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Exhibition

Lorraine Gilbert’s installation at the Or Gallery consists of several large photo murals which comment on the effects of logging on British Columbia’s landscape. As well as depicting economic devastation, Gilbert disrupts notions of the representation of landscape in fine art photography and painting that usually depicts an idealized and often pastoral beauty and untouched plenitude.

Brochure essay by Lary Bremner

Reworking what have been the largely male traditions of an intentionally that equates nature with a feminine Sublime and portraiture with “essence” and power, Lorraine Gilbert’s recent project is a newly engaged ecological precision, an extension of her previous involvement in what has come to be known as the New Topographies. Her work is revelatory of the naive and suspect pleasure produced by view-camera over-abundance of detail, here exposed as the trace of destructive power.

An eight-year veteran of the “drudgery and exhilaration” that is the seasonal rigour of tree-planting camps in British Columbia and Quebec, Gilbert uses a large format 4“x5” camera in the field, in this case the crewcut, the planting-site slash. In addition, she has constructed a portable studio for portrait work. As a forestry graduate, Gilbert does not condemn the industry but opposes the short-term economic expediency of current logging practices. Her project title, the rhetorically ironic Allowable Cuts, comes from the same neutralizing corporate newspeak that refers to old-growth tress as “unit stands,” forest decimation as the achievement of theoretically “sustainable yields” and tree plantations as “above ground management.” As environmental biologist
Chris Maser has pointed out (in The Redesigned Forest), species-rich first-growth forests are, under the current exploit-and-repair philosophy, rapidly being
replaced by “time constrained and oversimplified monoculture environments.” Likening old-growth to a living laboratory, and our only blueprint for a true forest, Maser argues that the point of irreversible cumulative damage to the ecosytem cannot be predicted by the statistical models forwarded by the profit-motivated “stewards” of our forest lands. As current bumper-sticker wisdom has it, “A tree farm is not a forest.” Faced with the further evidence of mineral erosion, flooding,, and the destruction of salmon spawning-grounds, Gilbert’s photographs help make visible, in the public domain, abuses that may still be corrected. Her project asks, “What degree of exploitation is ‘allowable,’ and who decides?”

That Gilbert should employ “the principle tool of the idealized North American landscape aesthetic” is not surprising. By way of highly detailed and inappropriately “beautiful” images of devastation she reclaims and re-employs the landscape tradition, evoking, of necessity, everything from the expansionist survey
photography of the late 1800s through to the humanist modernism of Ansel Adams. In this context, Gilbert calls into question both current clearest logging practices and photography’s historical complicity with notions of nature’s endless abundance. Her work is conscious of photography’s tendency to synechdotal framing, and its inherent irony: the virtual replacement by the document/simulacrum for the “real” world it purports to depict.

In the ecological context of the altered landscape Gilbert has subtly inverted a number of the expected photographic conventions. In previous installations of her ongoing project (La Terre Promise, and Le Paysage) the referential dissonance set up in work captioned, for example, Luc in Bella Coola, or Planting Crew Going to Work, Invermere, BC. is effected by the minute scale of the human “subjects” all but lost in a recapping of the mutilated topography. One is reminded of the plethora of turn-of-the-century stereoscopic images of the wilderness, particularly the heroic poses of loggers and survey engineers whose very presence, while intended to show the scale of the towering first-growth
frontier, signified Victorian confidence, domination and control. Here, in the large panorama Carolle, posing & planting (four 30“x40” panels), the barren
clearest slopes seem to extend endlessly beyond the frame, threatening even the foregrounded and evident optimism of the putative subject, the young planter.

Gilbert’s portrait work draws the viewer into an easy identification with “document” but her directorial interventions resist the romanticism of an entirely objective gaze. Here portraiture, itself landscape’s coeval, sociological twin, plays with a range of viewer expectations. The sixteen 11“xl4” portraits, comprising a single piece arranged in a grid, remind us of both the statistical nature of the uniformly imposed plantation plots, and of the faceted “species-rich” diversity that is the human “resource.” The temptation to a facile valorization of the “proletarian” planters that was subverted by the hyperbolic mock heroism of Self Portrait (from La Terre Promise) is here extended in this grouping. A taxonomy of portrait styles and intentions – carte de visite to snapshot aesthetic, work-site specific to backdrop formality – acts to diffuse the historical pretentious of portraiture, and provide what Barthes would call a “suprasgmental” syntax. Indeed, Gilbert’s inclusion of biographical information about the planters (the crew family tree, if you like) reveals their broadly middle-class origins. Gilbert’s own active role as a planter gives portrayals of her cc-workers aspects quite dissimilar to the well-intentioned but ultimately condescending bathos of reportage in, for example, the widely disseminated F.S.A. photographs of Depression-era America.

Cross-fading the hard distinctions between portraiture and landscape forms, the humorous iconography of the introductory piece, Shaping the New Forest (30“x40”, colour), says much about the necessary cc-habitation of the mutually interdependent systems, the human and the ecological. It provides, also, clues to a reading of multiple and overlapping subject in the pivotal diptych Cassettes of Tress/Snags, the unplanted tree-plugs in the lush verdancy of the first panel dichotomous with the planter and seedlings dwarfed by the razed and l’ocllp- expanse in the second.

A short video, a study for a future (Spring/Summer ’9 1) project, accompanies Allowable Cuts. Its brief, straightforward sequences of treeplanters at work are interspliced with tightly framed slow-motion shots. The soundtrack, as listened to through earphones, is comprised of ambient planting noises: buzzing of insects and the breathing of planters; scraping of shovels and the purposeful clomping of boots. The silence of the slow-motion hands and torsos conveys a sense of the meditative rhythm that can be part of even the most back-breaking work. The video’s
inclusion here serves as an antidote to the kind of self-congratulatory television advertising that has been the main public relations strategy of British Columbian
logging companies in recent years.

Gilbert, stressing the documentary nature of Allowable Cuts is quick to emphasize that this work is “not about art,” is less self-reflexive and conceptual
than its showing in a gallery context would indicate. However, that a company like MacMillan Bloedel should attempt to enlist for their publicity Gilbert’s more “heroic” portraits (as they appeared in the Spring ’88 issue of the treeplanters’ magazine Screef), while refusing to accept what they termed the “scare tactics” of the clearest landscapes, is telling. In the contentious insistence on form Gilbert reopens the discourses of documentation and divests them of the unquestioned traditions of unlimited access both photographic and economic.

