Exhibition Essay: Juan Ortiz-Apuy’s La Guaria Morada (2018). Truck Gallery, Calgary.
My partner’s mother Carol keeps 20 orchids in her Jimtown, Nova Scotia home. They’re potted with bark to keep the roots aerated, and placed in front of North-facing windows for cold snaps to set the bloom. With her sisters, Carol conspires to protect the orchids from critters, pets, and the moody Atlantic weather. The Los Angeles flower district occupies a few blocks along 7th St. Big orchid wholesalers share the area with a homeless population stretching south from Skid Row. Some 17,000 people live out of tents amidst the flower stocks. I haven’t found estimates of the orchid population there, but I like to think it’s around 17,000 – one per resident.
To these images of beauty and vulnerability, add Juan Ortiz-Apuy’s La Guaria Morada. Orchid plants hang 56” off the ground, at the standard height for museum displays. They are spliced to hunks of bark and suspended by airplane wire against “evening blue” walls. Ortiz-Apuy is fond of factory paint names, and the atmospheres they evoke. But the plants are indoors, hidden away from the sky, like the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Evocation is slippery. These orchids are not Jimtown orchids, or Skid Row orchids, but they’re close. As the national flower, purple orchids enjoy great visibility in Costa Rica, but here they’re in hiding, or waiting, or triage. This is not their natural habitat, but it’s close. Humidifiers and dehumidifiers simulate a tropical garden in the wrong place and out of season. For Ortiz-Apuy, the plants are “hustling” in Calgary.
They will grow slowly here, or one imagines - perpetually. Development in Costa Rica is a lot like this too - perpetual, precarious, and aimed at a curated beauty. Ortiz-Apuy moved from Costa Rica to Montreal in 2003 and has travelled back only twice since. After ten, nearly uninterrupted years away, he wished with this work to make a touristic homage to his country of origin. The view of La Guaria Morada is a visitor’s view, but collaged together, with conspicuous joints. In much of Ortiz-Apuy’s work, collage is a method. He keeps a meticulously indexed library of National Geographic issues and Ikea catalogues at the studio. La Guaria Morada mingles the visual languages of documentary photography and advertising, in its clinical arrangement of plants, and colour-coordinated humidifiers. Costa Rica is cast here as an idea, laid open to innocent curiosity and to consumer choice.
La Guaria Morada’s elements function as interior signs of a partially-recalled tropical outside. But what of this outside, and of its history? Costa Rica is carefully arranged to show or conceal its cracks as needed. Roads through the Monteverde rainforest are deliberately left unmaintained by the parks service to sustain an air of wilderness for eco-tourists. Elsewhere, private resorts have displaced Indigenous and farming communities. Costa Rica’s recent economic history, or ‘development’ follows on decades of World Bank-mediated, US investment and meddling in the region to combat socialism, and extract fruit, rubber, and oil for international markets. La Guaria Morada’s delicate balance, between hung flowers, and the inputs and outputs of humming climate-control appliances is a striking metaphor for the phenomena of resource preservation and extraction in Latin America, and beyond in the Global South.
Ortiz-Apuy’s sculptural language owes a debt to the readymade. In The Lovers: Hunter and Kenmore (2013), he joined a humidifier and dehumidifier at the lips, as it were, in a pose of absurd co-dependence. With this earlier work, Ortiz-Apuy rewrites the Dadaist’s script for the readymade as a cyborg romance in a department store. Through Ortiz-Apuy’s art we re-read the cool, spare industrial parts aesthetic of the readymade in relation to absented people. His response to Dada offers an abstracted social realism for our times, and for this place. Just as La Guaria Morada points outward to an increasingly uncertain planetary horizon, the work’s association of care, Sisyphean labour, and beauty is also site-specific, and in dialogue with the fragile ecosystem of artist-run culture. In all this, Ortiz-Apuy encourages us to pause on the repeated coupling of beauty and vulnerability, from Monteverde, to Jimtown and LA, to Truck’s temporary home for a few purple orchids.
