CLAUDE CLOSKY: JOURNAL
Runs until January 7
Walter Phillips Gallery (The Banff Centre)
As I pondered French artist Claude Closky’s media exhibition Journal in the Plan B Curatorial Space at Walter Phillips Gallery, I noted a remark from a tour guide showing his clients through WPG. As he introduced Closky’s work, he quipped that as soon as you started to think about one of the images in the video, you had already missed the next three. Strangely enough, that response seemed appropriate.
Journal consists of a simple premise. Heavily pixelated photographic images from digital sources (presumably the Internet) are sequenced in rapid succession and projected large-scale on the wall of the darkened space. Accompanying each image is an audio clip. These clips vary from literal sounds one might hear in the scene (a picture of a surfer on a wave and the sound of a wave crashing) to sounds which function as icons for individuals, places or events (the Microsoft Windows chime and a picture of Bill Gates). There are an enormous number of variations within this basic system and the effect is often startlingly hilarious or profoundly grave. Images and sounds of war, death, laughter, festivals, riots, celebrities, soldiers, animals, weather, bodily functions etc. all meld together into a complex depiction of global social life and mass media.
As far as it goes, Journal doesn’t really present any new ideas regarding media itself. It is commonplace to note that the advent of the Internet has drastically shifted the ways we understand visual and aural information. Nonetheless, Closky’s work effectively presents a witty version of this situation while inducing a state of dramatic emotional and mental stimulation. At first, this sensibility is unnerving, but also oddly pleasurable and thought-provoking. Rather than violent, flashing edits reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange or Darren Aronofsky films, Journal reads as something more akin to playful. An irony here adds complexity to the work. Closky has carefully dissected image and sound to challenge our notions of what we should think and feel. Instead of simply being bombarded with an overwhelming mass of information, we are treated to minute moments of abject and poignant reflection.
The nature of this experience is undoubtedly ambiguous. As the tour guide noted, it was incredibly difficult to focus on specific ideas related to the image/sound pairings because of the rapid changes that the piece is constantly undergoing. In this way, each new scenario in the sequence dissuades the viewer from making fully formed interpretations of previous pairings. Everything becomes interrelated. The effect is one that challenges the belief that the depicted events are independent from each other. By avoiding hierarchies and democratizing each audio-visual combo to an equal duration, Closky is able to arrange our perception of the piece in a way that stimulates us to think but then curtails this thought pattern and abruptly moves us in completely opposite directions.
This careful orchestration of viewer’s perceptions might seem rather manipulative of Closky. Undoubtedly, calculated frustration is part of the work, but there is also a certain personal agency created through the subtleties of the piece. Because the manipulation is produced in ways that are both comical and crass, we become aware of it. This awareness frees us from the expectation that the artwork must reveal meaning in direct and unequivocal terms. If we choose, Closky’s work can be understood in an infinite number of ways, and every time we view it, something different develops. With this in mind, Closky entreats us to look past the obvious in global technological society and encounter our world as more than a series of unrelated audio-visual fragments. |
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