Lary Bremner, 1990 Lorraine Gilbert is a photographer from Montreal who currently teaches at the University of Ottawa. Previously a graduate in Environmental Biology (McGill), she has also studied forestry at the University of British Columbia. Her
most recent work was shown at McMicheal Museum in Klienburg, Ontario, and published in The Landscape/Le Paysage: 8 Canadian Photographers. She will also be exhibiting with Darius Kinsey and Frank Gohlke in Rochester, N.Y. in March, 1991. Lorraine has been planting trees every summer for the past decade.

Lary Bremner is editor/publisher of Tsunami Editions and is a former treeplanter.

Exhibition

Brochure by Phillip McCrum

William Nevens
Paintings

William Nevens’s paintings of contemporary herald signs are like stigma on the
surface of his canvases, acting as scabs of an antiquated language system that, for him, illustrates the dilemma of finding and making meaning in painting. Three Stripes Shaping a Canvas can be seen as both a starting point and finishing point in his inquiry.

This painting, the only abstraction in the exhibition, consists of a shaped canvas that appears to collapse inward. It is supported only by three monochrome colour bars that crisscross the surface in an attempt to maintain the regular rectangular shape of the other five paintings. The other paintings represent a variety of heraldic expression, ranging from the bombastic Coat of Arms of John Paul the Second to the Hells Angels emblem (which looks the most uncomfortable within the confines of the rectangle, needing some kind of skin as ground to be truly appreciated). In between are the arms of the Manitoba R.C.M.P., the Correctional Service of Canada, and the Victoria Cross. Each emblem is painted meticulously and centred on the canvas.

Heraldry is the the science of “armorial bearings,” controlling and denoting position and presence of the bearer of these arms. Historically bestowed by the head of state – monarch, city councils or pope, etc. – they ascribe one’s successes and the reasons for that success, whether it be militaristic, mercantile, or political. A coat of arms determined status, defined difference and, in short, gave the bearer the privilege of political existence. The structure that made up this language of commerce was visual, standardized and complex. It relied primarily on the shield shape as ground, the surface of which was dissected and divided by lines that halved, quartered and crisscrossed. Blocks of colours, abstract shapes such as chevrons, and more literal illustrations such as wines cups and lyres supplied a meaningful syntax describing the bearers and their status.

As a painter, Nevens finds himself locked within the circumscribed structure of modernist discourse. His use of heraldic sign is an attempt to understand this confining structure and to articulate the difficulty in speaking to the issue of painting and, ultimately, the exodus of meaning from the modernist canvas. His shield,Three Stripes Shaping a Canvas, is emblematic of that struggle in representing both the collapse of the canvas and the possibility of recouping meaning within the monochromatic bars.

The extreme standardization of the heraldic system appeals to Nevens, whose
paintings are inextricably connected to the reject of modernism. He attempts an analogistic strategy by placing these figures of heraldic meaning on the ground of the modernist canvas, therefore bringing into question the significance of these anachronistic signs in relationship to himself as painter. Coats of arms determined the language of dominance in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, whereas they now act only as obscure signs of dominance in an ailing culture. Images as antagonistic as the Victoria Cross and the Hells Angels emblem are reduced and revealed by Nevin’s treatment to be equal and devoid of polemic confrontation. These regressive figures, despite their careful painting and privileged composition, end up flat and empty, their condition vacuous.

Simultaneously, Nevens questions the validity of any mark made upon his standardized canvas, whether it be figure or abstract, thus challenging himself with the impossible task of making a mark. The canvas is collarless, flat and mute, yet it holds the authority of art history, resulting in the distress of a collapsing canvas: acrisis of meaning where even the blank slate implodes. Nevens’s answer to this perplexing problem is a “return to the future,” wedgingin three thin bars of monochrome. Less than marcs or emblems, they just hold, not re-establish, the rectangle. This preposes that despite the apparent co-option of modernism into a historical and therefore arcane mode, it still offers, if just as a support, the possibility of establishing an authenticity of meaning.

Phillip Mccrum, 1990 
William Nevens is an artist living and working out of Vancouver. He is a 1988 graduate of Simon Fraser University. Exhibitions include; Helen Pitt Award Winners Show, 1988/1989, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver 1989; Artropolis ’87, Vancouver, 1987; and various Simon Fraser University student shows.

Phillip Mccrum is an artist, working and living in Vancouver. Director of the Or Gallery from 1987-89. He is currently working on a collaborative project with. Gerald Crcede, entitled ‘‘Don’t Call Me Buddy, Buddy.’‘

Exhibition

The OR Gallery is proud to present Daniel Congdon’s exhibition of his new sculptural works.

Catalogue by William Wood

He first demonstrated his system of perspective on a small panel about half a braccio square. He made a representation of the exterior of San Giovanni in Florence, encompassing as much of that temple as can be seen at a glance from the outside. . . . And he placed burnished silver where the sky had to be represented, that is to say where the buildings were free in the air, so that the real air and atmosphere were reflected in it, and thus the real clouds seen in the silver are raried along with the wind as it blows… [H]e made a hole in the painted panel at that point in the temple of San Giovanni which is exactly opposite the eye of anyone stationed in the portal of Santa Maria deI Fiore, for the purpose of painting it. The hole was as tiny as a lentil bean on the painted side and it widened conically like a woman’s straw hat to about the circumference of a ducat, or perhaps a bit more, on the reverse side. He required that whoever wanted to look at it place his eye on the reverse side where the hole was large, and while bringing the hole up to his eye with one hand, to hold a flat mirror with the other hand a distance that more or less approximated in small braccia the distance in regular braccia from the place he appears to have been when he painted it up to the church of San Giovanni. With the aforementioned element of the burnished silver, the piazza, the viewpoint, etc., the spectator felt he saw the actual scene when he looked at the painting. I have had it in my hands and seen it many times in my days and can testify to it. – Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, The Life of Brunelleschi1

The preceding account of Filippo Brunelleschi’s ‘demonstration panel? records the first known experiment in linear perspective performed by an artist. Although detailed enough, one gets a bit impatient with Manetti’s awkward way of explaining the procedure for the illusion. His hesitancy is surely related to his biographical purpose: to record what Brunelleschi did rather than provide a technical explanation of perspective. Even so, Manetti seems to also have a problem with how to present what the apparatus actually did, and rests back comfortably on the rhetoric of mundane metaphor and trompe d’oeil. He wishes away the problem of technically produced (or induced) deception. It would be nice to refer elsewhere, but, since the panels are lost, we rely on the biographer, discomfited by detail, attesting to illusion’s effectiveness – happily fooled, punctuated
by an old mirror trick.

