DETAILS

Fandango by Pavitra Wickramasinghe & Amelie Brisson-Darveau and Jorden & David Doody
Truck
Friday, January 8 - Thursday, February 4

More in: Visual Arts

Compared to cities like Toronto and New York, where there’s a competitive and critical atmosphere among artist circles, Calgary is known to be fairly peaceful. Recently however, the programming committee at Truck Contemporary Art in Calgary seems to be instigating shows where several artists explore similar thematic content through opposing or contrasting philosophies. In the latest show, Fandango, a dance term which can mean an extravagant quarrel or a big fuss, two collaborative teams share the space while showing very different bodies of work.

Of course the show is only a staged opposition, and the artists involved are probably more interested in what they can learn from each other than a critical standoff. Their art works, however, take on postures within the context of the exhibition.

Jorden Blue Doody and David James Doody are a collaborative team from Vancouver interested in material culture and the related aspects of kitsch and religious sentiments. Drawing from collage, the duo collects objects that occupy the “realm of shared experience,” whether it’s pop culture or world religions. Their assembled objects are loose variations on the themes of worship and allure, theatricality and decadent acts of display. Everywhere are the visual tropes of mystery and aura, created by familiar cheap objects such as rhinestones, velvet, vinyl, tassels and curtains.

Although the Doodys didn’t stop assembling the works until shortly before the opening, their excessive materiality reveals a rounded and profound understanding of various practices of looking. Each piece, while restricted to the gallery wall, performs a flirtatious dance of intrigue and draws the viewer into a central point of interest, while somewhat obscuring it.

For instance, the piece “Pageantry of Power” is a wooden box mounted on steel legs, covered in white faux fur and feathers, resembling a proud exotic bird displaying its charm. Emanating from the centre of the box, however, is a diorama of a tiny taxidermy tiger in attack mode, which is visually intensified and distorted by a magnifying panel and lighting. Apart from minimal use of spinning objects, each piece is mostly static, while making explicit their various acts of veiling and revealing.

Tucked nicely into a back wall of the gallery, Pavitra Wickramasinghe and Amélie Brisson-Darveau’s piece is a tightly engineered work, mixing electronic programming and semiotics. The pair combined their interests in movement through space, drawing and unconventional animation to create what looks like three vertical circuit boards of rotating discs. On the front and back sides of the discs are drawings of female dancers in two consecutive steps, forming an illusion of movement with the rotation of the discs.

The flapping movement of the discs rotating within holes on the boards is robotic, hypnotizing and yet violent. Coming from two female artists, the work assumes a deconstruction of the fetishized female dancer by revealing the mechanics of a dance move in a binary format as well as by the slightly coy use of frenetic movement that is basic, but hard to watch.

Whereas the Doody’s work makes overt the mechanisms of allure, Wikramasinghe and Brisson-Darveau’s work avoids alluring material. Yet the ungraspable and minimal nature of the piece utilizes another mechanism of allure: playing hard to get.

The flickering white discs with fine line drawings draw the viewer in through curiosity and wonder. But the animated dancers deny any prolonged or involved gaze as the choreographed sequence starts and stops each of the 84 discs at different times and for different durations. The result is like REM sleep, where your eyes dart around trying to follow something. It can be dizzying.

The exhibition, taken as a whole, is like a Disney World ride, where mechanized objects are made to move or sparkle, all as an entertaining display for the ride goers. But more like a fandango, the works are active performers, demanding the attention of the viewer and in doing so, attesting to the innate need to watch.