgressions as a way to
probe societal norms and challenge hierarchical
power structures. As our cities become increasingly
predicated on security, automation and anonymity,
informal encounters between people and art in public
places – a theme central to the larger CAFKA project
– can serve to disrupt the social and cultural barriers
that commonly act as impediments to interaction,
exchange and frankly, civility. Borsato’s artwork
intuitively pushes up against the same invisible
barriers which serve to restrict us. Neighbourhood
presents us with a selection of elegant sculptural
disruptions that propose breaking the rules as an
emancipatory act.
Ivan Jurakic
1. Quoted from the artist’s website: http://www.dianeborsato.net/bouquet.html
Diane Borsato is a visual artist working in performance, intervention, video, installation, and photography. She has exhibited nationally
and internationally with exhibitions and performances at galleries and museums including Skol, and the Museum of Contemporary Art
(Montreal), Gallery TPW, the AGYU, and The Power Plant (Toronto), eyelevel (Halifax), TRUCK (Calgary), Saw Gallery (Ottawa), Artspeak
(Vancouver), and a residency at Villa Arson, National Centre for Contemporary Art in Nice, France. Diane Borsato is Assistant Professor
of Interdisciplinary studio at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario. <www.dianeborsato.net>
The artist wishes to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, and would like to thank
Amish Morrell, Emily Hogg, Michael Bartosik, and Ivan Jurakic for their assistance and support.
Cambridge Galleries are supported by membership, the City of Cambridge,
the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council.