Kristi Malakoff Butterflies

Gary Michael Dault's Globe & Mail review ("A gorgeous moment of collective pause") of Kristi Malakoff's Minutiae exhibit at LE Gallery in 2006 was my first introduction to this artist's work. I'm a sucker for modular art and for artists who have a touch of OCD. When I saw her Butterflies installation in a Toronto Queen Street West store I was thrilled to finally see her work in person. The Butterfly installation appears to be a subset of her Swarm installation from the LE show. Malakoff photocopied the butterflies from zoology texts onto sheets of transparent plastic, possibly overhead transparency sheets, and then armed with a pair of scissors, she cut out each one. The Swarm installation had 6,000 butterflies-- that's a lot of cutting.