ROB KOVITZ | ICE FISHING IN GIMLI
SATURDAY 01 JULY 2006 – SATURDAY 12 AUGUST 2006

OPENING RECEPTION | FRIDAY 30 JUNE 2006, search 8:00PM – 11:00PM

Photo credit: Peter MacCallum

“Imagine being outside time. That the past and future are revolving around you, and you cannot place yourself properly. That your body, your receptacle, has been numbed free of history. Because I feel this way, I can see clearly when and where the evil started ”
Richard Zimmler, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

Ice Fishing in Gimli is a multi-volume image/text bookwork-in-progress by Winnipeg artist/writer Rob Kovitz. Set in an enigmatic town on a large, frozen lake in the middle of Manitoba, it’s an epic, quixotic saga of desire, ambition, weather and landscape; of drownings, freezings, murder and cannibalism; of alien architectures, bizarre conveyances, enigmatic soothsayers and esoteric ice-fishing techniques; of the search for enlightenment, the poignancy of fish-flies and the indeterminacy of maps; of Gimli-born Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stephanson and prairie writer and double-agent Frederick Philip Grove; of boredom, failure, madness, nothingness, unrequited love, best-laid plans, the Wandering Jew, the House of Squid and mysterious things that may or may not be hidden beneath flat, frozen surfaces, to name a few things.

Evocative, wry, enigmatic, disquietinga densely built dream association in the guise of the meticulously documented and verifiablesix years in the making and still not finishedthis is a book unlike any you’ve ever read before, with lots of pictures for when you get bored. So cast your hook and hold your breathyou never know what will get dragged up in Ice Fishing in Gimli. Multiple copies of the second progress edition of Ice Fishing in Gimli will be available for reading in the gallery space, along with comfortable chairs.


ROB KOVITZ
creates bookworks and web projects that consist of texts and images he collects from various sources and recombines through a meticulous but highly subjective process of editing, ordering and juxtaposition, a kind of conceptual montage. Since 1992 he has published four bookworks, including Pig City Model Farm (Princeton Architectural Press) andRoom Behavior (Insomniac Press), various short projects in magazines, and online projects at www.treyf.com. A graduate of the University of Waterloo School of Architecture and a former resident of Toronto, he currently lives in Winnipeg because of its very interesting weather.