Over the course of Rezoning Eli Bornowsky, Aaron Peck, Martin Ordonez and Dawn Cerny rearranged the installation with me while we spoke. You can find excerpts of our conversations and photos of the arrangements below.

Here is an excerpt of the press release from The Apartment:
"Municipal textures are created out of materials that need to be handled by an entire community and endure the inherent erosion. What makes these materials sharable often makes them unyielding to the touch, a hard response to a shared desire. Through their positioning (and subsequent rearrangement) the objects in Rezoning surrender to relationships, sympathetic narratives of support and collapse. The common frontal, albeit three-dimensional, relationship with sculpture and the immersive experience of installations are two common modes that speak to different aspects of an individual’s experience. In Rezoning, Brown initiates an additional relationship of being beside, near and with; drawing attention to our social relationships in the built landscape. In this way Rezoning is an active investigation of besideness. Just as cooking or performing other simple tasks can make a conversation flow, the act of arranging the sculptures will provide Brown and her dialogue partners with the impetus to stand beside each other and the work, realizing their active/passive position within this landscape of things."

Sculpture Parade en masse down East Pender Street
Friends and fellow artists at Unit/Pit Studios walked the work down Pender Street to The Apartment.

The work was pressed into the corner for the opening of the exhibition in preparation for the first conversation and arrangement with Eli Bornowsky.

Post modernism finally died the day I read an essay by Eli in the EU in ,maybe, 2004. I can remember what I was wearing, the time of day, the quality of the paper; it is a flashbulb memory. He was writing about truth. It seemed fantastically brave at the time. Eli’s pictures have a ticklish humour. I think ticklish bravery might be important to a public. Eli and I will arrange/converse about pcitures.

Born in Alberta Canada, Eli Bornowsky received his BFA in Visual Arts from the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver and is an MFA candidate at Bard College, New York. His most recent solo exhibition took place in 2013 at G Gallery, Toronto. In 2007 his paintings were shown in the group exhibition Gasoline Rainbows at the Contemporary Art Gallery and he began working with the Blanket Gallery with solo exhibitions in 2007, 2008 and 2011. In 2009 his work was included in the exhibition Enacting Abstraction at the Vancouver Art Gallery and in 2010 he exhibited Walking Square Cylinder Plane, a solo exhibition at the Western Front.

His critical texts have appeared in Fillip Review, C Magazine, Pyramid Power and artist catalogues. The label Rundownsun has released a limited edition cassette of his experimental audio projects. He has curated exhibitions for the Or Gallery including, Making Real (2008), After Finitude (2012), and the ongoing Clamour and Toll, a series of experimental music and performance. He currently resides in Vancouver.

Eli and I questioned how discrete the objects are. While we were arranging things we looked for energy or tension and a way of presenting empty space.

I suspect Aaron and I have led very different lives, but more important to our conversations, we have led very different reading lives. I come away from our conversations trying to get a sense of the contrasting textures of our interiors due, in part, from our diverging literary points of reference. After a conversation with Aaron I always go through the same set of thoughts. Is Aaron a romantic or a historian of the romantic? Have I falsely identified something as romantic when it is some other kind of passionate internal relationship? Do I need to relearn how to read? A vibrant community could be understood as a really good story. Aaron and I will start our arrangement/conversation with my questions for him about narrative.

Aaron Peck (born Prince Albert, Sask.) is the author of one novel, The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis, and an artbook, Letters to the Pacific (in collaboration with artists Adam Harrison and Dominic Osterried).

He is a regular contributor to Artforum. His criticism has also appeared in Art Agenda, Art Papers, bookforum.com, Canadian Art, Foam, Fillip, La Fabrica's Matador, and 01 Magazine. He also has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogs. Recently, he has given talks at The Western Front (Vancouver, 2013), The Julia Stoschek Collection (Düsseldorf, 2012), and the Serpentine Galleries (London, 2013). In 2012, he was invited to participate as a “writer-in-residence” Documenta 13. Excerpts from a novel-in-progress, The Bad Arts, have appeared in The Capilano Review, Joyland, Matrix Magazine, and West Coast Line. He currently teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

In this section of the arrangement Aaron was looking for the kind of tension and movement in the ancient Greek sculpture Lacoon and His Sons.

In this arrangement we also worked on a number of traps and detours for Lee in front of his office door. Troubling Lee became a potential way to expand the narrative of the exhibition.

Aaron and I made the entrance to the space challenging as well to keep the trouble going.

I support faculty in communications in Martin’s engineering department at UBC. I would like to find a way to express something more essential to engineering thought than the evidence held within a particular technology. It must have something to do with systems. Systems thought is doubly unbounded. There is room for endless refinement of detail and an equally endless expansion of the frame to include more factors into the system. I have to admit, this occasionally looks like the door to madness to me. Grappling with systems that include the social seems to have more urgency in power engineering or it might be that a change in the boundary of the system in more immanent in power engineering. Martin and I will start our arrangement/conversation with systems.

Martin Ordonez is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UBC, and is also an Adjunct Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland and at Simon Fraser University. He was born in Neuquen (Patagonia), Argentina.

He conducts research in energy systems and renewable power conversion including: the characterization and utilization of renewable power sources; high-efficiency energy storage systems; grid-tie bidirectional power conversion and power flow management; power conversion architectures and high-performance power electronics topologies. His current research activities are supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC)of Canada, and by industry partners.

Martin created a bench for this arrangement.

All of the stainless steel was collected together as Martin spoke about modularity.

Directly across from the bench we constructed a display. Martin used this construction as an example of a modular system with core modules and other interchangable part.

I met Dawn in the artists’ wonderland called Bard. Our relationship is primarily built within sculpture; she is also an astonishingly accomplished print maker. Dawn is the first artist I have spoken to about theism. I am an atheist; she isn’t. My atheism is a faith that needs to be explored and questioned regularly; I think Dawn’s theism is similar in that way. Our conversations tend to turn to questions about voids in my sculpture and what their content might be; are they a space for the social or an expression of loss? Dawn and I will begin our arrangement/conversation by thinking about sculpture together.

Dawn Cerny is a Seattle based artist. Cerny is an adjunct faculty member at Cornish who received her MFA from Bard College Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Her works on paper, installations, sculptures and books have been exhibited at numerous venues including Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Western Bridge, Seattle,; Tacoma Art Museum; Or Gallery, Vancouver; and Night Gallery, Los Angeles, California; Motto, Berlin; Printed Matter, New York. Cerny’s shows have been written about in Art Week, Art On Paper, Art Ltd, The Stranger, Seattle Weekly, The P.I., and the Seattle Times. She is currently represented by Season Gallery and her most recent exhibition, Boys, Jokes and Thing took place there in 2013.

In preparation for this arrangement we organized the objects into a sculpture lineup.

Dawn created thresholds into the space.

And we erected something like a stainless steel forest on the other side of the room.