By Tammer El-Sheikh
Tammer El-Sheikh is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia. He received his PhD from McGill University in 2013 for his work on the reception of Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said within the discipline of Art History. Since then, his teaching and writing have focused on contemporary art and identity politics. His scholarly writing has appeared in the periodicals ARTMargins and Arab Studies Journal, and most recently in the anthology edited by Martha Langford and titled Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World (MQUP, 2017). His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, Parachute, C Magazine and ETC Magazine. He is the Montreal correspondent for Akimbo.
Friday, March 23, 2018
Saturday, January 20, 2018
ESSAY: Reservoir
Exhibition Essay: Chapter I: A monument to tears
She only cried once, but her tears birthed a river. And they stained her face for the rest of time, or at least as long as the particulate matter of a stone stays molecularly bound together. Her river was a tributary to a larger one, and that one: a benefactor to the salty ocean.
She was a canary in a coal mine, or rather, its antithesis. Canaries cease their song in the presence of carbon monoxide (CO) or methane (CH4) or an excess of ethylene (C2H4). When the music ends: time to leave. These alkanes are deadly. But, in that sweet spot of just enough but not too much, they compelled her songs, her sad prophesies. The gaseous plumes? Inhabiting her mind, as a god might. Eddies and she their epicenter.
She had the voice of a ghost, not an angel, emanating from the cave of her chest, out into the cave of her workplace, where it bounced off the wet, cold, stone walls, returning to the caves of her ears as something other than what left her mouth. When she was alone, when she was lost in the damp darkness—the kind that settles into your bones and sinews and becomes part of your anatomy—her voice was her only companion. Although her sounds would run away from her, in the cave, they always returned, wiser, with all manner of textures accrued throughout their journey. She would stop her singing for a time, and wait for her reverberations to come home, back to her. She was never really alone.
Then: another voice, a reverberation from the dark. Sounds mingling with hers. A call back, a response. From who? She would never see. She could only hear their nuclear fusion: a synthesis of the immaterial vibrations into something more dense. A magic. A harmony.
They sang perennially, preternaturally: time ceased to exist. Then a clamor, a crash, which summoned their fleshy bodies back to the cave. But they had one last perfect consonance. With it: her tears.
A smell can conjure a memory, but a sound can excavate something buried deeper in the neural fabric of the brain. Something that arouses every hair follicle, commands trembles down the notches of a spine. Sound is an archeology of feeling.
She only cried once, but she never stopped. Her tears birthed a river, a tributary to a larger one, and that one: a benefactor to the salty ocean. She relinquished every ounce of water, and turned to stone. A reprieve from her nameless fate. Now: she’ll be known forever.
We drink from her reservoir. She sustains us all. A monument to tears.
It is such a secret place, the land of tears.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Here too we find a virtue somehow rewarded,
Tears in the nature of things, hearts touched by human transience
- Virgil
Monument (mänyəmən), noun
A lasting evidence, reminder, or example of someone
or something notable or great
She only cried once, but her tears birthed a river. And they stained her face for the rest of time, or at least as long as the particulate matter of a stone stays molecularly bound together. Her river was a tributary to a larger one, and that one: a benefactor to the salty ocean.
She didn’t have a name. Well, at one point she did, but as part and parcel of her sacred obligations, she was required to relinquish it. Thereafter, she was known only as the Oracle. Or sometimes the Sybil, or other times still: the Pythia. Nomenclature in the hands of patriarchy is a science of oppression; those names were only indicative of a category, a box for many—an occupation or a blessing or a curse, depending on how you look at it—and not a particular human with a unique permutation of 20,000 or so combinations of cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine, a singular arrangement of seven billion billion billion atoms. There were 100 trillion neural synapses in her brain, greater than the number of galaxies in the universe. Her mind was a cosmos. But she didn’t have a name.
