The World in a Folly Garden: Dancing 'Round the Ruins

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The World in a Folly Garden: Dancing 'Round the Ruins
Katy McCormick

May 4 - June 3, 2006.

Presented in conjunction with the 10th Anniversary

The Open Air Theatre. Le Désert de Retz, 2005, chromogenic print, 1557 x 76 cm.

Katy McCormick's The World in a Folly Garden: Dancing 'Round the Ruins, which focuses upon the relationship between choreography, mise-en-scéne, and photographic representation. Using Le Désert de Retz, an eighteenth-century French Folly Garden, as a departure point, this exhibition plays upon the parallels between historic dance notations and gardens where ballets took place regularly.

Composed of twenty follies arranged around the grounds of a 100-acre estate, Le Désert de Retz was built to resemble nothing so much as an enchanted ruin. Also referred to as a Romantic garden, it was built by François Henri Racine de Monville. The central element, Le colonne détruit, which disguised an elegant country abode, referenced a Greek temple presumably destroyed by the gods. Built on the cusp of the French Revolution, each of the follies alludes to some ancient civilization and most were built to appear to be in a state of decay. In the early twentieth century, Monville's artifice would truly fall to ruin.

McCormick explores dance notation (not dance itself, but the written representation of dance) as a means of underlining the choreographed nature of historic gardens. Akin to dance, such sites as Le Desert are designed with the idea of promenade, where relationships between elements are revealed through space and time only as one 'goes through the steps.' Looking at 18th-century choreographic signs today, we can only imagine the ballets to which they refer. However, in attempting to decipher them, we engage in a virtual dance. This is also true of a compelling photograph. Though static, both forms reference a history of the body moving through space within a highly codified context.

Presented here as part of the 10th annual Contact Toronto Photography Festival, Katy McCormick's solo exhibitions have appeared locally at the Premiere Dance Theatre, Alliance Française Gallery, Gallery TPW, The Photo Passage, and Jamie Kennedy at the ROM, and elsewhere at The Photographer's Gallery, Saskatoon, The Other Gallery, Banff, and at Espace VOX and The Eleanor London Public Library, in Montreal. She has participated in group shows in both Canada and the US, including Critical Mass, an international exhibition on architecture at the Museum of New Art, Detroit. Since completing her MFA at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, McCormick has taught photography, printmaking, and book arts. An independent curator and writer, she has served as Exhibition Coordinator and Managing Editor at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography since January 2000.