Several items of interest can be drawn from the demonstration, not the least of which is the idea of demonstration itself. Brunelleschi was not making art so much as he was making an instrument in order to illustrate principles that would be of interest to an art of spatial coherence. The local arid specific nature of the effect is enough to satisfy its proof of principle, but the methodology does seem cumbersome: using both hands, a double reversal of the sky, a panel painted either in or on a mirror, a single eye, a precise location – a coordination of devices for something you could see right in front of your nose.2 Nonetheless it is the complex ingenuity of this instrumentation – even the idea of a simulated visual substitute – that substantiated the illusion. And the most strident effect waS the declaration of an apparatus that took account of the spectator by controlling his relation to the illusory painting and providing that glimpse of passing clouds to supplement the static
architecture of the proportioned “temple.” The deliberately repeopled representation of the piazza provided the relief for the illusion; the idea of persons inhabiting the space was left potential, perhaps even volatile.

By concentrating on miniaturizing the scene and by exploiting the virtual flatness of the mirror image, Brunelleschi modeled the body’s elision through framing so that the scrupulous organ of the eye accepted arid willingly recognized the fixed relations of its spectatorship. The spectator was not fooled into being there but was so exactly sited as to go along with the artifice of a manually devised form of seeing. Attuned to similar
ideas, Daniel Congdon installed a type of demonstration panel in the Simon Fraser University mall in 1982. placing a mirror to cover the screen of a television monitor displaying videotext information to the student pedestrian, he brought to the quadrangle a spatial coherence that was also a specular quandary. The spectator was intended not so much to attend and accept the mirror’s reversed reading of that space commanded by the monitor, but to confuse the mirror with a potential recording or surveillance of the architecture from another place or time. The lack of coordination between mirror space and travelled space, though rational enough, was utilized to suggest an aporia about tine mental imagining of institutional territory.

Where Brunelleschi proved the susceptibility to recognition of a regulated and controlled vision – using a regulated and known civic space – Congdon demonstrated the potential for misrecognition implicit in televised communications by including the public space of the university. His aim was not to provide an illusion replacing that space, but to suggest the habitual practice of viewing as disembodied and turned away from the somatic location of the spectator. Congdon’s linkage was not to the lineage supposing the mirror as falsifying plane, but to its tropic possibility as the phantasmagoric component of instituted subjectivity. The passing student was to see their own body as only temporarily of the scene projected; tertiary to the scene’s relentless appropriation of bodies and subjects in place in the institutional sphere. To recognize one’s position here was an acceptance of transparency in relation to one’s own body. The guaranteed illusion of the mirror not merely replaced an image, but expressed a capitulation to the administration of space that intimated your particular replacement. The ideal spectators were those who saw their campus peregrinations as continuous with a history made in contest with the authorized version of their presence within the monitoring scope. They were meant to include, along with their somatic positioning, that exceptional yet ordinary sense of being
within and without the scope of their authorized placement.

What links these two demonstrations is their differing relations to forms of visualize. Brunelleschi’s proportioning and microbic illusion speaks of the calculating mercantilism of his Florentine surround, while Congdon’s intervention marks the phantasmagoric relation of the subject to an administered space. Where the painted panel had the (slightly redundant) virtue of prescribing the subject’s relation to its work, the mirrored monitor indicated how the subject can be tricked into assuming that things go on elsewhere, exterior to the
surroundings and the experience of a specific, institutional site. These conceptions of space, institutional and somatic, replaced and reconfigured, are the foundation for Congdon’s subsequent projects.

~~~~~~~

Brunelleschi’s panel initiates an investigating activity among artists proceeding along two avenues: the preparation of more complex means of linear perspective (often using mechanical devices) and the use of optical instruments as aids to vision. Both are ways of being elsewhere, of seeing otherwise by systematizing experiential relations and framing the site of artistic production. The grids and veils of perspectives rendering, the
geometry of the picture plane, the camera obscura and the geometrical telescope, anamorphosis arid the Dutch peep-show perspective box all belong to this history – as does the presentational technology of photography. Where the first strand develops artificial methods for transposing planar information onto surfaces, the latter processes empirical vision through glass, mirrors, inversions and reversals, aiming to refine the eye’s abilities to organize and concentrate upon the scene at hand. Though perhaps divergent in their respective virtual and empirical approaches to cognizant spatial organization, there can be little doubt as to the regime they served. By placing and transporting visual objects onto planes, the schemas and devices posited a vision exterior to the body, maybe not corporeal at aII, which could be assumed or mimicked by the producing and receiving subject of the work in question.

Congdon’s Untitled (Project) has an ironic relation to this history inasmuch as it looks like (and is) a precision instrument, but delivers a rather simple visual experience. Set against the wall of the gallery, a squared-off conical scope and a forty-five degree mirror is spied into to reveal the gallery one just crossed to use the instrument. The principle proved is surely familiar, but the reflection does contain other elements -in particular, a black frame, similar in proportion to a cinema screen, appears at the edge of the image, almost a trace of the otherwise now – invisible instrument regarded on approach. The mirror as well, through its silver and liquid contents, attenuates flatness and acuity, ‘bringing up’ the light as it hits the white wall, while the frame crops any moving object in the reflected space, partialities the whole one seemingly ‘left’ to put an eye to the scope.

“I like to watch” is a clever rejoinder in this instance, for the coyness of its admitted pleasure does the necessary work. What is apparently beyond the principle proved, and commonly taken as extrinsic to the precision exemplified by tine scopic instrument, is the spectator’s imbrication within vision as an unprincipled subject. The regulation of vision, and its relation to the subject’s realization of space, has been exploited and disabused in an unspeakable manner, turning time again on the matter of spatial coherence as opposed to cognitive position. Untitled (Project) is a probe in this area, for its banality is also its provocation, It contests the gallery by reproducing it without questions or qualities; it punctuates the scopic viewer in another way by voiding the viewing body and framing the space instead. One does riot just look into the scope, one gazes into it to locate oneself within the frame of an ideal visualize only to find vision implicating a crouched, human, monocular organism subject to seeing as a peremptory form of speech. The user of the scope recognizes that the spectacle offered is not simply a view but represents a position taken by tine spectator-that position makes not just tine scene but the seer open for direction. As Lacan indicates: “it is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effect. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied
and through which-if you will allow me to use a word, as I often Coo, in a fragmented form – I am photo-graphed.”3

