Work, management, economics, politics, control systems, state-of-the-art technologies, and the culture industry are the many “worlds” that Prix Marcel Duchamp winning artist Julien Prévieux’s activities interrogate. The methods of recording movement and gesture developed over the last century and a half led to aesthetic results that recall the formal explorations of modernist art. Playing on this resemblance, Julien Prévieux transforms these records—originally produced for the sake of productivity, profit or surveillance—into pure form. Using map-making, dance, theatre, sculpture, video, and drawing, his work appropriates the vocabulary, mechanisms, and modus operandi of the sectors by which it is informed to highlight their dogmas and excesses. In this solo exhibition presented across both galleries, Prévieux highlights each mechanism’s potential for play, creativity, productivity, and counter-productivity.

In the Blackwood Gallery, The Elements of Influence (and a Ghost) brings together four projects: Patterns of Life (2015), which explores the history of the technological capture of human movement from George Demenÿ’s chronophotography to the “activity-based intelligence” generated by the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; What Shall We Do Next? (2014), a video work on patented and copyrighted gestures such as Apple’s “slide-to unlock” movement; Drawing Workshop – B.A.C. of 14th district of Paris (2011–2015), drawings of crime maps made by Paris police officers; and Forget the Money (2011 & 2017),an installation centered around Bernie Madoff’s personal library with their premonitory titles.

The Elements of Influence (Modulation) (2017) translates these four works by tracking the eye-movements of viewers and reproducing them in wool on the walls of the e|gallery as an echo or ghostly trace. The exhibition in the Blackwood is therefore also visible in the e|gallery as a translation or transformation made by the vision of the local community at the University of Toronto Mississauga.