Snap, Crackle, Pop brought together a sample of new directions by artists in Southern Alberta who are exploring themes and iconography from popular culture.

This 72 page publication features full colour reproductions of works by Lisa Brawn, DaveandJenn, Len Komanac, Jason Mathis, Christopher Moore, and Shanell Papp and includes essays by Josephine Mills and Riva Symko. Designed by Patrick Côté.

Available November 5, 2010 from the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery.

The most obvious link between the work of Dagmara Genda and Marigold Santos as it is hanging in the main-space at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre in Kingston (as Homelands), is a formal one – the handling of medium. Both artists have created large-scale pieces composed by the fluid assembly of several smaller, intricate line drawings. It is a technique requiring the viewer to move in close to the pieces, examining individual image-clusters in a detailed analysis that is hopelessly belied once the viewer steps back out again to try and perceive the drawings as a whole. The second link in this show, motivated by the curators themselves, is the grappling of cultural identity as it is played out through Genda and Santos’ childhood experiences of immigration. Both artists compose a series of soft sequences that follow a non-linear negotiation between their own memories, cultural fables, and ‘real’ political history in a narrative that, ultimately, ends up in the present – with the artists themselves.

But I would argue that there is a third, more sophisticated and slightly subtler dialogue happening between the artworks of Genda and Santos in this exhibition. Both artists evoke a kind of ‘mythology’ through the content of their drawings – but it is a seemingly opposing rather than complimentary use of mythology. Genda, for instance, uses satirical images of Josef Stalin to challenge the way he once attempted to position himself as the philanthropic benefactor to Polish history. Her viewpoint is an interesting one that reveals a mixture of her close Polish heritage and her Canadian sensibilities. Santos, on the other hand, maintains the mythical status of her borrowed figures, using them in a kind of futile bid to hold on to the undulating memories of her early life in the Philippines. However, these competing formulas – political mythology vs. cultural mythology – actually embody what Lévi -Strauss identified as the common structural nature of myth. If, as he argued, “myth is language…a part of human speech”, then the drawings of Genda and Santos refer to the past in order to explain their identity in the present, the future and the past in the same way that myth possesses an ‘operational value’ that reveals timelessness (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 1963, 209).

Homelands runs at Modern Fuel ARC until October 23

A Modern Fuel dance party!
Sept 11 9pm
Black and white dress code in effect, 19+

No but literally though. Peeps. Hanging. In a window. Like, peeps as in peepers as in eyeballs. Five hundred of them. Suspended by fishing line from the ceiling of a commercial-style glass-fronted display window. The kind of display window that you might be more likely to associate with an old-fashioned Christmas toyshop display featuring a fat Santa presiding over an electronic train set, blonde curly haired baby dolls sitting on mounds of fake snow, and a jack-in-the-box leering maniacally out of his colorful aluminum shell. Or maybe you’re more the type to associate it with a flashy department store window featuring mannequins sporting the latest ripped designer jeans/sparkly blazer/t-shirt/spiky heels combo (what?). EITHER WAY, I highly doubt you’d be thinking “floating eyeball holding case” and so you might be slightly creeped out if you came across London, Ontario-based Conan Masterson’s latest installation, Peep Show. After all, it has some audacity, just staring at you like that. I mean, who’s the viewer here; the audience of perpetually alert googley eyes gawking out from behind the glass? Or the parade of white-collars, black-clad arties, street people, socialites, skateboard-toting youths, and Flames-jersey’d shoppers that inhabit the +15 pedestrian walkway in downtown Calgary – a labyrinth of indoor pathways built fifteen feet above the street linking all the major office towers and high-traffic shopping and cultural areas of the city centre. Designed to protect those poor, long-suffering Calgarians from the not-unusual minus thirty degree winter chill of the foothills, the +15 pathway, made (in)famous in films like Waydowntown, also entertains with its brightly colored walls, interactive digital maps, historical posters and, yes, half a dozen large display windows designated to various local artist-run-centres. Peep Show (aka “awesome eyeballs” as overheard by a group of passing eight year olds), hosted by Truck Contemporary Art, combines Masterson’s penchant for creating anthropomorphic and eerie fantasy environments out of soft, fluffy textiles. Her 2006 show Kaleidoscopic, for instance, featured a soft forest of enormous, hovering, white trunk-like sculptural forms in a darkly lit, glowing gallery space transformed into a kind of spectral antechamber. For Peep Show, Masterson had to adopt a painstaking construction technique that saw her (pun intended) gluing an army of tiny hole-punched vinyl pupils onto soft blue irises onto bulbous needle felted polyester scleras in an almost masochistically meditative process of repetition. Masterson has an obsession, it seems, with unsettling the banality of passing strangers and unsuspecting urban amblers by injecting the ethereal seduction of a freak-show smack-dab in the middle of their consciousness. Here, Bakhtin’s carnivalesque – that elusive artistic device that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the status quo with humorous chaos – is suspended motionless but watchful in some kind of low-grade fun-house hegemony. Masterson points out the spectacle of the spectacle and draws attention to the deeply embedded visual carnival of our everyday lives. Her work is unnerving, but captivating at the same time – welcoming in its cartoonish sense of humor and inviting materials, but still something you want to keep at arm’s length for all its strangeness. But can you keep a gaze at arm’s length?