~~~~~~~

Lacan’s fragmented word harks back to the early connection made between images formed using light-sensitive chemicals and the idea of these images as written. Fox Talbot proudly called his collection of photographs The Pencil of Nature, and began his chemical investigations after having produced unsatisfying transfers of landscapes by hand using a camera lucida.4 To him, and to many photographic promoters, these notions followed from the seemingly ‘objective’ character of the technology; its distinct aloofness from the human hand and its utilization of given light and dumb materials. Yet the development of that technology has shifted the idea of writing from the light exposed to the plates produced, stressing that the image is written by the operator of the camera and not by nature herself.

With this emphasis, the photograph became a cipher for the domination of nature, proceeding through the analogy of the lens with the eye and the camera with the mind. Even recent theory, by taking over a linguistic model, has read the image produced as an iconographic treasure-trove with little consideration for the arrangement of materials and processes required to make an image appear. Photography remains an expression of the
operator of an unaccounted-for instrument, even as the photographer is reread as a socio-political subject and the photograph itself is interpreted as a collective fetish. Congdon’s slide-projection works attempt to address this lacuna in our understanding of photographic technology by stressing an unresolved doubt.

To do so, Congdon exploits a number of simple aspects of photographic projection. He has combined the parts of standard slide-projection systems-lamp, lenses, transformer, mirrors, Screen-in rational schema, but in a way rarely presented. If technology covets the covering box that both protects the equipment and mystifies its workings, Congdon does away with the box. Rather than hiding and containing the device, the elements are placed on aluminum shelves extending from gallery walls, and the spectator approaches them from the side. The placement of lens and screen and slide is easily understood, yet the devices retain a sense of mystery, power, estrangement, as the light from the unprotected bulb spills out across the wall and the image ends up oddly undone by the apparatus. The milled surfaces and bright light effect the image they transfer, rendering an innocuous representation of nature into a microbic, miniaturized representation of its delivery system, or making a camera a projection device rather than a faithful recorder. The photographer is absented more by the array of technology than by the indifference of the actual imagery, and Congdon foregrounds the apparatus to the point where it appears as if the image were expelled from tine device rather than facilitated by its arrangement of parts.

The suggestion, as in his other work, is of an unknown force regulating the process, an other writing representation rather than inscribing this particular image into codes of semiosis. The shelves and technical instrumentation intimate a laboratory setting, a testing arrangement for spectacular effects-the aspect of external control redolent in aII projecting equipment.5 The aluminum lateral support discourages the spectator from taking an anthropomorphic position behind the lamp; we must approach from the side, and the projection thus becomes a spatial scheme instead of a replacement for vision. In Corner Piece a mirror reflects the image around a right angle, delivering it intact but invisibly to a small theatre. One gazes into this blackened anti mirrored box as into a doll’s house, to meet a picture of leafy branches arid twigs multiplied across three mirrors. The scale is miniature, almost cosy, yet uncannily disjointed from the projecting appliance. It seems that it should be bigger – or is bigger some place else – and that this appearance is the prototype of an image-machine of monstrous proportion. Which it is, in a sense, for Congdon uses stock parts from Kodak projectors with their industrial standards for illumination, film stock, screen material arid heat filters.

