As humans, we all wish to connect with others, to be known and to share our experience, and yet we know that truly sharing an experience with another is often fraught with missed connections and misunderstandings, and that we often simply fail. For Steven Cochrane and The Walled Garden, this critical failure is at the crux of his whole endeavour. Recognizing the tenuous objective, Cochrane’s installation offers a speculative conversation about both his own memory and also the relative impossibility of recreating for your conversant the intricacies and subtleties of a memory, a dream, something that you experienced or a feeling you once had. Describing the scene only goes so far.
Cochrane layers and repeats drawings, prints, photographs, and familiar-but-unsettled objects alongside signs bearing fragments of text, intentional lighting, and larger installation elements in a multivalent but non-verbal description of something elusive and yet very concrete. The memory is real. This immersive exhibition tells the parts of a story that words can’t convey and casts the viewer as interlocutor, puzzler, witness.
Untitled (Screen wall) (2011) is made up of a series of unique rubbings, each repeating graphic components within a gridded frame to create irregular patterns. They are regimented enough to make a person think there’s a formula here (on this wall, and also in this room) but further investigation seems to suggest otherwise. Can you crack the code? This careful looking, eyes darting over the grid to compare this here to that there, is similar to the mind’s project of persistently revisiting different aspects of the memory/ies of a traumatic moment in an effort to make sense of it/them. The mind continues puzzling, despite the possible endlessness of this pursuit.
Plants drawn from memory with invisible ink (2012) is a series of blind contour drawings Cochrane’s made by relying on his own memories of botanical illustrations of plants that grew around his childhood homes,^ and they’re drawn with a medium that disappears as you work and then reappears when it’s dried. He explained, “you can see sometimes that I'd accidentally draw…over and over again in the same spot…I was trying to build the struggle to remember into the making of the work”^ —again, a metaphor for the mind’s project of working it out, whatever ‘it’ may be. Explaining, repeating, defining, exaggerating, leaving things out, forgetting, but you get the gist.
Two jewels gleam on the wall, yellow-green and blue-red eyes surveying the space. Together they are After Evening Thunderstorms, June 2002 and June 2007 (2013), a pair photographs from Cochrane’s personal collection, each mounted behind an acrylic prism—a paperweight? an award? a crystal ball? These two snapshots were taken in the same room, five years apart, each an attempt to capture and reproduce “that quality of light—a very particular kind of hyper-saturated yellow-green.”^ Windows in particular have a specific job: letting the light in, framing the view. Windows are contemplative by their very nature, conjuring ideas about reflection, longing, escape… Cochrane’s pictures of windows here, now viewed from a distance in time through a bevelled crystalline filter, put us in that room looking out those windows. Viewing the rest of the exhibition from this position, we might feel that we’re looking through Cochrane’s own lens. Is this the key?
Cochrane’s visual and sensorial narrative seems to reveal intimate details about a moment in his life, if obliquely, and at the same time The Walled Garden presents a perfect illustration of the frustration inherent in such an undertaking. Communicating a subjective experience, whether profound or traumatic or both, can be tremendously difficult. The artist is sharing something with us here, and whether we scrutinize the clues or simply absorb the impressions, or/and walk away feeling stumped/bemused, curious, betrayed, or touched, we are participating in a conversation.
Lisa Benschop
July 2015
^ refers to details shared by the artist in email correspondence, April 23, 2015.
Friday, January 15, 2016
Thursday, January 14, 2016
ESSAY: Finding Ana
“The ghost is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life.”
- Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters
- Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters
In the summer of 1981, after a long exile, artist Ana Mendieta returned from New York to her native Cuba, where she created a series of sculptural silhouettes entitled Rupestrian Sculptures in the limestone interior of the caves in Las Escaleras de Jaruco National Park.
Guanaroca & Iyaré (1981), a photograph Mendieta produced of the resulting Rupestrian Sculptures series, is now in the possession of the Guggenheim. On the institution’s website, curator Nat Trotman describes Mendieta’s photographs as the “haunting documents” of a search for the “one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy.” He continues to explain that the sculptures, though meant for discovery by future visitors, were ultimately destroyed by the elements. He concludes: Mendieta’s work now lives on only through her films and photographs.
