Zeke Moores: Constructs
Diaz Contemporary, Toronto, Ontario
May 31 — July 7, 2012

The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) University in Halifax has been a bit of a hotbed of sculptural activity, orbiting the aesthetic of 1:1 scale. Thierry Delva (now longsince moved on from Halifax) numbers amongst its more prominent practitioners, which also includes the likes of Ontario-based sculptor Greg Forrest and, more currently, Zeke Moores, who obtained his BFA from the university in 2001 before moving on for postgraduate work at the University of Windsor, where he now teaches.

His work, much like that of his contemporaries and predecessors (excepting Forrest, much of whose work has been based on iconic sources, like the Stanley Cup or the late Keith Moon’s drum kit) takes its source in the trivial and mundane things of the world, in the discardable stuff of everyday life, in the unremarkable and overlooked—in short, in all that we take for granted and don’t give a lot of thought to. Delva, for instance, famously made a precise 1:1 scale sculpture of a very ordinary, nondescript Styrofoam cooler—carved from a solid block of marble.

The point behind all of this is, of course, to transform a banal and ordinary thing into something aesthetically extraordinary, and the way that’s done is to undertake the sculptural equivalent of putting a frame around it. By exactly repeating and replicating the dimensions and appearance of ordinary things in an extraordinary medium, that thing

…