Again, it is the field of management which intrudes, along with the compliant spectres of residual epistemological regimes. Corner Piece bends light and makes it travel as in many an elementary optical experiment, while proving simply the system’s continued efficacy. Praktik, meanwhile, reverses the camera’s recording function by using it as a projecting lens, opening up the back to deliver a picture of the camera itself to paradoxically trepan the model of the mind as a camera obscura. Appearing upside down and showering the wall in an anamorphic distortion, the projection carries a humorous reference as the unshielded bulb casts a truly indexical shadow of the camera above its illusionistic picture. The shadow, the cave, the spectator not yet ready to go out into the sunlight . . .

~~~~~~~

There is a game being played out in this arrangement that revels in the topsy-turvy moves of inversion and reversion, negative/positive, citification and enlargement that characterize photography as a technology arid as an imagination. It is the fascination with this certified visualize that Praktik interferes with, making a case for an unhappy interpenetration of subject and object. The mobility of tautology and qualification inhabiting the political economy of photographic standards is raised against the iconographic assumption of identification arid projection in the imagery. The photograph is then not writing by light, but is instead written by human agencies, utilities and social organization. Even the title, with its modish relation to praxis as a model of theory becoming actualized, declines as well into practice, discipline, habit – the domain of subjective construction rather than the action of positive proof.

Congdon’s work with optical instruments takes advantage of what Martin Kemp has called an attempt to define areas of “valid operation of the ‘Arts’ in contrast to the ‘Sciences’.“6 Kemp notes how the breakdown of relations between science and art – in terms of perspectives studies and optical instruments-occurs alongside the emergence of segregationist aesthetic theories and romantic ideology. The separation of disciplines then speaks of the aesthetic as a distinctly subjective area of endeavour, while the sciences occupy territory quite objective anti Seemingly
super-natural. an accordance with the aesthetic attitude, the alien presence of the scientistic ‘spoils’ the enjoyment of imagery with lights and devices that don’t make things comfortably viewable arid identifiable as potentially experienced. We might think as well of Jonathan Crary’s parallel description of the abandonment of the camera obscura as a model of the observer’s primarily visual cognition in favour of a conception of the body as receptive to and productive of a variety of sensual stimuli. “The perceiver,” he writes, “here becomes a neutral conduit, one kind of relay among others to allow optimum conditions of circulation and exchangeability, whether it be commodities, energy, capital, images, or information.“7 We can recognize in his terms the traces of technology used in Congdon’s art, and its attempt to render opaque the institution of neutrality in reception.

It must appear odd, then, that Congdon’s latest work for this show is a ‘straight’ photographic print. Showing a technical high school in Vancouver, the print is an admirably sober representation of the school as part factory, part public institution, part of an altogether unexceptional urban landscape. These qualities are quite intelligible, as is the slight ironic use of reflection in the image-a puddle close to the camera reflects the cloudless Sky, a liquid analogy for the plate’s receptivity and the acuity of the lens. However, cast among the scopes and projectors, the disjunct illusions and regulated viewings, this image condenses and qualifies much of the other works’ eccentricity. It is a place of techniques that is sited, a school to teach procedures and processes, to cultivate skill and instill fidelity to a neutralized technology.

The question the technical school raises concerns the status of knowledge, which, after all, is what Congdon’s tropic devices have repeatedly frustrated to suggest the gaps of habit, regulation and instrumentation in our relations to mental and physical space. The school’s shops and tools, its class and gender biases, its stress upon production are all intertwined with its pragmatic obedience to dominant pawers. Here, in a sense, is the training ground for the millers and grinders, technicians and printers who fabricate the devices arid images Congdon uses for his investigations. That we relay read this picture without recognizing this condition is yet another discontinuity in our knowledge of the management of imagery, technology and experience. That we may riot notice that the school is unpopulated in the picture – that it is an empty, virtual image of subjection like Brunelleschi’s piazza-is what makes it wholly appropriate in the gallery.

William Wood

1 Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, “From The Life of Brunelleschi,” in Brunelleschi in Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974), 65-66.
2 Brunelleschi did do a similar panel for the Piazza del Signori, but did without the mirror by making a cut-out of the buildings that one could hold up to the sky.
3 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis, trams. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 1O6.
4 See Martin Kemp, Science and Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 200.
5 Els Barent, “Typology, Luminescence, Freedom: Selections from a conversation with Jeff Wall,” Jeff Wall: Transparencies (New York: Rizzoli, n.d.), 99.
6 Kemp, Science and Art, 221 .
7 Jonathan Crary, “Modernizing Vision,” in Hal Foster, ed., Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 42. 
Daniel Congdon
Education
1990 MFA, University of British Columbia
1985 BFA, Simon Fraser University
1978-80 University of Calgary

Solo Exhibitions
1988 Projector, Western Front Gallery, Vancouver,
1987 Cinema, Window for Noncommercial Culture, Vancouver.
1984 Two Sculptures, Simon Fraser University Gallery, Vancouver.
1982 Untitled installation on the campus of Simon Fraser University.

Group Exhibitions
1988 New Sculptural Works, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.
1987 Grunt Or Artspeak, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver.
1986 Objects of Labour, Park place, Vancouver.
1985 On the Subject/Object of Money, (N)on Commercial Gallery, Vancouver.
Office Structures, vacant offices of the Vancouver Stock Exchange, 536 Howe Street.
1984 Ex Academe, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.
Poco Rococo, Coquitlam, British Columbia. 
Bibliography
Davis, Tod. “Ex Academe,” Issue, Vol. 2, No. 3, Jan. 1985.
Fee, Collin. Vanguard, Vol. 1 6, No. 4, Sept/out. 1987.
Godley, Elizabeth. “Grunt Or Artspeak,” The Vancouver Sun, June 19, 1987.
Godley, Elizabeth. “Reflections on labour, from a revolutionary viewpoint,” The Vancouver Sun, Nov. 12, 1986.
Harris, Mark. “Ex Academe,” Vanguard, Feb. 1985.
Johnson, Eve. “Modern Art from the Suburbs’?,” The Vancouver Sun, June 5, 1984.
Lindsley, Robert. Issue, Vol. 2, No. 7, June 1985.
Muirhead, Ross. “Project,” Artery, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1988.
Ferry, Art. “Elegant Exhibit,” The Province, Jan. 11, 1988.
Ramsey, Ellen. Vanguard, Vol. 1 3, No. 7, Sept. 1984.
Talve, Merike. New Sculptural Works, Contemporary Art Gallery, 1988.

Exhibition

The Or Gallery is proud to present the first Vancouver exhibition of Brenda Petays. Petays is an emerging artist from Victoria. Her show, Affectionate Objects, consists of objects and paintings that explore issues of decoration and feminism.

Brochure essay by Donna Clark

Brenda Petays’ Affectionate Objects

Petays’ Affectionate Objects are made strange through excessive detail, exaggerated size and hybrid constructions which make apparent the repressed in Western culture’s psycho-social formations of fetishism.

