Universalia

Within, through, and across Universalia, Bronson Smillie expands his practice of probing the possibilities of material intervention. The resulting fugue asks us to seriously consider all manner of serialization, but especially the act of fixing an object that is codified as informative within a system of categorization. 'Universalia', meaning attributes, properties, or qualities shared by divergent objects, manifests as the exhibition’s recurrent motto and its angle of inquiry.

The titular series of wall works, Encyclopédie (I-VIII), act as a malfunctioning manual for approaching the exhibition as a whole. By carving into and selectively peeling back the encyclopedias’ leather, Smillie exposes fascia-like book board. The recurring motif of a house and a flower, in addition to various erasures of the embossed titles, are punctuated by rings of jaunty buttons. Like an orbital field, a brief window of vision, Smillie’s action on these covers transposes importance from the contents to the external materiality.

Felt Drawing series wonders about textual certainty in relation to the tradition of manual-making. Here, we are presented with deeply-yellowed pages, bracketed by a front and a back cover, from an early twentieth-century grocer's ledger, featuring Smillie's intervention of felt furniture protectors, two cream-coloured buttons, and a suite of gauzy, compositionally-balanced illustrations that hover above the underlying scrawl. In their firm roundness and sooty colouring — echoing the thickness of grime found down the centrefold and fore-edges — the floating felt circles function as points of departure amidst indecipherable notation never intended for general consultation.

By persistently recuperating cast-off, burdensome, and affectively-charged materials that harmonize with paper, Smillie extends the drawn-line away from the page. While Paper Guillotine 4 is notable for its absence of paper, the gridded surface — originally the colour of oxidized copper, now heavily patinated — evokes the past-tense presence of documents. There are two registers present in this wall-work: an industrial one based on the act of severing, as well as an exuberant bounce evoked by buttons unfastened from the task of joining a garment together.

While elsewhere in the exhibition works assume a subversive position within series and serialization, in the sprawling, large-scale work Fore-edge Drawing (lean right), the possibility to exhaust is found in repetition and material mass. Constructed from books originating from three different encyclopedic volumes, this work shifts the site of surface embellishment to a typically hidden location. The textured plane is adorned with a single motif, repeated as many times as possible down the length of the work, leaving the impression that the leaning, asemic image could proliferate to infinity. So nimble that they barely disturb the surface, the lines and volume of the motif takes up a reverberation of the extended page with gestures of figuration. This work anchors the universe of Universalia within the communicative, the interrogative, and the limitless potential of disordering our relationships to objects that feel known.

- Text by Emily Zuberec