>>REVIEWS
MAKE BELIEVE
Runs until November 26
Art Gallery of Alberta
JUST MY IMAGINATION
Runs until December 16
Illingworth Kerr Gallery (Alberta College of Art and Design)
Make Believe and Just my Imagination can be read together as two delightfully kindred narratives, yet they use radically different art forms and curatorial approaches to conjure up the topic of representation through inner thoughts, feelings, magic tricks and storytelling.
Many of the narratives in Make Believe involve spoofs, visual trickery or magic, but they're also intellectual meditations on seeing and perception, showing the clear thinking processes of the artists. How to put two and two together? What's the best camera angle for this shot? Where will I hide the visual clues to help unravel this story?
Calgary artist M.N. Hutchinson's vertiginous The Attic Incident, or How 12 Bunnies in a Hutch Flew the Coop, sets the scene of a mischievous herd of bunnies. Much like shooting a film, the process of making his continuous panorama photographs involves several takes, locations and characters. Instead, the vignette reads like a detailed dream, and appropriately, it's Hutchinson himself who produces the in-camera visual effects such as blurring, spinning and sequencing himself. He also appears in the "on-screen" roles as several bunnies, creepy dude in the window, gravedigger and body about to be buried.
Other elaborate stagings are by Judy Radul and Louise Noguchi, where the artist's orchestration of overwhelming details – both in the settings and delivery of the narratives – creates a theatrical space where artists cast actors, assemble props and edit scripts. Radul's project enlists a team of artists to direct a scene and then allows us to compare the subtle differences between their takes, and Noguchi's wild-western sets leave clues such as the unpainted edge of a two-by-four, that lead us to examine the rupture or breakdown of truthfulness of the scene. We realize that it's a set-up just as the shoot-out ends in a puff of theatre smoke.
Curators Catherine Crowston and Barbara Fischer have created a context in which the technically proficient works allow the viewer to sink into the stories with equal fascination about how their illusion is created. The artist's adept handlings of the media are wildly innovative forms of trickery – David Carter's set paintings look like photos, media works by Adad Hannah and Althea Thauberger reference tableaux vivants, photographic narratives by Tim Lee and Myfanwy MacLeod refuse to be confined within the frame. All among other artists whose works in video, photography and sculpture propose exciting mysteries to solve.
If Make Believe views the imagination using filmic and photographic constructions to aid our recalling, or looks at cinematic tricks through the lens of theory and history, Just My Imagination originates from physical experiences of the world, messily implicating the bodies of the artists who are streaming their movements, gestures and touches directly through to the media of drawing.
Drawing is defined loosely for this exhibition, with expansive takes on the practice and its radical departures from the drawn page into video, performance, new media and textiles. Anna Torma's hand-embroidered quilt is very much like a drawing, yet the shiny, raised colours and textures of her embroidery have a luminosity that drawing often lacks. Stephen Andrew's small video animation sequence of a soldier extinguishing a burning corpse builds simultaneous sensations of horror and disassociation through its use of pattern.
Perhaps the most disquieting sensations are achieved through the works of Raphaëlle de Groot and Luanne Martineau – particularly the video work of de Groot, wrapping her own head in art materials such as paper, tinfoil and paint. While this uncomfortable spectacle takes place, art students draw her as a "living sculpture" and their drawings are exhibited as part of the exhibition, too. Her gesture of suffocation with her materials is bizarre enough to hold the interest in the project – the student works that are also included in the show, lead the viewer back to one of the least interesting incarnations of contemporary drawing practice on display here: the figurative study. Like the other figurative works by Lucie Chan and John Scott, the representational studies of the body simply don't provoke the same sensation as the imaginative works that probe our inner realms.
Luanne Martineau's rambling textile sculpture resides squarely in the realm of gross bodily references. From a distance, the hanging textile work references a translucent sci-fi creature, as it attacks the gallery space with six tentacles that reach out to the ceilings, and even challenges the other works around it with the aggressive infestation. Closer up, the threatening size of the sculpture is no deterrent for a look at some of the seductively felted lumps glommed onto its shimmering silk organza, that start to resemble the site of a scabby orifice or cartoonish excretion.
Just My Imagination reveals a visceral preoccupation with the dirtiness, discomforts and maladies of the physical self – and makes convincing connections between the body and the processes of drawn media. Together, the artists in the two exhibitions reveal a deep interest in our perceptions of reality, how stories are told, constructed narratives, and the exciting tensions between what is visible and what is imagined. |
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