Valentine is representative of Petays’ five works, which combine large-scale painting and sculpture. The painting yokes contradictory elements: An enlarged handpainted detail of a mechanically reproduced nineteenth-century wallpaper design. In this sense, the separation between private spheres (represented by the wallpaper) and public spheres (represented by mechanical reproduction) is imploded to form a utopian whole.* In addition, the wallpaper painting is of a familiar motif, roses and thorns in the shape of a heart. Yet, through the exaggerated size of these ghostly black-and-white roses covered by shellac, the work reveals a menacing side – sadomasochistic relationships – which a fixation on the surface of sentimentality of love often masks.

The sculptural component to Valentine, a found object and dysfunctional machine part or mechanical tool, embellished with handpainted or hand-dipped details, is placed as if on an altar before the painting. The seemingly detached mechanical neutrality of shiny steel on highly reflective black plinths is comprised through the addition of artisanal embellishments that suggest the domestic: The steel object as well as being suggestive of a shower hear or a “chocolate grinder,” appears as if it has been dipped by hand in a gooey yellow confection which has hardened like icing on a cake. Thus, although the machine part may evoke a late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century “bachelor machine,” its relationship to the feminine imagery of the wallpaper painting is insisted upon. Like the painting, such binary oppositions as private and public spheres, feminine and masculine, and the artisanal and mechanically reproduced, are imploded. For these reasons, this embellished and detached object appears strange or humorous, privileged as an enshrined fetish.

Both the painting and the sculptural components of each work are fetishes and hybrids that reveal repressed relationships between people, although when considered simultaneously they appear simply in a figure-and-ground relationship to one another: The figure is associated with a “masculine” body, which contrasts to the ground associated with a “feminine” body. However, they can easily be read as recursive,that is, the “feminine” ground of the paintings and the “masculine” figure of the objects may together form a hybrid body. The effects of all five works would then be to turn the gallery into a liminal space that allows the spectator a critical distance to the fetishized objects.

Donna Clark, September 1990.

Brenda Petays Born Moosmin, Saskatchewan, 1956. Lives and works in Victoria, M.F.A., University of Victoria, 1990. B.F.A., University of Alberta, 1987. B.A., University of Saskatchewan, 1979. Exhibitions: Affectionate Objects, McPherson Library Gallery, Victoria, 1990; Prints from the Snap Archives, University of Alberta, Edmonton, 1990; Imagemakers Underground, Edmonton LRT Station, Edmonton, 1988; Suspects Latitude 53, Edmonton, 1988; Medicine Hat Print Show, Medicine Hat, 1988; Technicalities. Technical Staff Exhibition, University of Alberta, Edmonton, 1987.

Donna Clark is an artist and writer who lives and works in Vancouver. She is a member of the Kootenay School of Writing and the Association for Non-Commercial Culture.

*Charlotte Perkins-Gilman’s short, autobiographically based story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written in 1892, describes her experience by inventing a female character who becomes sicker as a result of the rest “cure” prescribed by her doctor-husband. This “cure” often confined (mainly bourgeois) women to their beds for long periods of time. Barbara Johnson’s “Is the Female to male as Ground is to Figure?” (in Feminism and Psychoanalysis, eds. Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1989) provides a redemptive addition to Gilman’s story: “Twenty years later Gilman published a sequel titled ‘Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper,’ which documents the therapeutic effects of the story on other women suffering from the rest cure, and concludes, ‘It was intended… to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.’” Also, Gilman was active in the women’s movement and eventually left her doctor-husband.

Exhibition

Brochure Essay by Scott Watson

Roy Arden
Frontenac

The series Frontenac follows a year of taking portraits. This activity marked a return to earlier concerns.The audience for this exhibition will notice at once that Arden’s concerns for photographs and images are now ‘‘parallel’‘ to his involvement with monochromes. But beginning with Rupture (1985), and ending with Komgata Maru (1989), these ‘practices’ had intersected in single works of art. Images in those works were found in archives. Arden’s only interventions were in cropping and in presentation. Yet beneath the theoretical possibilities and expectations of such strategies provoked there were always uncanny correspondences in these images, with each other and with Arden’s earlier work – single or double prints of his photographs which he exhibited as Fragments.

I suppose there was nothing really uncanny about seeing Arden’s authorship or even his portrait in photographs that he selected but that he had taken by others before he was born. The sensibility found in the early Fragments was constructed out of Arden’s feeling for and knowledge of European modernist photography. Arguably the most important figure of this history for Arden is Wols, whose photographs are little-know in Canada. Wols photographed things that had been touched and worn, still-life compositions of pig’s kdneys, eggs, eyeglasses and cheap wallpaper, empty corners and windows, something discarded on the street. Arden reads a Bataillian violence in Wols’ images of a disordered world. And his own photographs – in this case of surprised and “interrogated” pipes, boxes, ladders and coils stored in the boiler-room of the Frontenac apartment building – imply by their Wolsian character a correspondence between the world of war and postwar ruin, and our faceable province whose modernity is so innocent.

Indeed, Arden’s photographs are an affront. How dare he photograph junk in a basement when he could be taking pictures of all the wondered things we have wrought in the West: How dare he love the crumpled, worn, used-up world when a new one is so readily available. How dare he use European models when he could use Canadian ones.

Arden s boiler-room is meant as a poetic place, disturbed, even startled by his camera’s flash. The boiler itself is sort of heroic, from the days when heavy industry seemed to be leading to proletarian emancipation. Pipes, buckets and coils evoke body functions such as digestion. The ladder, ascent and descent. The cubes, cylinders and cones in cardboard and tin, classical paradigms long ago given the heave-ho. They are also someone’s tools. The basement room is claustrophobic, dusty and seemingly rarely frequented, like an archive of things no one knows the function of anymore. The great-grandfathers of these pictures are Nadar’s flash pictures of Paris crypts.

According to Arden the monochromes here, both in house paint and applied with a house-paint brush, are ‘‘parallel’‘ to the pictures. He claims that the straightforward nature of the materials and procedures makes themonochromes ‘‘proletarian.’‘ His intentions, in the paintings and photographs, is to ally himself with socialism and modernist humanism. That is the most poignant thing about them.

Scott Watson, 16 August 1990

Roy Arden is an artist who lives and works in Vancouver. He has exhibited his work locally for a number of years and has recently begun to show nationally and internationally – in group exhibitions such as Perspective ’89 at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and Photo-Kunst at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart Germany. He is represented in Paris by Galerie Giovanna Minelli.

Scott Watson is a local critic and curator who is presently director of the LJBC Fine Arts Gallery. Over the seven years that he was a curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery, he produced numerous exhibit-ions, and his critical writing has been published in art periodicals from Artscribe to Vanguard. His book on Jack Shadbolt is forthcoming from Douglas and McIntyre.

Exhibition

Vancouver artist Larry Cohen’s exhibition of his recent sculptural works delve into issues of minimalism and its relationship to the art market.