Every day before sunrise, she was awoken by a Keeper, bathed—in the purest of water, of course—and then led down. Down, down, down, down. Into her subterranean throne room: Queen of the foul gases that leaked through the cracks of her cavernous, cold castle, gases that swirled around her face, then her respiratory system. They coursed through her blood—O Negative, O, sweet priestess—creating unusual and novel new highways in her neural circuitry. She had visions. She was the Oracle of Delphi.
She was a canary in a coal mine, or rather, its antithesis. Canaries cease their song in the presence of carbon monoxide (CO) or methane (CH4) or an excess of ethylene (C2H4). When the music ends: time to leave. These alkanes are deadly. But, in that sweet spot of just enough but not too much, they compelled her songs, her sad prophesies. The gaseous plumes? Inhabiting her mind, as a god might. Eddies and she their epicenter.
She had the voice of a ghost, not an angel, emanating from the cave of her chest, out into the cave of her workplace, where it bounced off the wet, cold, stone walls, returning to the caves of her ears as something other than what left her mouth. When she was alone, when she was lost in the damp darkness—the kind that settles into your bones and sinews and becomes part of your anatomy—her voice was her only companion. Although her sounds would run away from her, in the cave, they always returned, wiser, with all manner of textures accrued throughout their journey. She would stop her singing for a time, and wait for her reverberations to come home, back to her. She was never really alone.
Then: another voice, a reverberation from the dark. Sounds mingling with hers. A call back, a response. From who? She would never see. She could only hear their nuclear fusion: a synthesis of the immaterial vibrations into something more dense. A magic. A harmony.
They sang perennially, preternaturally: time ceased to exist. Then a clamor, a crash, which summoned their fleshy bodies back to the cave. But they had one last perfect consonance. With it: her tears.
A smell can conjure a memory, but a sound can excavate something buried deeper in the neural fabric of the brain. Something that arouses every hair follicle, commands trembles down the notches of a spine. Sound is an archeology of feeling.
She only cried once, but she never stopped. Her tears birthed a river, a tributary to a larger one, and that one: a benefactor to the salty ocean. She relinquished every ounce of water, and turned to stone. A reprieve from her nameless fate. Now: she’ll be known forever.
We drink from her reservoir. She sustains us all. A monument to tears.
By Natasha Chaykowski
Natasha Chaykowski is a researcher, writer, and curator, based in Wichispa Oyade (Calgary, Alberta) on Treaty 7 Territory. Currently, she is the Director of Untitled Art Society.
Natasha Chaykowski is a researcher, writer, and curator, based in Wichispa Oyade (Calgary, Alberta) on Treaty 7 Territory. Currently, she is the Director of Untitled Art Society.
ESSAY: Duet
Exhibition Essay: Anthems Un/sung
William Robinson’s Duet is a piece of music created from the American and Canadian national anthems, played between speakers and at a distance from each other, like two fence posts facing off in a borderland. A compositional booklet shows the graphic breakdown of the composition, and if you like, you can follow along. The original scores for “O Canada” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” are treated first as physical objects, on which Robinson has drawn in order to change their patterning, resulting in mutations of sound, rhythm, and pitch. The subsequent score is sung a cappella, recorded, and further digitally manipulated: stretched, distorted, doubled, augmented, and peppered with electronic effects. In their final recording the anthems are still recognizable, and while skeletons and shadows of their former selves, maintain consistent ‘known-ness’ and inherent power over the listener. A powerful echo, which, coupled with their disruption and reconfiguration in the gallery, interrupts a clear notion of the anthemic and calls into mind the anthem as a potential site of protest.
