Derek Sullivan: Field Notes

This solo exhibition highlights a recent body of work by the leading Toronto-based conceptual artist Derek Sullivan. The works were inspired by Sullivan’s twelve-month site-study of Shift, a landart work by the American sculptor Richard Serra long-hidden in a field in King, Ontario.

The exhibition features a series of Sullivan’s signature large-scale drawings responding to this important site of international modernism in rural Ontario, not far from where the artist grew up. For Sullivan, walking around the site was central to his research, as was note-taking, taking pictures, collecting stones, and researching in archival collections. His thoughtful drawings consider the history of Serra’s work, and the present context in which it exists.

“I used Serra’s Shift 1970 as an orienting device for me to consider networks of interconnection encountered in this location (colonial expropriation of land, agricultural impacts, property development, tactics of preservation, trespassing, community use, imported artistry), but it also drew forth my own tangled histories in this region,” says Sullivan. “The project aimed to put Serra in his place, so to speak, whilst better understanding my own.”