A Babel of Desire
Offset print on velum
27.5 x 42.5 cm (11 x 17in)
1996

A Babel of Desire was the end "product" of a year long group project entitled "Immixtion-Sites of Engagement" held at the artist-run DAREdare Gallery in Montreal. A group of about 15 artists met once a month to discuss issues centred around the "implication of the artist in the community".

The idea was for each of us to choose a group in the community at large, interact with that group and create a work with that group's participation.

The concept of community was left wide open and so I chose the on-line telephone dating community. It struck me that this group of people, of which I was a member at the time for obvious reasons, constituted a community by any definition (see Community in panel 2 above). I thought it constitued a very contemporary form of community mediated as it was by technology and largely fragmented and individualized, as many communities have become.

The result is the collection of four pages above which speak both to the longings of the community involved and to some of the concepts and attitudes informing the project.

The work was later published in 2001 as a pull-out poem in the Montreal literary magazine Matrix for its 25th anniversary issue (58).