I've been a fan of Megan Dickie's work ever since I took her Intro to Sculpture class a few years back so I was delighted when she came to talk to our class.
Her sculptural pieces gode the viewer to interact with them. The seed of this approach to comes from Dickie's sense of "wrestling" with notions of sculpture (as a male dominated field). One of her early video pieces shows her donning a wrestling mask while tussling with a sculpture of hers made of a flexible network of wax bricks. This piece also acts as a commentary about the coldness and exclusionary aspect of the austerity of architecture and sculpture that aspires to that aesthetic (Richard Serra would probably agree: he holds the belief that architecture is not art because architecture serves a function, whereas "art" serves the purpose of making the viewer experience things in a different way etc.). I like her ideas and how it questions the role and reception of sculptural work.
In her more recent pieces, such as The Gleamer, Dickie has created what she called "flexible geometry". A multitude of cut aluminum triangles are glued to a sheet in a grid fashion. This allows the viewer to pile and move the sheet into different forms: the aluminum triangles make the sheet able to stand up on it's own. This calls into play the themes of science: mathematics and physics. There's a great video of it on her website.
I really enjoy that "digital" effect of the reflections of the aluminum triangles in this piece . . . like a 3-d digital sculpture.
Dickie left off with discussing ideas about a new piece using the same principles that Buckminster Fuller used in his geodescic domes but I'm sure her piece won't suffer the snobbery of architecture (my apologize to architects out there . . . LeCorbusier would be turning in his grave lol).
Megan Dickie's work is currently at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. :)
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