Need a good place to sit and chat with friends? Adrian Blackwell’s sculpture Furnishing Positions at the Blackwood Gallery is a good place to start. Designed as a conversation space, the area can be booked by student groups and organizations for informal and formal gatherings.

The 40-piece modular sculpture forms an amphitheatre in the centre of the Blackwood Gallery. Each piece is a curved one-sixth of a circle, with four different heights that can be assembled in many different configurations. Over the course of the exhibition, the sculpture will be reconfigured six times.

In addition to the sculpture, Blackwell’s Furnishing Positions includes a series of 18” by 18” broadsheets that focus on the paradoxical nature of public space. Each issue to be published once every two weeks over the next three months will feature an artist’s project on one side and text on the other. The contributors will explore questions like what draws people to public spaces and whether public spaces are physical or virtual.

On November 22 and 23, the Blackwood will host the third part of Blackwell’s Furnishing Positions, which will be open to the public. The artists and writers who contributed to the Furnishing Positions broadsheet will participate in six conversations, each about a different paradox of public space.

Mary Mattingly’s series of photographs, House and Universe, include images of self-sustaining floating islands and depict her predictions of a collective dystopia due to unabated global warming and corporate privatization.

Adjacent to the e|gallery in the CCT café hangs Mattingly’s Sphere, a 140-pound bundle of the artist’s personal objects. Over several months, Mattingly archived every object she owns and traced its history from how it came into her life to where the raw materials came from.

Pull is a participator performance that will take place this Tuesday and Thursday. On Tuesday, Mattingly, with the help of participants, will pull, roll and drag the bundle from UTM to Sheridan College in Oakville. The performance offers participants a chance to experience the environmental and societal impact of personal consumption. On Thursday, the artist and participants will drag the bundle from Sheridan back to UTM.

The Bernie Miller Lightbox outside the Davis Building displays Laurel Ptak’s Wages for Facebook. The poster discusses the exploitation of Facebook users who do not receive the advertising and metrics profit they generate for companies when they like, chat, or share. Facebook’s alleged persona of an entertainment platform rather than an income source is explored as an element of virtual public space.

Falsework, curated by Christine Shaw, runs till December 7. Look for later Medium articles exploring the individual exhibits in depth.

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