The practice of collecting has been established as a major art-world preoccupation in the last decade, with artists amassing great archives of materials and historians poking into the history of the renaissance “cabinet of curiosities” or wunderkammern.
A Banff International Curatorial Institute conference, “Obsession, Compulsion, Collection” in 2003 firmly established this dialogue on collecting in Alberta art circles. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the 2007 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art, in which a group of the exhibition’s emerging artists is presenting new takes on the theme of collecting and its connection to memory.
Sarah Adams-Bacon’s Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt is a series of scrappily drawn portraits plus captions that read like an issue of “elementary school confidential.” She dredges up all kinds of uncomfortable and banal anecdotes about kids she grew up with: there’s the girl who was über-popular, the one who got knocked up in high school and the kid who committed suicide. The tender and unassuming suite of drawings dares to defy the Biennial expectation of large-scale, monumental works with its simple frames and grid arrangement on the wall. Once you are drawn into the stories, though, it is hard not to get lost in each one with the same delving interest that is provoked by the obituary pages of the paper.
Anu Guha-Thakurta’s practice of collecting began not out of morbid fascination, but out of the very real task of caring for her dying father. She translated this into Absentia, an installation that’s announced by a decorative stencil that wraps from the front of the gallery, through a doorway, and draws interest towards two small collections of objects pinned in the centre. The discreet oval-shaped vignettes include personal effects, such as scraps of clothing, drawings or small objects from her father and grandmother, and reflect moments that often slip away after someone has died.
These collections are evidence of her puzzling over the idea “that a scrap of paper could outlast a person.” Each little bit of personal ephemera reads like a map of the individual. “One of my concerns was that the work would be too sentimental,” she says. However, the paisley pattern common for menswear in India, engineer’s diagrams her father drew and sewing supplies used by her Danish grandmother offer narrative clues. They read the same way you might read lines on someone’s face that would be captured in a more conventional photographic portrait. As she says, “it’s not exactly garbage, but these things have very little material value.” Still, there’s something comfortingly universal about these little scraps of a life lived and, ultimately, the ghost-like installation that covers the wall holds its own with quiet gracefulness.
Through a small door in the gallery wall is Jonathan Kaiser’s meticulously built Lost Boys and the Hundred Year Mortgage. Once inside, it appears exactly as the inside entrance to a pretty posh house might — until closer inspection reveals cobwebby corners, spiders crawling in the upper reaches of the tiny room and a major water problem. In the places where coats and boots would hang, a wall of aquariums glows intriguingly. Some of the tanks are a dead ringer for pet store enclosures, while others are little custom built spaces that resemble a modernist hell for pets. Wall-to-wall white tiles to house a canary? Yikes! Little boy pajamas and a yellow raincoat hang above buckets, boots and a gallon of bleach, but all the creatures have flown this coop.
Kaiser’s long-standing interest in keeping pets — fish, hamsters, birds and mice, to name a few — and in pet shops, was good fuel for the story that unfolds in this elaborate set piece. “I always loved setting up an aquarium for a new pet, and I think the best part of the whole process was having the tank or cage all ready for its new inhabitant,” he says. He reveals the obsessive degree to which each object is carefully included to conjure a detailed story. He recalls a time when “a hose came loose on my aquarium and emptied all 48 gallons into the second story of my parents house,” resulting in major property damage on all the floors of their house. This probably informs the torrential downpour that rushes behind the purpose-built windows above a heavy front door in the installation.
He also cites his “impending move from the family home and into a place with my partner, Tom,” as another influence. The installation buzzes with the tension of his experience of growing up as a gay boy in a very religious home and community. “At church, people who are on the wrong track or have mixed up their priorities in life are called lost, or sinners.” He and his partner are cast as the “lost boys” that the title refers to.
The irony of these three installations, like that of many wunderkammern from the 17th century that survive today, is that the viewer can never completely unravel the complex narrative clues that are embedded in each work. That’s perfect for the artists for whom personal collections of mystery and memory are so closely intertwined.
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