In Finding Ana, Elise Rasmussen presents a hard rebuttal to the Guggenheim’s somewhat shiftless error. In 2012, retracing Mendieta’s footsteps, Rasmussen returned to the site of the allegedly destroyed sculptures. With the generous assistance of local residents, Rasmussen was able to locate sculptures, their bodies persisting on the limestone walls of the caves. Rasmussen took her own images of the sculptures, some of which she titled after Mendieta’s originals; she gave others—careful documentation of the surrounding area—more evocative titles. At night, they go amongst the living, one title announces. They Believe there is a Place Where the Dead Go, another. Heavy leaves surrounding, overgrown and obfuscated, Rasmussen’s images of Mendieta’s sculptures and their sustaining environment create a spectral projection, a pitched dialog between past and present.
On 8 September 1985, allegedly drunk in her 34th floor Manhattan apartment and quarrelling with her partner, Carl Andre, Mendieta, somehow, “went out the window”. Remitting a jury, facing three separate indictments, Andre was tried before a judge and acquitted, on the grounds of insufficient evidence toward his complicity in her fall. During the trial, Andre’s jaundiced lawyers cite Mendieta’s performance and other work as evidence toward her possible suicide.
In the second work in Finding Ana, entitled Variations, Rasmussen employs four cameras, an audience, and two actors cast to the approximate size and weight of Andre and Mendieta. They play the night of the defenestration, as told by the three perplexingly disjointed statements delivered by Andre to police and media. Rasmussen directs, interjecting facts, weather reports, interrogatives. A recreation of the window and its sill sit centre stage, built fastidiously to scale, its height becoming a curious obstacle to Mendieta’s small surrogate. All parties break in and out of character as they investigate the testimony, responding to each other, inserting themselves into each other’s roles – audience-cum-player, director-cum-audience, cast-cum-jury.
In a slight revision of the Guggenheim’s misstatement, it is true that much of Mendieta’s work lives on only through documentation. Through the fogged-out history of female-identified, “precarious”, and ephemeral practices, Mendieta’s work can be traced through multiple bodies; new artists and authors play cipher to her story, haunted in new and different ways by her absence. Writer Nasrin Himada, in a longer text on the possibilities of poetry, finds herself thinking through one such haunting she experienced while viewing Mendieta’s films. She includes the following citation from Brian Massumi’s book, Semblance and Event: “We never register what’s actually in front of our eyes. With every sight we see imperceptible qualities, we abstractly see potential, we implicitly see a life dynamic… because something has happened: the body has been capacitated. It’s been relationally activated. It is alive in the world, poised for what may come.” Himada then poses her own question: “How do we examine a situation from the point of view of its possibility?”
As a consumer of media in an era reliant on ephemerality, it’s possible to feel like an unwitting character in an ongoing flash procedural, an amnesia-inducing episodic. As such, we’re often remiss as viewers to locate the narrative, to find the path that leads to the “dense site” of history, discovery and recuperation.
Writer and educator Avery Gordon, in her book Ghostly Matters, uses the term haunting to describe the “singular and yet repetitive [instance] when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind-field comes into view.” In Finding Ana, lost paths are activated, reconnected. Rasmussen calls her audience to task as repeat viewers, co-detectives, engaged in a lineage, set as pro- and antagonist, participant, spectator, culprit and body and ghost. “Haunting raises specters,” Avery Gordon continues, “and it alters the experience of being in linear time, alters the way we normally separate and sequence the past, the present and the future.” Rasmussen’s spectres and viewers collide; we are not a separate order. We are enlisted together, either in the task of building another perspective, or the patient wait for its arrival.
Essay by Danielle St Amour
________________________________________________
Gordon, Avery F. “‘Who’s there?’: some answers to questions about ghostly matters” (2007)
— Talk presented at UnitedNationsPlaza (Berlin) for Seminar 6: “who’s there?—an interrogation in the dark,” organized by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Ines Schaber, Anselm Franke (22–26 October 2007)
About the writer:
Danielle St Amour is an artist, writer and curator currently based in Toronto, Canada.
Guanaroca & Iyaré (1981), a photograph Mendieta produced of the resulting Rupestrian Sculptures series, is now in the possession of the Guggenheim. On the institution’s website, curator Nat Trotman describes Mendieta’s photographs as the “haunting documents” of a search for the “one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy.” He continues to explain that the sculptures, though meant for discovery by future visitors, were ultimately destroyed by the elements. He concludes: Mendieta’s work now lives on only through her films and photographs.