Exhibition

Co Curated by Artspeak and Or Gallery
Review: Vancouver Sun September May 19 1990 by Anne Rosenberg

Exhibition

The Or Gallery is proud to exhibit Skai Fowler’s latest work in which she investigates the position of the female nude in art historical painting. Her show consists of several mural sized C Prints and the issues she explores will contribute to ongoing debates about feminism in Vancouver.

In her large black and white murals, Skai Fowler rephotographs textbook reproductions of well-known paintings, and through the technique of in-camera double exposure puts herself into the picture in order to qustion the position of the artist’s model as well as the function of the female nude in painting.

Phyrne, the thitle of Fowler’s show, was a Creek 4th century BC model charged with impiety – a crime punishable by death. A statue of the Venus, for which she posed, was one of the first female nudes to appear publically. It caused such a furor of unleashed passion amongst its supposedly uruly worshippers that the state arrested the model. Her body, they figured, was the cause of trouble not the artist’s representation. Phryne was acquitted after her young lawyer, in a moment defenselessness, liftes her robes to reveal all to judge and jury. Her divine beauty could not be wasted- execution was out of the question. What began as a threat to virtue became, in the end, virtue itself.

Since this famous incident many artist’s models have adopted the pseudonym “Phryne” and to a certain extent the name has become slang for model. Unlike Phryne, however, most artist’s models are incidental to their likenesses. They are usualy presented as ciphers of the artist’s desire, objectified, passive, in opposition to the artist’s active ‘creative’ apporpriation of their bodies. Moreover, many artists’ modes in their actual lives occupied subservient roles such as muse, couresan, wife, mistress, servant. fowler, however, collapses the fixed gender dichotomies, as she is both artist and model. Serving as her own model, she presents a figure interacting in a performative relations wiht the painted female nudes, thus desrupting narrative, gesture and gaze. For example, in Guercino’s Venus, Mars, and Cupid, (1634), Fowler engages with Venus in directing Cupid’s arrow but, rather than aiming for some abstract object outside the picture plane, Fowler’s direct gaze and pointing gesture has redirected the action so that the arrow is headed straight for the viewer. In David’s Psyche and Cupid (1817), Fowler’s inquistive stare at Psyche and mimicry of cupid’s pose acts as a temporary block to the narrative action. Te circuit of gaze is disrupted in Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus (1649-51): Fowler’s consternated look, the frontal view of her nude body, its misshapen fit in the mirror (which is at once reflection and not), blatantly opposes the mysterious identity of Venus that is alluded to through the rear view of the figure and her likeness reflected in the mirror. The secret of femininity are again threatend when Fowler attempts to open the curtain in Ingres’ Odalisque (1814).
In relation to the elongated, structureless, impossible body of Ingres’s painted model, Fowler’s photogenic body is taut, thin, has muscle and bone definition and pubic hair, all trait considered unworthy of ideal feminine beauty in historical painting. The difference in body types is especially apparent in Palma Vecchio’s Venus and Cupid (1523-5), where the voluptuous figure of Venus is rendered with ample hips and abdomen, smaller breats, slightly slumped shoulders. Venus servs as a literal transition point between natrue and culture as she reclines languorously between a lush meadow and classically renderd city.

Often the nudes Fowler chooses as subjects function as sites of transformation. They are figures through which literary and mythic narratives are transformed into figurative, spatial representation. Fowler’s literal intervention into these spaces act as a catalyst, disrupting fixed meaning lending a sense of contingency to the passive role o the artist’s model and female nude.

Exhibition

Brochure by Dorothy Trujillo Lusk
The works in NEWS, while being separately conceived discrete objects, function interactively in the gallery space, both in relation to each other and collectively, to inform the viewer’s position. W, Elliott investigates notions of time and space in relationship to representation, object making, history, language and gender.

Upon entering the Or Gallery via a vestibule, the sculptural assemblage First Clock presents an object of time rather than an image, which in effect locates time within an historical framework. First Clock is constructed of angle iron and K2 partide board with a mirror facing upwards from right angles mounted on the upper third of the K2 plane. The mirror reveals not the viewer, but rather the underside of an old school handbell within which the dapper has already completed its trajectory through time and space. The bell is tipped, indicating a time already activated, More specifically, the bell refers to a transition from a concept of time that is seasonal and organic to a modern notion of time that is mechanistic and regimented, According to Lewis Mumford, the bell was first used in monasteries during the 14th century as an object which when rung ,demarcated the rigid and regimented times for worship and duty to God, and as such, appears to be the first manifestation of a modern conception of institutional time.

The CLOCK paintings mimic the narrative in a minimalist schematic of analogue time, Constructed as a figure/ground problem, the viewer’s eye and body is given the movement of 12 colored rectangles to trace across their placement on the gallery wall. This foregrounds the dependence of position and orientation specific to the context of a narrative reading of painting. In a similar fashion, the paintings entitled Quotes are mounted at a theoretical crotch level and function as a droll comment on the ability of painting to narrate and quote itself, and that of the modernist gallery space itself to quote such tendencies.

Study for Subject Matter is a precursor to Newspleces. This is a small still life study after Cezanne, rendered in india ink, oil stick and charcoal on printed newspaper, This piece arises from such problems confronting the artist such as what constitutes subject matter, or for that matter a subject, while the materials are determined by the economic constraints of the artist.

Newspleces question the presumptions of representation-what does it mean to represent, to be represented? How is it possible to make a picture or construct an image? What does it mean as women, in this instance, to experience the reification or assumption of self after representation. By editing, cropping and presenting these images of women as news, and placing them in the terms of an ephemeral print media literacy, the relations between the actual lives of women and what in such lives could be considered newsworthy are thereby gendered and problematized.

Invention borrows a Klimpt pose to show the body and reciprocated gaze of an actively pregnant women in the built environment of the city. In Recovery as News, we find a grouping of women in an abortion clinic again returning our gaze from a socially constructed space of confrontation. Self Portrait as News gives us an image of the artist as a pedestrian in city traffic – the impossible girl flaneur, Two 13 year old girls are under implication of becoming Virgins as they pore over image/role constructs in magazines, compare ideas over junk food, thus existing within a condition that is really only conceptually possible in the past tense.