A common thread in his practice, it was perhaps not surprising that Robinson chose to examine and play with the musical scores of the national anthems of Canada and the United States. After a lifetime in Canada, the last 17 years in Halifax, Robinson moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey to attend Rutgers University for his MFA. As I had also moved from Canada to the US in the Trump election year (I landed in New Orleans) we reflected on shared experiences over the last six months as Canadians living in the US. I wondered if Duet provided an opportunity to explore metaphors for the relationship between the neighbouring countries, or touch on the rise of recent Nationalist and White Supremacist groups and the desire to “Make America Great Again”. We talked about the roles of protest and monument in colonialism and civil rights. Robinson was curious how I felt living a few blocks from the now-removed confederate monuments in New Orleans, the Jefferson Davis monument and Gen. P.G.T Beauregard monument, which stood outside the New Orleans Museum of Art. We agreed that the empty pillars, like plinths in a gallery in the absence of old objects and in wait for new, signalled necessary change.
We also discussed Colin Kaepernick, and his use of “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a site of resistance, and it led me to reflect on Robinson’s practice more broadly and his inquiries into how monuments, buildings, and music might provide architectures for new meaning. So how might music be an architecture of protest? The most obvious example might be the protest song, whereby lyrics speak to injustices or reveal prejudices. African American blues singers protested discrimination and other issues, like Lead Belly’s “The Bourgeois Blues” or Billy Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”, and folk singers of the 50s and 60s discussed Civil Rights, the War, and unions. However, alterations can reflect all matter of opinion. In 2016, at an MLB all-star game in San Diego, one of the Canadian Tenors was fired when he changed the lyrics of the Canadian anthem and held a sign in support of “All Lives Matter”.
The interpretation of a familiar tune can also be confrontational. It can be stretched, distorted, played irreverently, played to a rhythm or slant of an underrepresented voice, or a particular genre or musicology can be employed to call notice. Jimmy Hendrix’s version of the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock, or Marvin Gaye’s 1983 NBA All-Star Game performance come to mind as versions that reflect cultures historically ‘unsung’ by the country.
This is also where I would locate Robinson’s work and the techniques he uses to create meaning, as in Duet. In the case of Kaepernick, while the music itself had not been altered, its framing as part of a traditional event with defined structural elements (standing, bowing, holding hand over heart, singing along reverently) was disrupted. In Duet, Robinson is interested in the many layers of potentiality in music—how it can be created, manipulated, and melded as a sonic art, but also, as an architecture. The anthem is its own kind of monument, and like the monuments in New Orleans, its structure can be dismantled.
By Erinn Beth Langille
Erinn Beth Langille is an award-winning writer who has published in National magazines, newspapers and journals. She has degrees from Dalhousie University, the University of Essex, and two from NSCAD, and is currently an MFA Fiction candidate at the University of New Orleans. A past participant of several residency programs, she is co-founder and creative director of The Lemon Tree House Residency in Tuscany, Italy. Her ekphrasis poem "Take Away The Bells", a commission by the artist William Robinson, was cast as a bronze plaque and displayed at the National Gallery of Canada from October 2016 to February 2017.
William Robinson’s Duet is a piece of music created from the American and Canadian national anthems, played between speakers and at a distance from each other, like two fence posts facing off in a borderland. A compositional booklet shows the graphic breakdown of the composition, and if you like, you can follow along. The original scores for “O Canada” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” are treated first as physical objects, on which Robinson has drawn in order to change their patterning, resulting in mutations of sound, rhythm, and pitch. The subsequent score is sung a cappella, recorded, and further digitally manipulated: stretched, distorted, doubled, augmented, and peppered with electronic effects. In their final recording the anthems are still recognizable, and while skeletons and shadows of their former selves, maintain consistent ‘known-ness’ and inherent power over the listener. A powerful echo, which, coupled with their disruption and reconfiguration in the gallery, interrupts a clear notion of the anthemic and calls into mind the anthem as a potential site of protest.