In Finding Ana, Elise Rasmussen presents a hard rebuttal to the Guggenheim’s somewhat shiftless error. In 2012, retracing Mendieta’s footsteps, Rasmussen returned to the site of the allegedly destroyed sculptures. With the generous assistance of local residents, Rasmussen was able to locate sculptures, their bodies persisting on the limestone walls of the caves. Rasmussen took her own images of the sculptures, some of which she titled after Mendieta’s originals; she gave others—careful documentation of the surrounding area—more evocative titles. At night, they go amongst the living, one title announces. They Believe there is a Place Where the Dead Go, another. Heavy leaves surrounding, overgrown and obfuscated, Rasmussen’s images of Mendieta’s sculptures and their sustaining environment create a spectral projection, a pitched dialog between past and present.
On 8 September 1985, allegedly drunk in her 34th floor Manhattan apartment and quarrelling with her partner, Carl Andre, Mendieta, somehow, “went out the window”. Remitting a jury, facing three separate indictments, Andre was tried before a judge and acquitted, on the grounds of insufficient evidence toward his complicity in her fall. During the trial, Andre’s jaundiced lawyers cite Mendieta’s performance and other work as evidence toward her possible suicide.
In the second work in Finding Ana, entitled Variations, Rasmussen employs four cameras, an audience, and two actors cast to the approximate size and weight of Andre and Mendieta. They play the night of the defenestration, as told by the three perplexingly disjointed statements delivered by Andre to police and media. Rasmussen directs, interjecting facts, weather reports, interrogatives. A recreation of the window and its sill sit centre stage, built fastidiously to scale, its height becoming a curious obstacle to Mendieta’s small surrogate. All parties break in and out of character as they investigate the testimony, responding to each other, inserting themselves into each other’s roles – audience-cum-player, director-cum-audience, cast-cum-jury.
In a slight revision of the Guggenheim’s misstatement, it is true that much of Mendieta’s work lives on only through documentation. Through the fogged-out history of female-identified, “precarious”, and ephemeral practices, Mendieta’s work can be traced through multiple bodies; new artists and authors play cipher to her story, haunted in new and different ways by her absence. Writer Nasrin Himada, in a longer text on the possibilities of poetry, finds herself thinking through one such haunting she experienced while viewing Mendieta’s films. She includes the following citation from Brian Massumi’s book, Semblance and Event: “We never register what’s actually in front of our eyes. With every sight we see imperceptible qualities, we abstractly see potential, we implicitly see a life dynamic… because something has happened: the body has been capacitated. It’s been relationally activated. It is alive in the world, poised for what may come.” Himada then poses her own question: “How do we examine a situation from the point of view of its possibility?”
As a consumer of media in an era reliant on ephemerality, it’s possible to feel like an unwitting character in an ongoing flash procedural, an amnesia-inducing episodic. As such, we’re often remiss as viewers to locate the narrative, to find the path that leads to the “dense site” of history, discovery and recuperation.
Writer and educator Avery Gordon, in her book Ghostly Matters, uses the term haunting to describe the “singular and yet repetitive [instance] when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind-field comes into view.” In Finding Ana, lost paths are activated, reconnected. Rasmussen calls her audience to task as repeat viewers, co-detectives, engaged in a lineage, set as pro- and antagonist, participant, spectator, culprit and body and ghost. “Haunting raises specters,” Avery Gordon continues, “and it alters the experience of being in linear time, alters the way we normally separate and sequence the past, the present and the future.” Rasmussen’s spectres and viewers collide; we are not a separate order. We are enlisted together, either in the task of building another perspective, or the patient wait for its arrival.
Essay by Danielle St Amour
________________________________________________
Gordon, Avery F. “‘Who’s there?’: some answers to questions about ghostly matters” (2007)
— Talk presented at UnitedNationsPlaza (Berlin) for Seminar 6: “who’s there?—an interrogation in the dark,” organized by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Ines Schaber, Anselm Franke (22–26 October 2007)
About the writer:
Danielle St Amour is an artist, writer and curator currently based in Toronto, Canada.
Monday, October 5, 2015
Friday, August 21, 2015
Tuesday, July 21, 2015
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
ESSAY: Before Prospero's Cell
Group exhibitions are often difficult to talk about in a way that does justice to the complex and distinct works that have been brought together within them. In conceiving a model for thinking about these exhibitions, and this one in particular, my thoughts swing to archipelagos. In The Radicant, the metaphor of an archipelago is touted by Nicolas Bourriaud as “the dominant figure of contemporary culture,"[1] as a mode of thinking that rejects totalizing systems in favour of a network of conversing autonomous entities. As a collection of islands, an archipelago is comprised of discrete physical bodies with distinct topographies and ecologies, however, they often share collective traits or elements: cultural features, for example, or the climate, objects that float among them on ocean currents, seed pods that drift on the wind, creatures that swim and long for the experience of other terrains. And so it often is with exhibitions, including this one: ideas arrive, ricochet, are shared, and depart.
