Withdrawing Room is a site-specific performance-based installation situated somewhere in-between what is familiar yet unknowable, blurring the possibility of an absolute inside or out, sameness or difference, and public or private. Using wallpaper and textile of a co-ordinating pattern, a corridor within City Hall is transformed from a transient place into a staged domestic setting. The space is the context for a nine day performance that examines the notion of camouflage - the perpetual state of a body being visible and invisible simultaneously. Wearing a business suit of the same pattern, I withdraw to and from the space that is designated as home, underlining and undermining the intent of the architectural space and social etiquette inherent to the site.
David Grenier lives in Toronto and works primarily in drawing-based installations and performances. Interested in the intersections between art and architecture and notions of public and private, his work acts as a renovation of sorts, a process of reordering space and of taking place. He has been exhibiting professionally since 1996.