Amherst Daily News: Artist making statement with bicycle repair

Michael Flaherty is not your average cross-Canada traveller. Not only is he bicyling from coast to coast, but he is also fixing bicycles along the way encouraging to ride more often and lessen their dependence on automobiles. Flaherty will stop at Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre in Sackville from Sept. 4 to 10 and will tuning up bicycles while he’s here. The Regina artist has stopped at a number of galleries to exhibit The Bicycle Rehabilitation Project.

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.

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 and so on 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.

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.