(Visit the Cagibi website at: http://www.lecagibi.ca/art)

Marginalia is defined as annotations on the pages of printed and published texts or the embellishments of illuminated manuscripts. This exhibit expands the term to include a third definition, the images and non images which inhabit the margins of a note taker's page. The concept for this exhibition sprung from a fascination with explicit an implicit connections between images and notations as well as between notations and spontaneous pictorial additions. It explores the relationship between the subject of attention and the constant commentary of a personal stream of consciousness that cannot be shut off. The margins of the page reflect the margins of consciousness, a flickering of the corner of the eye just beyond the object of concentration.

Marginalia enlists the varied talents of Toronto Artist Emily Cook, Ottawa Artist Sarah Hallman and Montreal artists Richard Rossetto and Bettina Forget. Bettina Forget's series “The Weather Diaries” uses both subtle tonal variations and hand written notations to journal day to day environmental conditions. Both of these recording methods employ codes likely unfamiliar to the viewer. Neither the meteorological symbols, old Germanic script or delicate hues of water colour convey a readily available message. We are left to imagine the contents of a foreign lexicon, to unravel the artist's personal formal language and to attempt to glean the relationship between the two. Ottawa artist, Sarah Hallman's work evokes an atmosphere of day dream with the distinct flavour of a childhood work book. Animals, some of them pets and some of them woodland creatures, make appearances. Loosely inscribed fauna and various insignia amble about their natural habitat, the familiar red and blue lines of ruled note paper.(Check out Sarah's Music at http://www.myspace.com/sarahhallman) 

In the work of Richard Rossetto and Emily Cook sinuous lines and biomorphic forms have taken over the picture plane entirely. In Rossetto's automatic drawing, the half conscious and half seen have become the main event. Figures and alphabetical characters emerge from tangled forests of blind contour. Some of his drawings remaining largely abstract while others unfurl into dim dream like landscapes. In Cook's work another tool favoured by the Surrealists to plumb the depths of the unconscious is employed. Her pulp paper paintings tell tales of Greek mythology. A book and paper maker, Cook is well versed in the relationship between images and text, but also the very stuff of which the page is composed. Fibres of flax and hemp take on the quality of shapes in the clouds and the viewer becomes a sky gazer, wondering if they have gleaned the image's true identity, or projected their own imaginings.