Death of Tom allows you to watch a movie in a little theatre, but there’s more….

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Death of Tom and Untitled (Minnesota Massacre) by Glenn Ligon
Alberta College of Art & Design
Friday, October 9 - Saturday, December 12

More in: Visual Arts

There are two schools of thought when it comes to viewing a work of contemporary art. Some want to check out background and biographical information, and find out about the work before they step into the gallery. Others want the “what you see is what you get” experience. When it comes to the two exhibitions on now at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, viewers don’t have much of a choice. You cannot fully experience the meaning of the works without talking to gallery staff, or consulting the didactic panels. This can be unfortunate for some curious viewers entering the gallery, as half (or all) of the work may remain hidden to them.

For example, in the exhibition Untitled (Minnesota Massacre) by Brooklyn-born artist Glenn Ligon, a white staircase and wall has been constructed in the middle of the gallery to block the viewer from entering the work. One has to climb the stairs to peer over a wall to see historical panels from the Glenbow archives. Based on a few visitors I watched, the problem is that some people think the staircase is the installation and never climb up to get a full view. The purpose of obstructing the viewer from the panels is poignant and necessary to understand the work. The didactic panel at the entrance to Ligon’s work and an accompanying text by Glenbow curator Quyen Hoang explain that the painted panels were created in the late 19th century to portray the gory murders and pillaging of settler villages by Sioux tribes. Ligon installed the panels the way they are stored at the Glenbow to comment on how much history is inaccessible to the public.

Ligon’s other work, Death of Tom, is another big construction that might leave you scratching your head if you don’t know the entire story. Inside the black box made of wood slabs is a mini movie theatre with carpet flooring and chairs and a black and white film, set to piano music, that has been transferred to video. The flickering, grainy images and flashes of white are entrancing, and the experience of watching a totally abstract movie alone in a theatre is surreal. It questions whether people enjoy the abstract and esthetic qualities of film itself, or do we just think we should?

Reading that the film is damaged footage of the artist’s re-staging of the 1903 silent film Uncle Tom’s Cabin, assures us that there is more to the work than meets the eye. In the original, the white actors in black face portrayed racial stereotypes, but the film and book still became historical documents of slavery. The fact that what we are seeing in Ligon’s piece is a misrepresentation of a misrepresentation points again to his theme of separation from historical reference.

On the other side of the gallery, work by Irish artist John Gerrard is also deceptively minimal. Standing opposite one another under spotlights are two screens with moving images of 3D landscapes. The smaller screen on a simple white monitor depicts the camera moving around an abandoned facility in the middle of endless barren fields. The larger screen, a projection onto a freestanding wall division, is a slow moving view of a farm threatened by an incoming storm cloud.

Both videos were meticulously built from hundreds of landscape photographs that were then recreated in a 3D-software program to depict the landscape from a 360-degree moving perspective. The small piece Grow Finish Unit (near Elkhart, Kansas), 2008 is the virtual representation of a pig farming facility. The technologically perfect depiction is eerie in its detail and lack of life signs. Spookier still is learning that the video shows the facility in real time. No one tends to the facility except for two days a year: to hook up the new pigs, and to ship other pigs to the meat plant. Machines feed the pigs and their waste flows into a nearby pool. I wouldn’t have known this without talking to the gallery staff. The other thing I wouldn’t have known is that the viewer controls the movement of the “camera” around the pig facility by turning the monitor to the left and right.

Gerrard’s second piece Dust Storm (Dalhart, Texas), 2007 uses the same technology. A photograph from a 1930s American dust storm was made into a virtual representation moving in real time. Since there isn’t any moving footage of the storm, this video is something to see. The exhibition literature explains that Gerrard links the dust bowl and Great Depression with the birth of oil and agriculture industries. The videos are particularly relevant to Alberta audiences since the landscapes based on Texas and Kansas look much like home.

Ligon and Gerrard present two shows that are rife with socio-political commentary relating to North Americans — especially those in the prairie regions. Topics of race relations, land use and industry are breached in an unsentimental and insinuating way. As in any healthy relationship, the more you put into this exhibition, the more you get from it.