In note to self, Laurel Woodcock expands her interest in language and perception with a playful exploration of how meaning is made. The work in the exhibition moves away from language per se, focusing on the formal properties that remain when the words themselves are absent. She turns to the structures that hold them, such as the typographic grid layout of a page, or symbols commonly used to replace them. The humourous inadequacy of language, such as magic hour never really being an hour, is explored in a work that brought her to Whiskey Gap, Alberta, a ghost town where Terrence Malick filmed Days of Heaven in 1978. This capacity of language to convey conflicting texts and subtexts simultaneously runs throughout the exhibition.

Laurel Woodcock is a Toronto-based artist whose work often culls from familiar language; a turn of phrase, song lyric, punctuation mark, typography, element of syntax or cinematic trope. These become materials from which she explores the problems and possibilities of language, its formal and semantic qualities and malleable meanings. This culminates in sculpture, editions, video, audio, photography, site and situational work that explore the formal and connotative aspects of words as ready-mades. Many of her projects have responded to specific sites and situations, momentarily mistaken for official public signage in the form of a banner toting plane, neon, adhesive vinyl lettering and billboards.

Recent solo exhibitions include the AGO, Toronto Now; her on-going series walkthrough, text-based interventions into public architecture where everyday life and cinema converge were part of the Images Festival, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Mount Saint Vincent University and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Recent group exhibitions include A to B at MKG127, Calibration of Chance at Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto; On Being an Exhibition at Artists Space, New York and Concrete Language at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. Her video work has been screened in festivals nationally and internationally, in Paris, Berlin, New York, Barcelona, Cairo and Glasgow. This fall, she has will have a survey exhibition at University of Waterloo Art Gallery curated by Ivan Jurakic, and an upcoming monograph that will be launched in summer 2012. Her work is in several private and public collections including McCarthy Tétrault, Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Canada Council Art Bank.