Charles Rea: Crystal Lab/Mirror Mazes

Additional Information

Other associated events: Reception, Friday, January 27, 7:30 pm. Exhibition tour 8:00 pm. Shuttle service leaves Central for Sherwood Branch at 6:00 pm, and returns at 7:15 pm. Please call to reserve a place.

Charles Rea hails from Vancouver where he studied at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in the early 1980s. Rea's preoccupation with depicting architectural spaces, such as vaulted cathedral interiors and catacombs, has segued recently into an interest in three dimensional labyrinth structures and abstract maze-like patterns. Rea's work has been exhibited nationally, and internationally at the Galerie Kampnagel in Hamburg, Germany, Art Cologne in Cologne, Germany, and at the Museum of Modern Art in Toyama, Japan. With Crystal Lab, Charles Rea presents a world that is both familiar and alien, both pregnant with meaning and opaquely abstract, and this is where a sense of unease is reintroduced. Crystal Lab . . . began with research into diagrams of labyrinths that he initially applied to small vanity mirrors and later, in the Mirror Maze series included in this exhibition, to larger convex security mirrors. The specific designs Rea has chosen to use, while ostensibly aesthetic in form, . . . lead the eye or physical body to the centre of the labyrinth and then out again without crossing the same path twice. Labyrinths are often thought of as puzzles, leading one to the excited frustration of dead ends while in search of an exit, but unicursal labyrinths provide more of a meditative experience as there is no guessing - there is only one path to follow. Keith Wallace, 2005

Charles Rea, Crystal Lab/Mirror Mazes (Installation View), 2006.