Andrea Slavik at the Workers Art & Heritage Centre

Andrea Slavik's strikingly sparse installation The Things We Cannot Live Without triggers a subconscious uneasiness even before its meaning is revealed. The Victorian gallery of the Workers Arts & Heritage Centre is moodily lit and spanned by an oppressive black net that casts shadows across the walls and sags low enough at its centre to brush incautious heads and breathe down the back of one's neck. This setting appears at odds with the bright QR codes arrayed on the walls, each a friendly burst of inviting colour. Only by scanning the codes with one's smartphone – or an iPad Mini available from reception – does the narrative behind that net unravel itself in links to news stories of the suicides that have plagued Chinese factories where Apple and other manufacturers produce their popular consumer technologies.



Andrea Slavik, The Things We Cannot Live Without, installation view

The staggering human cost of our insatiable appetite for gadgets is delivered with a complicit punch to the gut. By making the QR code the sole means of gleaning the work's meaning, Slavik emphasizes the viewer's dependency on the devices that have wrought these miserable labour conditions. For those like myself who enter the gallery with our iPhones at the ready, the personal dimension is immediate and damning. The net overhead – not so much a metaphor as an exact replica of the suicide prevention barriers mounted outside Foxconn factories – looms heavier still. Slavik has succeeded where much political art falls flat by camouflaging an activist heart in a muted space for engagement and eliciting a reflection that demands knowledge before action, and rightfully so.


Workers Arts & Heritage Centre: http://www.wahc-museum.ca/
Andrea Slavik: The Things We Cannot Live Without continues until August 30.


Stephanie Vegh is a Hamilton-based visual artist and writer whose criticism has appeared in Scotland's Map Magazine, Canadian Art, C Magazine, and Hamilton Arts & Letters, in addition to her own blog. Her drawings and installations have shown most recently at the upArt Contemporary Art Fair and Nathaniel Hughson Gallery in Hamilton. She is the Executive Director of the Hamilton Arts Council and a member of the Curatorial Committee for Hamilton's annual Supercrawl. She is also Akimblog's Hamilton correspondent and can be followed @Stephanie_Vegh on Twitter.