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It is not apparent that the walls of this big room are covered with tiny rooms, minute spaces which have gravitated to the edge of this interior, forming minor intrusions and protrusions, gentle spatial folds in an otherwise austere environment. Using foam-core which has been painted with navy blue enamel on one side, Kathleen Horton has constructed numerous irregular assemblages, at times reminiscent of architectural models, and placed them systematically on the gallery walls. Even the material presents another interior, a filling, a soft layer of foam which is exposed at each cut edge.
At first sighting, these miniature constructions belie their three-dimensionality. They are pictorial, and at times reflective due to the glare of hard light on the enamel surface more like facades than constructions. The eye searches for a logic, a key which is not readily available and by which one can enter Kathleen Horton's Project for Interior. Perception vacillates between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, surface and depth, sameness and difference, interior and exterior, dark and light.
Through this vacillation multiple spatialities and temporalities fragment, revealing a paradox: the work's repetitive nature and its ostensibly structural uniformity seem to promise a narrative. However, narrative, as Susan Stewart explains is 'about' closure, a given origin and completion, a particular set of boundaries within which it unravels. For Susan Stewart, 'the privileging of origin… is particularly manifested in the ambivalent status of the quotation, for the quotation lends both integrity and limit to the utterance.'1 Perhaps there is really only one assemblage - an original or authentic work - and the remainder are its variations, tracings or quotations. Or as Gail Hastings has suggested, this one might be the