Peep Show by Conan Masterson ran at the Truck Gallery +15 window space in Calgary in February and March 2010.

(as published by Modern Fuel A-R-C in Syphon, Issue 1.2)

July 30th, 2009: A characteristically humid and tired Thursday night in one small Ontario lake-city. (Laziness pervades. Nothing uncommon here, yeah? I’m going to see some friends, if I’m lucky maybe I’ll drink a drink, listen to something that will maybe be interesting if I’m lucky. Then I’ll drink another drink. Then I’ll go home.) An empty white space on the second floor of a downtown artist-run-centre. Suddenly, OUT OF NOWHERE: noise! All over the place! Sound is sent screeching through a vibrating set of amplifiers, ricocheting off the concrete floor, smashing into the drywall, and shattering the eardrums of a small group of devotees, aficionados, and habitués – paralyzed by this sonorial assault. Ahhhhh, but is it not that kind of paralysis that takes hold only because you’re maybe a little bit shocked, if you’re lucky? That kind of hypnosis that comes with being impaled on a good riff? It’s that kind of petrifying captivation that balances right on the ledge of really really good, ready at the slightest wrong move to tip over and plummet into embarrassing disaster. And if you’re lucky, your paralysis will be partly of your own making – I mean, maybe you’d been making yourself bored with the same old same old, but that means you can unbore yourself twice as fast and you don’t even have to be lucky to do that. So you find yourself standing there – mouth gaping, saliva practically dripping off your chin, eyes locked on Biesinger’s lithe frame, his feet dancing around the cord of his guitar in a rock & roll ballet that threatens to send him toppling over a mic-stand at the slightest trip. And then your eyes are flipping back and forth between Biesinger and Kruger – his drumsticks bouncing off the skins are making you blink in rhythm. And you’re thinking, “what garage did these two just emerge from?” Because it must be the same one that once housed earthshakers like The Sonics, Miserables, The Kinks and, more recently, The Vines, The White Stripes, and G&E Auto Brake and Tune-Up. And, after the two of them end up in some kind of a minimalist scrum in the centre of the floor, you close your mouth and swallow and slowly let your ears pop back into tune with the hum of after-gig white noise. And now you understand why E-town’s reputation for d.i.y. symphonic aesthetics has been spreading across the country. Anyways, the point is: Dear Famines; “I like some of the things you do”.

(as published by Modern Fuel A-R-C in Syphon, Issue 1)

DISCO, DANCING, DRINKS, & DEBAUCHERY.

A disco-themed dance party featuring the cool groove stylings of DJ’s LK, Sealegs, and Helen 10pm following a sound-art performance by Craig Leonard 8pm. Also featuring a Custom Art Record Raffle of uniquely altered LP’s (and corresponding record sleeves) by some of our favorite artists.

*licensed event

**‘precious metals’ dress code in effect (sequins WILL be considered a precious metal)

All proceeds will support Modern Fuel Artist-Run-Centre.

http://www.modernfuel.org

hello operator
i’m digging for fire
up comes a cop about twice my size
when I was younger I thought
shyness is nice
we’ve been on planes and on trains till we think we might die
coming home after a dozen wars
no time to think of consequences
good luck, good luck
you look to those you love
like you wanted to, blue jeans
are on my mind
she’s always calling my bluff
my only weapon was my pen
i know, what i know, i know
no matter what i know this means something
i would not run
i’m bored of cheap and cheerful
pirate skulls and bones
in search of the youth crew
i’m getting tired and i’m sweaty
i would go out tonight but
i think it’s time that i’ve got away
i can feel it
and it was awesome.

Steve Aoki mixes it up in Kingston, Ontario

It was cold outside. Freezing, actually and we were decked out in our best dance gear. It was sold out. We didn’t have to wait in line, whew. The front room was packed. We stopped at the corner of the bar and leaned in. We negotiated a couple of handfuls of topped-up gins through a crowd of hot bodies and around the screens to the main room. An empty plush booth: success! Staked-out a spot on the dancefloor (everywhere’s a dancefloor at NV): stretch out our feet and ankles with a half-hour set by Merkmeny. Aoki hit the decks. And I do mean hit. We danced for three hours. Without stopping. Nobody was stopping. It would’ve been stupid to stop when every track was more ridiculous than the last. He mixed up M.I.A. He mixed up Slayer. He mixed up The Beatles. It was a full-spectrum sonorial collision. What metamusic feels like: the mirrors were completely steamed up and we were soaking wet: I was laughing so hard I couldn’t stop moving.

