“Maggs’s serial works promote internal
comparisons, whether studious or meditative; they
occupy the mind and refresh it. A book … that we
should normally apprehend diachronically is
represented synchronically, resulting in a first
impression of complexity and mutability in which
we are invited to play a part.”
– Martha Langford, Arnaud Maggs Nomenclature, The
Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2006.

Contamination shows pages of a water damaged
ledger from the 1905 Yukon Gold Rush. The factual
transactions recorded in the book have been
bypassed in favour of showing a series of mould
formations that have migrated from page to page
through the unused portion of the book. The soft
tainted pages and the bleeding pink ink are
ghostlike traces, phantoms of a cruel history,
motivated largely by dreams of wealth. The spores
are the animating principle of this work. The book
itself is the host, the ground upon which these
spores dance. As we approach the last pages of the
book, we see the mould subsiding, gradually
disappearing, leaving us with but a memory of what
went before. The contaminated pages silently speak
of a forgotten epoch of unfulfilled desires and
delusional dreams.