A common thread in his practice, it was perhaps not surprising that Robinson chose to examine and play with the musical scores of the national anthems of Canada and the United States. After a lifetime in Canada, the last 17 years in Halifax, Robinson moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey to attend Rutgers University for his MFA. As I had also moved from Canada to the US in the Trump election year (I landed in New Orleans) we reflected on shared experiences over the last six months as Canadians living in the US. I wondered if Duet provided an opportunity to explore metaphors for the relationship between the neighbouring countries, or touch on the rise of recent Nationalist and White Supremacist groups and the desire to “Make America Great Again”. We talked about the roles of protest and monument in colonialism and civil rights. Robinson was curious how I felt living a few blocks from the now-removed confederate monuments in New Orleans, the Jefferson Davis monument and Gen. P.G.T Beauregard monument, which stood outside the New Orleans Museum of Art. We agreed that the empty pillars, like plinths in a gallery in the absence of old objects and in wait for new, signalled necessary change.
We also discussed Colin Kaepernick, and his use of “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a site of resistance, and it led me to reflect on Robinson’s practice more broadly and his inquiries into how monuments, buildings, and music might provide architectures for new meaning. So how might music be an architecture of protest? The most obvious example might be the protest song, whereby lyrics speak to injustices or reveal prejudices. African American blues singers protested discrimination and other issues, like Lead Belly’s “The Bourgeois Blues” or Billy Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”, and folk singers of the 50s and 60s discussed Civil Rights, the War, and unions. However, alterations can reflect all matter of opinion. In 2016, at an MLB all-star game in San Diego, one of the Canadian Tenors was fired when he changed the lyrics of the Canadian anthem and held a sign in support of “All Lives Matter”.
The interpretation of a familiar tune can also be confrontational. It can be stretched, distorted, played irreverently, played to a rhythm or slant of an underrepresented voice, or a particular genre or musicology can be employed to call notice. Jimmy Hendrix’s version of the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock, or Marvin Gaye’s 1983 NBA All-Star Game performance come to mind as versions that reflect cultures historically ‘unsung’ by the country.
This is also where I would locate Robinson’s work and the techniques he uses to create meaning, as in Duet. In the case of Kaepernick, while the music itself had not been altered, its framing as part of a traditional event with defined structural elements (standing, bowing, holding hand over heart, singing along reverently) was disrupted. In Duet, Robinson is interested in the many layers of potentiality in music—how it can be created, manipulated, and melded as a sonic art, but also, as an architecture. The anthem is its own kind of monument, and like the monuments in New Orleans, its structure can be dismantled.
By Erinn Beth Langille
Erinn Beth Langille is an award-winning writer who has published in National magazines, newspapers and journals. She has degrees from Dalhousie University, the University of Essex, and two from NSCAD, and is currently an MFA Fiction candidate at the University of New Orleans. A past participant of several residency programs, she is co-founder and creative director of The Lemon Tree House Residency in Tuscany, Italy. Her ekphrasis poem "Take Away The Bells", a commission by the artist William Robinson, was cast as a bronze plaque and displayed at the National Gallery of Canada from October 2016 to February 2017.
Friday, October 27, 2017
ESSAY: Thumb Through
Exhibition Essay: Jade Yumang and My-O-My
“If men were angels no government would be necessary.” James Madison, Federalist No. 51.
- Case document excerpt, New Jersey v. Shapiro, 1973
In July of 2012 I bought Jade Yumang a vintage gay porn magazine on Fire Island. A pop-up shop in Cherry Grove, New York was selling high quality reprints of 1970s stud mags like Dynamo! and HONCHO, along with island knick-knacks and some belongings from the estate of Rue McClanahan (God rest her soul). I immediately thumbed through a few issues, grabbed two or three, and ran back to the house to proudly flaunt my finds and offer a few gifts. The magazine covers were reprinted in a sturdy glossy plastic laminate—no doubt a material response to the flimsy, fading paper covers of the 1970s that clung to their staples with all the commitment of a short-term relationship. Two of the magazines were more traditionally hardcore: locker room scenes, hikers in denim cut-offs with tall striped tube socks and hiking boots, leather scenes, that sort of thing. The issue I had in mind for Jade was far more romantic and unimaginably colorful.
