Bruno Billio
6 February – 5 May 2008
Bruno Billio’s artistic practice is informed by the active displacement and staging of the found object, a contemporary strategy with a historically established lineage. The everyday is reinterpreted through its spatial and contextual re-appropriation by the artist, who presents himself as proxy as both interventionist and inventor. By defamiliarizing the everyday object, Billio effectively reinterprets the material and social valence of the object in space. Whether it’s the object’s utility or physical context that his installations throw into question, Billio forces the viewer to confront the fragility of material determinism and the utilitarian dictates of the familiar commodity. The conventional use of the commodity is literally evacuated when sculpturally monumentalizes as installation. Thus, Billio’s practice is at once an emptying of meaning and a renewal of the proscribed object.
At once an installation artist, a sculptor, and a designer, Bruno Billio creates challenging works informed by his command of each of these practices. The artist is currently living and working in Toronto, and has been the artist-in-residence at the Gladstone Hotel (Toronto) for the past few years. He has exhibited internationally in Milan, London, Miami, New York, and Los Angeles.