Programming

In his exhibition If I Told You Once, I Told You A Million Times, Alberta artist Trevor Mahovsky presented a body of some 2,000 drawings of various sizes, grouped together in the form of wall installations. The drawings were executed in ink on scrap paper and were, in the artist's words, based on an irrational, obsessive and arbitrary working method.

The series presented at DARE-DARE was extracted from an enormous "volume" of work inaugurated in June 1993. These drawings were somewhat like a diary, in that they are the result of impulsive, daily scribblings, devoid of any specific artistic intention, although they were dictated by the desire to translate through their humorous and ironic content "the neurotic joy of a daily production". The range of subjects they evoked is as wide as the space they fill on the walls, ranging, the artist mentions, from his Pontiac Acadian car to James Joyce... The result was a collection of sketches in a variety of media, often tinged with dark humor, and noticeably carefree in their execution.

The installation of the drawings on the walls testified to an organization of the information they contain. Mahovsky grouped them into grids of various sizes, the largest being seven by thirty feet. The artist created work sheets on which he recorded various documentary data about his pieces: title, date, format, medium, exhibition, collection and number. Through this combined process of compulsion and systematic annotation, the project of establishing a continuity between the hundreds of fragments of this never-ending logbook was outlined.

Trevor Mahovsky graduated from the University of Calgary in 1992 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Since 1991, he has exhibited in Calgary, Winnipeg, Windsor, Moncton, Czechoslovakia (Canadian Artists to the Benefit of the Olga Havel Foundation, Prague, 1993) and the United States (New Directions '93, Poughkeepsie, N.J.). Trevor Mahovsky is a board member of Truck, an artist-run center in Calgary.