Printed and distributed in the early 1970s, My-O-My Volume II focused exclusively on two male models in a studio whose sexual narrative unfolded over the course of the 32-page book, at first intimately kissing and undressing page by page before eventually succumbing to one another for several more pages. The models were set against lush monochromatic backdrops of what can only be described as deeply timely colors for the 1970s: rust, ochre, sea foam, deep mauve, avocado green. Solid backdrops of color cast focus on the rich textures and character of each man’s garments and their pink and peach bodies in various states of passion and undress.
My-O-My also had another life as material evidence in New Jersey v. Shapiro, the Superior Court trial of Edward Shapiro and Milton Nerenberg after two police raids of their bookstore, Action Auction, in 1972. At question frequently in the suit was whether indecent material had any “redeeming social significance.”[i] What is remarkable about the language in the case is that it refers to the content of the magazine as “nude males making love to one another,”[ii] which in descriptive terms is actually quite sweet. (The title of the other magazine obtained from the raids was Togetherness.) Apart from this, the case language makes no other mention of the magazines’ sexual content, apart from their "obscene" nature. These notions of speaking around bodies and transforming desire into something harmful are at the center of Jade Yumang's Thumb Through series.
Consistent among the 32 objects, which vary in form and content for each page in My-O-My, is the use of page scans printed in archival ink on cotton and wrapped around long tubular forms, like pillow-soft porcupine quills. Some hang from or jut out of vintage fabrics and objects, resembling—or fastened to—fringe, tube socks, and refashioned garments from the early 1970s. Others like Page 28 (2015), bright and colorful and collected in a corner, offer sewn-cotton candy echoes of Felix Gonzalez-Torres piles. Like Felix’s practice and the pornographic images in My-O-My, Yumang’s works transfer intimate emotion out into the public realm.
The magazine’s retro design features, like typesettings, borders, layouts, and ads for back issues of other magazines in the series, frame the desire on adjacent pages. The edges of the artist’s sculptures pay careful attention to this detail. Fabric borders and underbellies of objects flaunt fringe, long strands of fibers, satin rope, and smooth patches of leather, recalling both nostalgia and biological features of organic creatures. Each sculpture’s tendrils appear both soft and dangerous, wielding a tender and uncertain harm. Like the models in My-O-My, works like Page 10 (2015), Page 12 (2015) and Page 5 (2016) themselves appear to be in states of undress, with zippers revealing inner layers, teasing and unveiling their private contents.
**
For a time that summer on Fire Island, Jade was tucked away in a basement studio designing and sewing elegant garments of white tulle that resembled diaphanous dragon spirits made of slender clouds. Objects in Thumb Through find echoes of these queered monster-forms, combining intimacy and absence, perceived potential harm and soft surfaces. Neither Jade nor I were yet aware of the power—and the redeeming social significance—of this random porn mag. Looking back it seems fitting that it was a gift from the island. (Had the nude men in the pictures cruised these beach forest paths? Were their ashes underfoot?) In Yumang’s careful hands, the intimate layers of these queer, quiet histories are shed one by one, transformed into something strange—and strangely powerful.
[i] State v. Shapiro (Superior Court of New Jersey, Law Division (Criminal) January 26, 1973), Law.justia.com 300 A.2d 595.
[ii] Ibid.
By Evan Garza
Evan Garza is Director of Public Art at Rice University. In 2011, he co-founded Fire Island Artist Residency in Cherry Grove, New York, the first residency program in the United States exclusively for LGBTQ artists. Garza served as Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin from 2014–2016 and was Exhibitions and Programs Director at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston from 2011–2014. He has organized and curated several exhibitions internationally and his writing has been published by Hyperallergic, Flash Art, ART PAPERS, and Artforum.com.
“If men were angels no government would be necessary.” James Madison, Federalist No. 51.
