ANGELL GALLERY is pleased to present the fifth solo show by gallery artist Jakub DolejÅ¡, How I Make Things. The exhibition will run from August 26 to September 25 in the East Gallery. An opening night reception will be held on Thursday, August 26 from 6 – 9pm. In his previous, mostly photo-based practice, Jakub Dolejs’ research often involved a complex process of layering of images, language games, and juxtaposed, unfolding systems of reference. The works which would result were attractively intelligent in their visual appeal, as well as multi-faceted and bitingly clever. He aimed to unpeel and present the ambiguities of representation, and the ontological differences between images and objects, ideas and actions. In doing so he noted that although these things go together necessarily, there is yet a basic existential separation between the phenomena, a slippage that occurs within the zone of meaning we attribute to artists’ work, on the basis of our sense of their intentions and choices. Dolejs was at pains to make explicit the possibility that we may be, in effect, always already wrong in this, or at least, wrong to be confident that we can understand where an artwork “stands”. In his new body of three-dimensional works he has responded to the internal logic of his process and produced its next natural step, turning to sculpture to further his investigations into this aesthetic and intellectual territory. By removing the gap between object and viewer that the photograph imposed, he has revealed not only that the language of images and that of objects overlap, but that they can be seen as indistinguishable. The sculptures manifest a quality of distance, a sense of being hidden in plain sight; somehow the constructing hand of the artist has acted – even with respect to Dolejs himself – as a sort of cloaking device, showing and concealing at once, and thus paralleling that quality of photography he uses to such effect in his other projects. Moreover, also implied is the comprehensive possibility that our larger reality itself can be construed as a mode of photography, a series; in that it, like art, is theoretically structured like and as a language. His carefully built sculptural works revel in their three-dimensionality, and in their “thing-ness”; and at the same time continually bring forward, as a result of conceptual, installation and of craft-based criteria, the idea that it is the indexical perspective of his art that acts as both its abstract center and its shifting circumference. Jakub Dolejs – Jakub received his MFA in painting at Academy of Art Design & Architecture in Prague in 1998 and by 2007 had work purchased by the National Gallery of Canada. Both historical & contemporary in reference, his work combines photography and painting to question our perceived reality of both. Escape to West Germany and Caspar David Friedrich were shown at The National Gallery of Canada as well as the Vancouver Art Gallery in a group show called Acting the Part: Photography as Theatre. He has exhibited in solo shows across Canada and his work has been shown at art fairs in London, New York, Miami. Jakub Dolejs lives and works in London, United Kingdom.