Dexter Barker-Glenn
Stop Request
2021
Aluminum, rubber coated wire
Dimensions variable
Artist statement
Drawing from the Victorian domestic bell pull and the bus pull cord, Stop Request depicts a body enmeshed within the systems it wants to escape. Within this body, mechanical connections of bells and wires are as ingrained as Pavlovian connections between the smell of an orange and the salivating mouth. Bell pulls utilize differently tuned bells to allow their user to call servants to particular rooms. Through this mechanism, the body is extended throughout the house and power can be used without human contact. The bus pull cord allows a passenger to communicate to their driver that the vehicle is no longer going in a desired direction, and that they would like to get off. This installation connects these mediums of communication in an imaginative exercise to reflect on the ways power shapes and is shaped by bodies.
Artist’s biography
Dexter Barker-Glenn is a multidisciplinary artist based in the unceded territory of Tiohti:àke (Montreal) and Tkaronto (Toronto) who has recently completed his undergraduate degree in Studio Arts with a minor in Computer Science at Concordia University. Barker-Glenn is interested in the products of intersecting desires, offering objects stuck between multiple functions. Often contrasting industrial and handmade production, his work questions the limits of the personal and the intimate. Among other exhibitions, Dexter has shown work at Bradley Ertaskiran, Project Casa, and Livart in Montreal and The Plumb in Toronto.
