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Harold Coego
Transactions of the Eye
January 11 to February 16, 2008
The works in this exhibition reflect Harold Coego's rediscovery of himself as a visual artist after a long engagement in the worlds of stage and screen. This series of drawings and collage-derived monetary currency bridges the artist's two home countries-Cuba, where historical and cultural heroes (perfect human beings trapped in their own historical circumstances) surrounded him, and Canada where new characters and new human interactions shape a different life. Most of the currency "characters" came to the artist in a "pure" way, as a child growing up in Cuba. Now, thirty years later, Coego gives those characters the chance to break through their own historical frame and wander free in an abstract world of ink and irony where they have become a commodity. The resulting images are representations of the artist's imagination through an abstract cinematographic kaleidoscope-a twisted photocopy of reality, or perhaps more like a dream where something is always out of place.