Infra-Ordinary is @ Modern Fuel Gallery, Kingston until September 6th, 2008

What they recount doesn’t concern me, doesn’t ask me questions and doesn’t answer the questions I ask or would like to ask…How? Where? When? Why? – Georges Perec, L’Infra-ordinaire, 1989

What is this ‘ordinary’? Is it easier to ask what is extraordinary? Is the extraordinary “the big event, the untoward, the front-page splash, the banner headlines…a scandal, a fissure, a danger…the spectacular…the abnormal…historical upheavals, social unrest…the historic, significant, and revelatory…the truly intolerable, the truly inadmissible”? (Georges Perec, “L’Infra-ordinaire (1989)”, 209) Are these the only things, to Georges Perec’s annoyance, that speak to us? What has happened, he asks, to the daily? “What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it?” (209-210) Shouldn’t we be questioning “the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?” (210) Is this ordinary the daily? The everyday?

Is the everyday ordinary? What is the everyday? Is the everyday that which is commonly thought to be those actions and objects that involve a habitual presence in our lives? Is everyday life, as British cultural theorist Ben Highmore writes, “not simply the name that is given to a reality readily available for scrutiny”, but that which also accounts for aspects of life that lie hidden (Ben Highmore, ed. The Everyday Life Reader, 2002, 21)? Do things become everyday by becoming invisible or unnoticed (21)? Is the everyday familiar? Does familiarity breed a kind of numbness? Does the numbness and familiarity of everyday life, as American cultural theorist Fredric Jameson suggests, “estrange us from the everyday?” (Fredric Jameson Brecht and Method, 1998, 84). How is it that the familiar has become estranged? Is it because familiarity has encouraged neglect? (Highmore, 21) Do we neglect the familiar in favor of the extraordinary? Has this neglect caused our alienation from the ordinary everyday life? What is the consequence of this?

Was the Situationist International right after all? Is everyday life the “measure of all things” (Guy Debord, “Perspectives for Alterations in Everyday Life (1961)”, The Everyday Life Reader, 239)? And has that measurement become defined by materialism so that “all that was once directly lived has become mere representation” (Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1957, 12)? Are we locked into a cycle of reification whose result is the spectacularization of the ordinary? Does consumption depreciate everyday life? Is “what is gained at the level of appearances lost on the level of being and becoming” so that everyday lived reality begins to seem so inconsequential that “appearances become the centre of our attention, until roles completely obscure the importance of our own lives”? (Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, 1967, 125) Are impersonal human relationships, such as those found in public spaces or even more private situations like offices or apartment complexes, a kind of sterilized zone offering a “truce in the endless battle against isolation, a brief transit which leads to the illusion of communication”? (Vaneigem, 42) Are we passive receivers of information and regulations? Are we consumers of manufactured pseudo-needs? (Debord, 1957, 33) Has our passivity made the everyday inconspicuous? Was the Situationist’s search for a non-commodified ‘authentic existence’ – the synthesis of art and life – futile in the face of consumer capitalism? Isn’t consumption an inherent aspect of the everyday?

Is the everyday “choked with opportunities which we are unable to seize”? (Alberto Melucci as quoted in Michael E. Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life, 2000, 157) How do we “strip the everyday of its inconspicuousness?” (Highmore, 21) Will this allow us to move closer to ordinary reality? Instead of seeking the more grandiose revolutionary schemes of the Situationist’s, should we look, instead, to Michel de Certeau’s understanding that ‘culture is ordinary’ and human agency is a natural mechanism of everyday life? (Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1988, 1) Is there a creative nature to ordinary culture that only emerges out of the direct experience of a particular moment? (de Certeau, xix) Does resistance happen in the common here and now? Is power ordinary – “where there is power, there is”…ordinary? (Michel Foucault as quoted in de Certeau, xiv) “How are we to speak of these ‘common things’, how to track them down rather, flush them out…give them meaning…let them speak of what is”? (Perec, 210)

Can we track down the empty places in our city? If we photograph all the corners of Kingston and, over time, observe the changes, the details, the relationships between the natural and built environment will the innocuous suddenly stand out and confront us like the deserted baseball diamond in Preston Schiedel’s Marlbank Baseball Diamond? Will the Midway Mini-Mart suddenly seem like a noteworthy reflection of our history? Does this kind of history bleed from the edges of the aesthetic materialism right back into reality again, like a bird or a sailboat moving through one of Collin Zipp’s untitleds? Do these kinds of documentation tell us just as much about the terms of our technology as they do about their subject? Are the pixelations, scratches, and ordinary ‘flaws’ in the technologies of representation part of the unseen system of our perception?

