Plotnikoff and Pullen force the incidental to redefine the notion and meaning of "chance occurrence." Coincidences happen all the time, some resonating more than others. Picking up the phone at the exact time the per­son you are calling calls you is a peculiar occurrence that is hard to ignore, while seeing the same stranger in two unre­lated places in one day is both easy to miss and dismiss. Coincidences occur naturally, but what happens when you start looking for them? Artists Sandy Plotnikoff and Lucy Pullen shift the casual, accidental nature of coincidence by increasing the likelihood of occurrence. They stack the deck, so to speak, with colour. For Plotnikoff, noticing that the phone matches his red gloves, and the chair next to the phone matches his mint green sweater constitutes coinci­dence, while Pullen supplies the material of coincidence. As part of an ongoing series, Coordinator, Plotnikoff takes self-portraits of himself stiffly posed next to buildings, signs, vehicles or some element that matches the colour of his hooded sweatshirt.' Plotnikoff's collection of well over 200 thrift store hoodies improves the probability of incidental, yet colour-coordinated, occurrences. In 1997, for Chance Operation with Blue Buttons, Pullen offered visitors an end­less supply of round blue pin-on buttons.' An opportunity for contact was created when people took and wore the free buttons outside the gallery, with chance meetings of those sporting buttons occurring beyond the exhibition's dura­tion.

Plotnikoff and Pullen force the incidental to redefine the notion and meaning of "chance occurrence."They amplify probability factors by simultaneously limiting and multiply­ing the variables. Plotnikoff isn't limited to one colour in particular, but to colour in general. Pullen formalizes a common experience beyond the gallery exhibition with a take-away object. They orchestrate coincidence in their col­laborative practice as well. Their collaboration is more than the collision of two solitary practices; it is an intentional reaction to each other's work. Bun Bun, 1994, an intervention by Plotnikoff, signifies the beginning of their collaboration. In Kelowna, British Columbia, Plotnikoff scattered ten thousand buns, collect­ed from a bakery garbage bin, in a park the morning before a local radio station held their annual Easter egg hunt. Labels with the words "'bun bun" were pinned to each of the buns. Complaints made to police regarding the bun inva­sion incited a run of press in local papers. Eventually, the "quirky" story got picked up by the associated press and made provincial papers across Canada and the United States. One paper ran the headline "Cops Hunt Bun Wacko" and called the unknown suspect "an obviously sick and demented person."

After meeting Plotnikoff and hearing about Bun Bun, Pullen produced Eat Your Words. She baked trays of sugar cookies in the shape of the word "words" then packaged them to simulate a grocery store item, going so far as to fabricate a Sobey's barcode. She placed them in the cookie displays of five supermarkets. Again, daily papers hyped the event with headlines like "Who Cooked These Up?", and by printing photographs of Pullen's cookies in a Ziploc bag marked "Evidence" next to a frowning police constable. Bun Bun and Eat Your Words resemble each other in that they are a literal play on a word. Even though Plotnikoff did not intentionally seek "bad" press, he and Pullen recog­nized it as central to the project. The press offered the work a life beyond the park, documenting the project in a way the artist couldn't. Eal Your Words offered them both a way to work through what was an unforeseen element of the earli­er piece. Pullen didn't call the press, but she did conscious­ly look for representation by bringing the work into a super­market and disrupting the controlled system of buying and selling. The social nature of the artists' practice goes beyond responding to one another's work-they intentionally build ideas. Pullen takes the spontaneous gesture of lines drawn freehand and transforms them into a signature pattern. The design is obviously a repeated freehand drawing but she manufactures it into wallpaper and formalizes it as a print. Plotnikoff takes the essence of a line and brings it into the pages of The Face, a British lifestyle magazine. Starting with the cover and ending on the back page, he draws a connecting line in black marker under the nose of every face in the magazine. Plotnikoff and Pullen's separate works fuse into a corresponding series that not only follow each other in time and place, but also come together to address a central concern.

Both artists' work converges on the reproducibility of a simple line, taking it across a variety of surfaces. Carrying the formal concerns of the line through various spaces, Pullen installs her wallpaper in the offices of Ernst & Young and Plotnikoff brings the line into the pages of a popular magazine. The work lingers, but not necessarily through a simple remounting of the same work. Instead, they search for innovative ways to extend formal and conceptual aspects of individual works. Bookworks play an important role in addressing this con­cern and remain a tangible way to distribute their work. In 1998, the pair documented themselves in a thrift store, try­ing on an assortment of multicolored clothes all at once. They layer themselves in turtlenecks, absurdly squeezing into eight at a time. In another photograph, they pile on a stack of brightly coloured baseball caps and weigh them­selves down with bulky sweatshirts and jackets. Under the auspices of an Art Metropole Little Cockroach Press pub­lishing project, they consolidated the snapshots in a book­work.'The artists also print bookworks in relation to larger projects, like Superballs (1997), where they let 2,500 multi­coloured superballs live up to their name by dropping them from the roof of a seven-storey building.

As opposed to reinventing old work or simply documenting it, they develop new ventures out of a familiar language. This process embodies the way they will collaborate for an upcoming exhibition at the Helen Pitt Gallery in Vancouver. For one aspect of the show, Plotnikoff will travel to meet Pullen in Philadelphia, where she is currently studying, with a shoebox of 4" x 6" photographs. Pullen will contribute her own collection of snapshots to combine their separate archives in an overall composition based on colour, form, and meaning. They plan to adapt source material and con­tent of current and earlier works to emphasize the nature of their exchange, beginning with the promotional poster, which will be a collage of the press clippings from Bun Bun and Eat Your Words.

Even though many works exist independently, Plotnikoff and Pullen bring them together as something larger and more comprehensive. A work which previously carried only one of their names is incorporated into one cohesive installation, leaving a purposeful vagueness as to who has made what. Meeting one another had an immediate impact on Plotnikoff's and Pullen's separate practices. However, they didn't come together in full-fledged collaboration until three years after that meeting, with Superballs. Pullen refers to Superballs as a metaphor for their collaborative practice: "bouncing ideas back and forth between us over years, months, days, hours, minutes."The pair's collabora­tive work is a reaction to the singular. It takes them out of their solitary practices and offers up a platform to acknowl­edge the value of their exchange. The exhibition at Helen Pitt allows for an opportunity to formalize the ephemeral nature of this unique collaboration, showing a ceaseless connection between individual works. Like the single super­balls left to linger and to compel on the streets of Halifax, Plotnikoff and Pullen's individual production references a larger whole.

Jenifer Papararo