Joe Bérubé’s series of drawings, Inventory of an Unknown Island (2012-2015), is a sharp-eyed catalogue of flora, fauna, and fragments of human activity. Though they resemble natural science illustrations torn from an anthropologist’s observational field notebook, these objects have no origin in a particular place. The island from which they come is one of conjecture, a place not yet known. The drawings offer a strange perversion of the scientific methodologies of direct observation and documentation. Instead, they present a speculative taxonomy; in them the imagined and the real coexist in an incongruous space. By utilizing taxonomic organization and technical aesthetics Bérubé gestures to our perennial impulse to neatly categorize the world. The documentation of the imagined object, however, problematizes the language of discovery and the act of claiming knowledge. The blurring of the real and unreal reveals the ineffable qualities of the world and the ambiguity involved in coming to know something.
The human impulse toward order and categorization is one borne out of a desire for control. In his short essay “Desert Islands” (1953) Gilles Deleuze muses on the psychogeographic relationships among islands, humans, and the imagination. He articulates our need for philosophical normalcy as a fundamental condition for living: "Humans cannot live, nor live in security, unless they assume that the active struggle between earth and water is over, or at least contained…humans can live on an island only by forgetting what an island represents." [2]
Sandy Grant’s large-scale oil paintings pull back the cover on this assumed normalcy; they reveal the folly of our strategies to impose harmony and order and our tendency to isolate ourselves from the natural world. These images pick at the edges of our efforts to control the chaotic, the mental barriers we raise against the unsettling wild, and the lies of dominance that we tell ourselves. They depict day-to-day experiences rubbing up against, or operating adjacent to, the hidden natural world in unsettling and unnerving ways. Grant raises the corner on the deliberate, formalized edges of humanity’s impositions to reveal the things that lurk just out of sight: the hissing in the shadows of shaded hedgerows, the irrational reptilian fear of submerged logs beneath our plump little toes, and the threat of tremendous and uncontainable natural disasters exacerbated by our human carelessness and excesses. In spite of our best efforts, these unplanned and unsettling edges of existence have a deep and profound effect on us all: in each of us skulks the frightening spectre of our fundamental impermanence.
Natasha Alphonse, Joe Bérubé, and Sandy Grant are occupied by encounters with the (un)familiar, by questions about what makes us human, and by intense curiosity about the complex linkages between the surrounding environment and ourselves. Leaning from a steep slope draws their work together in a speculative dialogue about the mysterious affinities, existential wonderings, and inescapable relationships that affect us all.
Essay by Shauna Thompson
1. Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, trans. James Gussen and Lili Porten (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009), 185.
2. Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974, (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 9.
About the Writer:
Shauna Thompson is Curator at the Esker Foundation, Calgary. Previously, she worked with Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre; Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, and YYZ Artists’ Outlet, both in Toronto; Doris McCarthy Gallery, Scarborough; as well as the Art Gallery of Mississauga. She holds a master’s degree in Curatorial Studies from the University of Toronto as well as a master’s degree in English from the University of Guelph.
- See more at: http://www.truck.ca/events/772#sthash.mugF34aH.dpuf
Mysterious relationships are also at the centre of Natasha Alphonse's work. Through intuitive arrangements of collected found objects (natural and/or synthetic, chosen for their affinity of colours and material qualities, and often paired together) Alphonse creates arranged forms in a simple economy of balanced, site-specific gestures. Each component of a sculptural pairing actively influences and relates to the other: they are mutually dependent. The objects at once exist as they are, but also adopt human-like qualities through spatial relationships and physical dialogue. There is something truly enigmatic about our affinity to these objects; we find ourselves implicated in an empathetic response as we
project ideas, narratives, and characteristics upon them. We imagine a mutual recognition and dependency exists and we come to understand the components of the installation – including our presence – as parts of an inextricable whole.
Essay by Shauna Thompson
1. Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, trans. James Gussen and Lili Porten (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009), 185.
2. Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974, (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 9.
About the Writer:
Shauna Thompson is Curator at the Esker Foundation, Calgary. Previously, she worked with Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre; Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, and YYZ Artists’ Outlet, both in Toronto; Doris McCarthy Gallery, Scarborough; as well as the Art Gallery of Mississauga. She holds a master’s degree in Curatorial Studies from the University of Toronto as well as a master’s degree in English from the University of Guelph.
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