Struts prepares for Michael's arrival

Michael will be giving an artist's talk at Struts on Monday, September 10 at 8pm. He will be discussing the The Bicycle Rehabilitation Project and his experiences biking across Canada and America. All welcome!
date change for Michael's artist talk to Tuesday, September 11 at 8pm

Regina artist Michael Flaherty has been on the road since early this summer bicycling from Victoria, British Columbia on his way to St. John’s, Newfoundland. Along the way he has stopped at a number of galleries to exhibit The Bicycle Rehabilitation Project. The project has been supported by the Saskatchewan Arts Board and by galleries along the road and now including Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre.

What important issues is art capable of dealing with today? How can art be truly activist without being mere commentary? The Bicycle Rehabilitation Project was created in direct response to such questions.

Several times in the past Flaherty have contextualized his interest in bicycles as an artistic practice, however his fundamental desire to ride a bicycle is not so complicated. Throughout his adult life he has refused to operate automobiles on the basis that they contribute more than their share to the addiction to fuel and energy consumption that threatens the world and our delicately balanced civilization. Global climate change, conflict over dwindling resources, and outrageous levels of illness caused by physical inactivity are just a few of the most desperate concerns exacerbated by dependence upon automobiles for transport and recreation. Because the effect of each individual automobile and each individual driver is so perceptible, the impact of not driving is one of the strongest that a person can make.

A great number of the bicycles in use today operate below their optimum capabilities. This can take many forms - a missing reflector, a rusty chain, weak braking power, etc. - and the results can range from a ride that is merely inconvenient to one that is uncomfortable, impractical or downright dangerous. More important is the concession that this signifies that bicycling is merely a trivial afterthought of the necessity of travel unworthy of the virtues of care and maintenance. Michael Flaherty seeks to convey the opposite, that bicycling can be a powerful symbolic activity capable of much more and that caring for each single bicycle amounts to caring for the environment and interpersonal relationships.

The crucial conceptual components of this project are the relationships being built through the activity of repairing bicycles. These are numerous: he will provide the service for free, and people will be free to use it or not; the project will create a forum on the issues represented by automobiles and mass-consumption; the sticker with which I will "sign" the repaired bicycles is a physical relationship between the rehabilitator and the participant, representing a shared opinion on the issues; a network of relationships will be formed between the rehabilitator and the viewers and among viewers who meet in the gallery or viewers who identify each other through the sticker/signature.

Bicycling is not, of course, a magical cure-all for the energy and pollution problems that plague our society. It is still dependent upon the questionable practice of mass-production, and bicycles themselves are subject to the conflicts delineated by the quest for commodity, wealth and status. Despite its imperfection, it is, at the very least, a workable compromise - a negotiable middle road between the impossibility of navigating today's car-oriented landscape on foot and the intolerable option of burning gasoline just to get to the grocery store. But this project is less about the impossible idea of utopia than it is about the possibility of making a dystopic reality just a little bit better. The title of the exhibition - The Bicycle Rehabilitation Project - speaks not only of the practice of repairing bicycles, but also of the restorative and relational powers that bicycles provide for participants in the project.

Michael Flaherty and The Bicycle Rehabilitation Project will be at 7 Lorne Street at Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre from September 4- 12. For more information see http://www.bicyclerehabilitationproject.com