Preview
DISASTER!
Truck and dANDelion
Runs until May 22
Truck gallery (815 First St. S.W.)
Disaster recently struck a part of downtown and it will continue until May 22.
As in disaster! – a collaborative project between the Truck gallery and dANDelion Press.
With five installations at the gallery, a special edition of dANDelion magazine and readings on the closing night, there is a lot of disaster! to digest.
The famed psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, who was imprisoned in two Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War, wrote extensively about how people respond to trauma. He believed that we all have an intrinsic need to express our fears; real and imagined. And so it is perhaps not surprising that we find writers and artists drawn to the theme of disaster. In a world where jumbo jets are flown into skyscrapers and bombs go off in crowded city streets, what else would they do?
For some, creative expression is a way to cope with disaster. For others, it is a forum to display their outrage and for still others, disaster becomes something to mock; perhaps in the hope that through defiance some measure of safety will follow. As Jim Ellis says in the exhibition’s notes, "The contemplation of disaster can act as a comforting form of denial."
This ideal is realized by Kevin D. A. Kurytnik and Carol Beecher, who have created the short animation, Meanwhile in Outer Space…. The work envisions a meteorite plummeting through space and smashing into Calgary. Working with vivid colours and quick edits complemented by a quirky soundtrack, this animation is as funny as anything Homer Simpson can throw at you. By creating an absurdist cartoon, the two animators help to ease our fears as we cope with the prospect of everyday disaster in the world.
Visual artist Scott Bowering takes disaster into the psychic realm by creating a series of diagrams that are based on outdated predictions of world destruction contained in pseudo-scientific books from the 1970s. The result is an interesting exploration of how such predictions are viewed. Once a doomsday deadline passes, the predictions are considered ridiculous rantings. However, those same predictions can whip us into frenzy if the fateful deadline looms ahead. In Bowering’s photographic print United States - 1996 we see North America with its entire West Coast missing. The graphic image captivates the viewer as we ponder the continent reconfigured by disaster.
London, Ontario artist Adriana Kuiper examines how our homes are used to provide a safe refuge from the destructive forces of man and nature. Her installation There’s No Place… is made up of tiny houses set atop a glass table. As the viewer approaches the work, a motion detector is tripped and several of the homes begin to wildly spin. This violent disruption of the tiny model of idyllic suburbia underscores the idea that our peace of mind is often as fragile as the walls of our shelter.
New-media artist Daniel Dugas presents Boom(s) Nuclear Mickeys. This is a series of three large digital images in which Dugas has placed Mickey Mouse heads on the top of mushroom clouds from nuclear weapons tests.
Accompanying the installation is a soundtrack of hesitations created by the artist, who has lifted them from a speech given by the father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer. In that speech, given in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945 after the first detonation of an atomic bomb, Oppenheimer said, "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remember the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita.… Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."
The dANDelion magazine (volume 30, number one) gets into the mix on May 22 at the closing evening of disaster!, by presenting readings from performance poet David Bateman, filling Station poetry editor Ryan Fitzpatrick, veteran poet Fred Wah, and author and Fast Forward contributor Julia Williams. The press has also produced a limited-edition disaster! chapbook to help celebrate its collaboration with Truck. Pieces in this volume range from musings on the destructive force of a tornado to a poem depicting urban violence.
And if you haven’t had your fill of calamity and chaos by the time you see the Truck exhibition and leaf through dANDelion, then head over to the gallery’s plus-15 window, where Tim Barnard’s mixed-media installation is on display. Fittingly, it was inspired by a discarded book entitled Great Disasters, which the artist discovered on the top of a pile of trash. |
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