903 Lansdowne Ave, Toronto (via laneway)

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“There is a sense of replenishment here, of well-being and security.” - Don DeLillo, White Noise

             

 

                Paul Spencer Byard, in The Architecture of Additions: Design and Regulation, describes
''facadectomy" (or ''facadism'') as an often derisive term describing a redevelopment practice in
which the historical exterior of a building is retained while the interior is demolished, redesigned,
and put to new, modern use. It produces monstrous, hybrid forms, whose only constant metric is
their anachronism. This practice assumes a need - a direct response for new development, both
commercially and socially. It is a device for adaptation as much as it is for confusion.

             Paula McLean and Megan Bierman-Brophy have siphoned from the billowing efflux of stuff that
flows into and out of our buildings and homes. Their products are both brute facts and rebuses,
offering meaning while refusing to cohere in an intelligible whole. Behold creations as indistinct
and curious as the mass from which they were extracted; theirs is a body that does have organs,
ones that are blown-out, friable, dry, dusty, desiccated – both mummy and machine.
This stuff is arranged here briefly, and at the end of the exhibition, it will be expelled in a
compulsive repetition of the process by which it came into being.