Are there microscopic narratives lying dormant in the fibers of the everyday? Is it possible, for instance, to uncover the imperfections in the quest for feminine perfection by examining the rips, tears, bumps, and threads in the weave of Christine D’Onofrio’s Nude Grid 1? Do these Nudes have a life, a history, of their own after they’ve been removed from the body that wears them? Or is everyday life in a constant state of violent disintegration like a pair of nylon pantyhose? Like the bent and torn edges of a photograph or postcard that has been handed around and handed down through generations of owners? Can Dave Kemp and Kevin Robbie’s scanning electron microscope look deep enough to find Che’s aura in Alberto Korda’s postcard of Che Guevera at the funeral of the victims of the La Coubre. 1961.? Is the ordinary inherently lacking in aura?

Is aura as artificial a concept as one of Toni Hafkenscheid’s monumental model landscapes? Does the MGM Lion constitute the limits of reality or unlimited fiction? Isn’t Mt. Rushmore spectacular? Does the infra-ordinary magnify the common banalities and make them extraordinary? Is this the way we “question what seems so much a matter of course that we’ve forgotten its origins”? (Perec, 210) How much of it is really ordinary?

Works Cited
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Zone Books: New York, 1957.
Debord, Guy. “Perspectives for Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life (1961)”. The Everyday Life Reader. Ed. by Ben Highmore. Routledge: New York, 2002. Pp. 237-245.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. by Steven Rendall. University of California Press: Los Angeles, 1988.
Highmore, Ben, Ed. The Everyday Life Reader. Routledge: New York, 2002.
Jameson, Fredric. Brecht and Method. Verso: London, 1998.
Perec, Georges. “from L’Infra-ordinaire (1989)”. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Ed. and Trans. by John Sturrock. Penguin Books: New York, 1997. Pp. 207-249.
Vaneigem, Raoul. The Revolution of Everyday Life. Trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Rebel Press: London, 1967.

This Place of Departure by Pat McDermott runs until Aug 8th, 2008

This Place of Departure, Pat McDermott’s latest exhibition in the Project Room at the Union Gallery (Kingston, Ontario), is best understood with a material analysis. One that argues for the importance of substantive presence and stresses the way in which ‘stuff’ itself – matter, fiber, substance, material – embodies any directly experienced encounter with reality. Although there is nothing figural or representative about McDermott’s most recent collection of nine wax reliefs, they are clearly derived from a painterly tradition while at the same time recalling a set of ancient Egyptian stone tablets, or even an assortment of hanging wall textiles. In fact, if it weren’t for their subtly sweet aroma and dull smooth surfaces, one would be hard-pressed to identify the reliefs as being constructed almost entirely of wax, at all. McDermott’s use of lightly undulating biomorphic forms – created mainly by the effects caused in the molding of the wax – shifts the emphasis from representation to the physical reality of the materials themselves. Although there is a great attention to surface construction in McDermott’s reliefs, perhaps the abstract painterliness found here is more in line with one of the ripped and punctured canvases of Italian artist, Lucio Fontana’s Spatial Concepts, than with the conventions of Expressionism, Minimalism, or even early Modernism.

Like McDermott, Fontana stressed the ‘total reality’ of his canvases as material objects which were, nevertheless, intended to transcend their own materiality in favor of a more metaphysically ‘real’, yet still abstracted, concept (Jonathan Fineberg, Art Since 1940, 2000, 152). In other words, Fontana sought to shift the emphasis in painting away from representation and towards physical reality (Ibid). However, this is not to argue that form and substance are totally absent of any contextual, or even narrative, relevance in Departure. After all, there are traces of actual, everyday objects in McDermott’s works as well – a human hair curled in the centre of gone from night, for instance, or the rounded indentation of a coffee-cup in by weight of cloth and fact. Perhaps there is also an element of the spiritual and the emotional in the physicality of McDermott’s materials. Set into the small, shallow space of the Project Room, the translucent pieces of Departure tend to reflect the surrounding light in a subtle maneuver that blurs the edges of each rectangular composition in a sculptural performance of opaquely bleeding surfaces. There is a ghostly luminescence to the display, which evokes the kind of sacred hush found in the inner sanctum of a chapel or the quiet, brightly lit minimalism of a vacant hospital room – emphasized all the more by the two small, blood-like red circles at the top of in through the front and out through the back, by the thin red vein of thread hanging by a sewing needle in from this bright clarity, and by the dark red stain leaking through the top left corner of this place of departure. In fact, where Fontana’s canvases acted like ‘spatial environments’ aimed to launch the viewer into a metaphysical journey, McDermott’s reliefs act like ‘material departures’ that throw the viewer into a suspension of reality, only to pull them back into the tactile presence of their own corporeality.

Works Cited: Fineberg, Jonathan. Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being. Second Edition. Prentice Hall: New Jersey, 2000.