- Case document excerpt, New Jersey v. Shapiro, 1973
In July of 2012 I bought Jade Yumang a vintage gay porn magazine on Fire Island. A pop-up shop in Cherry Grove, New York was selling high quality reprints of 1970s stud mags like Dynamo! and HONCHO, along with island knick-knacks and some belongings from the estate of Rue McClanahan (God rest her soul). I immediately thumbed through a few issues, grabbed two or three, and ran back to the house to proudly flaunt my finds and offer a few gifts. The magazine covers were reprinted in a sturdy glossy plastic laminate—no doubt a material response to the flimsy, fading paper covers of the 1970s that clung to their staples with all the commitment of a short-term relationship. Two of the magazines were more traditionally hardcore: locker room scenes, hikers in denim cut-offs with tall striped tube socks and hiking boots, leather scenes, that sort of thing. The issue I had in mind for Jade was far more romantic and unimaginably colorful.
Printed and distributed in the early 1970s, My-O-My Volume II focused exclusively on two male models in a studio whose sexual narrative unfolded over the course of the 32-page book, at first intimately kissing and undressing page by page before eventually succumbing to one another for several more pages. The models were set against lush monochromatic backdrops of what can only be described as deeply timely colors for the 1970s: rust, ochre, sea foam, deep mauve, avocado green. Solid backdrops of color cast focus on the rich textures and character of each man’s garments and their pink and peach bodies in various states of passion and undress.
My-O-My also had another life as material evidence in New Jersey v. Shapiro, the Superior Court trial of Edward Shapiro and Milton Nerenberg after two police raids of their bookstore, Action Auction, in 1972. At question frequently in the suit was whether indecent material had any “redeeming social significance.”[i] What is remarkable about the language in the case is that it refers to the content of the magazine as “nude males making love to one another,”[ii] which in descriptive terms is actually quite sweet. (The title of the other magazine obtained from the raids was Togetherness.) Apart from this, the case language makes no other mention of the magazines’ sexual content, apart from their "obscene" nature. These notions of speaking around bodies and transforming desire into something harmful are at the center of Jade Yumang's Thumb Through series.
Consistent among the 32 objects, which vary in form and content for each page in My-O-My, is the use of page scans printed in archival ink on cotton and wrapped around long tubular forms, like pillow-soft porcupine quills. Some hang from or jut out of vintage fabrics and objects, resembling—or fastened to—fringe, tube socks, and refashioned garments from the early 1970s. Others like Page 28 (2015), bright and colorful and collected in a corner, offer sewn-cotton candy echoes of Felix Gonzalez-Torres piles. Like Felix’s practice and the pornographic images in My-O-My, Yumang’s works transfer intimate emotion out into the public realm.
The magazine’s retro design features, like typesettings, borders, layouts, and ads for back issues of other magazines in the series, frame the desire on adjacent pages. The edges of the artist’s sculptures pay careful attention to this detail. Fabric borders and underbellies of objects flaunt fringe, long strands of fibers, satin rope, and smooth patches of leather, recalling both nostalgia and biological features of organic creatures. Each sculpture’s tendrils appear both soft and dangerous, wielding a tender and uncertain harm. Like the models in My-O-My, works like Page 10 (2015), Page 12 (2015) and Page 5 (2016) themselves appear to be in states of undress, with zippers revealing inner layers, teasing and unveiling their private contents.
**
For a time that summer on Fire Island, Jade was tucked away in a basement studio designing and sewing elegant garments of white tulle that resembled diaphanous dragon spirits made of slender clouds. Objects in Thumb Through find echoes of these queered monster-forms, combining intimacy and absence, perceived potential harm and soft surfaces. Neither Jade nor I were yet aware of the power—and the redeeming social significance—of this random porn mag. Looking back it seems fitting that it was a gift from the island. (Had the nude men in the pictures cruised these beach forest paths? Were their ashes underfoot?) In Yumang’s careful hands, the intimate layers of these queer, quiet histories are shed one by one, transformed into something strange—and strangely powerful.
[i] State v. Shapiro (Superior Court of New Jersey, Law Division (Criminal) January 26, 1973), Law.justia.com 300 A.2d 595.
[ii] Ibid.
By Evan Garza
Evan Garza is Director of Public Art at Rice University. In 2011, he co-founded Fire Island Artist Residency in Cherry Grove, New York, the first residency program in the United States exclusively for LGBTQ artists. Garza served as Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin from 2014–2016 and was Exhibitions and Programs Director at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston from 2011–2014. He has organized and curated several exhibitions internationally and his writing has been published by Hyperallergic, Flash Art, ART PAPERS, and Artforum.com.
Saturday, September 16, 2017
Friday, September 8, 2017
ESSAY: In Blood and Bone
Exhibition Essay: an aware form of care
In Blood and Bone is a compilation of Alana Bartol's many multifaceted constructs; its result is similar to a corporeal body. This body—an accumulation of different organs, which in turn are different facets of Bartol’s work—reaches out into the world in a multitude of ways. The body works and in doing so makes this body of work.
First, there is the Orphan Well Adoption Agency (OWAA), which walks the line between a real functioning not-for-profit and a fictitious organization. The OWAA, like any adoption agency, busies itself with matching orphans, in this case orphaned oil wells, with people that will act as their caretakers. While at a first glance, the OWAA may seem the penultimate step towards a reconciliation with the land and its peoples, Bartol knows the reality to be far more complex; she knows this to be but the first step of many*. In actuality there may be no final step towards a reconciling but instead a resolve to actively care with awareness.The OWAA is a radical step in envisioning—stepping out of fantasy and into a messy reality. The responsibility inherent in privilege is only performed if a person puts their agency into action, and this is something that Bartol clearly is devoted to doing in this exhibition. Bartol utilizes her privilege granted from the exhibition version of In Blood And Bone to draw attention to the hazy grey area between real organizations, performance within fine visual art. This in turn is a tool to consider what it would be like if we entered a realm focused on care.
Also exerting the pushes and pulls of a physical body is Bartol's water dowsing practice, a second tenet of this exhibition. Dowsing, or water witching, is the practice of using a pendulum, dowsing rod, or forked stick to determine the location of water or other rare minerals. Water witching itself is contentious and controversial and is seen by many to be a dubious practice, though it has been practiced for over a century to successfully find water. To practice this, the dowser must ask the rod yes or no questions. Bartol also has a blue uniform for dowsing and uses Ganzfeld goggles, which renders the user's vision blank, making her as susceptible as possible to the whims of the dowsing rods, and responses to her questions. The dowsing rods are tools of the field worker but they also relate to the third and final element of In Blood and Bone, which comes flying into the gallery and becomes an entity of its own. Black vinyl neckties made of garbage bags, representing corporate culture, patriarchy, and evil spirits in general, which haunt the land and places where these orphaned wells reside. The dowsing rods themselves are installed to animate the dispersion of these ties, and this is represented in both the installation of the neck ties in the space and the animated video in the gallery’s front room.
The great pleasure of a body of work like this is that it offers viewers a space to consider the gargantuan and contentious issue of the oil industry within Alberta in a completely different manner. The absurdity of the ties that bind corporate structures to the land is intimated by the black neckties, which add an element of humour. The laughter that follows can both confound and disarm people to discuss socially and politically charged subjects which can be very difficult to address within the economic systems that we have created. Bartol poses the questions, “How do you get people to connect to issues that are overwhelming even if they are relating to them personally?” and “How do you shift a perspective so that the contentious and uncomfortable topic of oil can be considered?” If this exhibition is to serve as a starting point in which Bartol begins her inquiries, she does so by first listening, processing, acting, and persisting—with care.
By: Ashley Bedet
*A consideration she is aware of given Bartol’s history of incorporating walking into her practice. See A Woman Walks the City Limits, 2016.
Ashley Bedet came back to Calgary, where she was born. Bedet is the product of many very different worlds reproducing, meeting difference, and then reproducing again. That makes her the product of at least four distinct separate paths. She graduated from NSCAD University in 2014 and has been slowly making and showing work since.
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