Purse evolved through drawings from a simple post and lintel constructivist sculpture to a model of feminine space inspired in particular by the autobiographic writing of George Sand. As a single mother at that time, it was impossible for her to move freely in public as a woman, even to buy groceries, let alone as flaneur. Under her male dress, her female purse, carrying and containing all her tools and necessities, becomes the transitional space linking the domestic and public spheres. Standing outside of the gallery proper, the letters ‘M’, ‘R’ and ‘r’ can be seen mounted one on each of the visible walls. It is only by entering the gallery – penetrating this deeply gendered space – that the possibility for the female within the gallery space can be realized. By reversing one’s orientation within this space and sighting the’S’ mounted on the wall of entry one can partially correct the gender imbalance, yet it is only through the’S’ possessive to Mr or as additive that this can be done. Elliott’s reading of Jane Austin on the structures of marriage, arranged and chosen, and her concerns with the relations of marriage and modernity, are here broken into parts and reconstructed in the terms of modernist space, The experience of the spatial relations to the viewer’s orientation and movements give some sense of W.Elliott’s predicament as an artist and art historian who, as female, may only act within the space of modernism in a pact ,or compromise, of marriage to modernism.

Dorothy Trujillo Lusk
News Opens Mar 13 and runs until Mar 31 1990,Or Gallery Hours: 12-5 Tues to Sat. Contact Nancy Shaw, Curator at 683-7395, We are located at 314 W. Hastings, Vancouver. The artist would like to thank Pauline Conley and Rolf K, – .

Exhibition

Brochure

Revision, Susan Kealy’s installation at the Or Gallery, is made up of a rear-screened film loop and a static projected image. The film sequence, which depicts a bright light shining into an eye and traveling across the screen is, in fact, an optical print of an eye examination- the medical procedure that assesses visual acuity. The footage is derived from an offcut of a documentary film that was made about the artist in 1987 for a French TV series focussing on individuals who have had to face significant physical and social barriers (Kealy became visually impaired in 1985). Over the last few years she has been deconstructing specific gestures from these offcuts throguh calculated manipulation. By these exaggerated, silent re-representationfs of herself, Kealy questions constructions of female subjectivity and the realist project of traditional documentary. In the darkened gallery space, the eye, with its almost hypnotic repetition across the screen, becomes both object and spectator in relationship to the distorted static image of “The Red Maple” by A.Y. Jackson. The compulsive movement of the eye coupled with its relationship to the spectator and the A.Y. Jackson slide complicate the habitual circuit of viewing particularly in a gallery setting.
As a memeber of the Group of Seven, Jackson’s work has come to be read as an iconographic symbol of the Canadian landscaped and of Canadian art practice by the general public both here and abroad. The projected slide, itself a reproduction, has been copied from an archival slide typical of those used for instructional puropses by art institutions, a practive further alluded to by the frame of the film screen which recalls a blackboard. While various postmodern practionners have dealt with the art historical legacy left by European painting, few have reflected on the impact and influence of Canadian schools, such as the Group of Seven.
Kealey’s strategy of layering and reproducing images meant for cultural consumption is one of Brechtian distanciation which “liberates the viewer from the state of being captured by the illusions of art which encourages passive identification with fictional worlds.”
Similarly, Brailleography, a public art project consisting of a series of aluminum braille plaques, encourages an awareness of issues relating to language, audience, access and representation. The plaques, which are installed outside culturla institutions, are inscribed with either ART, ACCESS, CULTURE or PRIVILEDGE. Brailleography was first Awareness Week which seeks to promote awareness and support for the integration of people with visible or invisible impairments within institutional structures. While Kealey’s interes stems in part from the fact that she is legally blind, this site specific work raises questions about the relationship of braille to official signage, the representation of language by the Roman alphabet and this project’s relationship to mapping processes in terms of topography, geography, and typography.

Griselda Pollock- Vision & Difference- Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art. p. 163, Routtledge, 1988

Kealey will mount her plaqyes at the following Vancouver venues:

Artspeak- 311 West Hastings
Charles H. Scott- Emily Carr college of Art & Design
Contemporary Art Gallery – 333 Hamilton
Grunt Gallery- 209 E. 6th Ave.
Kootenay School of Writing- 152 W. Hastings
MacEwen Arts – 331 W. Pender
Or Gallery – 314 W. Hastings
Perel Gallery – 115 W. Hastings
Pitt international Galleries – 36 Powell
Presentation Hous – 333 Chesterfield North Vancouver
Proprioception Books – 709- 207 W. Hastings
The Western Front – 303 E. 8th Avenue
UBC Fine Arts Gallery – 1965 Main Mall, UBC
Video Inn- 1102 Homer Street
Vancouver Art Gallery – 750 Hornby
Women in Focus – 849 Beatty

Exhibition

Brochure by Beth Seaton

What sort of images are recalled from the dreams of travellers? What are the visions that pilgrims return with from the land of the dead? The postcads sent, the snapshots processed upon arrival home, testify to an uneasy presence in foreign territory – proof of occupation taken by an unreliable witness. But the veracity to which these images attest (:eroy was here) alos uncovers a lite which hides iteslf as Truth. For with the photograph, thos authentic experiences and original momemtns promised by the travle agent and the touristic brochure are revealed as fraudulent as they are factual. Its not so much that the Mayan ruins don’t exist- certainly the photograph confirms their exisitence – but that their obscured history how so precisely relies upon mysitification for its existance- and this too is what the camera concedes. The photograph invents a life just as it erases the traces of an other.
The photographs of Nancy Frohlick work within this paradoz of truthfulness and lies, of actual evidence and inventive explanations. her pictures of ruins scavenged by tourists bring to the fore the contradictions inherent in the double mediation of tourism and photography. both entail strategies of power and knowledge which are based upon methodologies of documentation and appropriation. Both render the thing dead in order to bring it to life: the guide book encapsulating a history of demise; the photograph creating death for a second. Momontary immobility is necessary in order to fix and isolate the complexities of an existence. A memento-mori must be tailored to fit into the palm of the hand. Only then may the stories begin to be told: after the fact.
The stories which Frohlick’s photographs narrate are at once banal and disquieting. the common-placeness of holiday snapshots, their everday self-evidence, is superseded by an ephemeral quality which blurs what we think we may have seen. the stories we may tell with these photographs are constantly interrupted, contradicted, and renounced by other tales. As viewers of these photographs, we are forever looking to grasp something absolute, something knowable, but we are continuously deferred in this task. Our eyes cannot rest long upon one identification or one truth in the image. These photographic tales are not discrete, self-contained creations. Rather, like the stories which we construct for ourselves, they are stories without resolution; timely and tenous stories whose authorities are constantly put under question.
Frohlick’s photographs operate precisely upon the contingency of meanings and truths constructed for an by ourselves. In this sens, it is not only the authenticity of the tourist’s sight. Is that with which we return with-not only the souvenirs, the relics found and bought, but the experiences – authentic? It is this volatile tension between the fictional and ‘the real’ a tension which in fact creates experience and allows it to name itself, which Frohlick takes as her agenda. Her photographs ride this edge between the dreamed and the known, the process which allows the traveller to tell her tale upon arrival home.
These photographs are filled with empty spaces of the unkonw: dorrways blackened by the sun. Still, despite the tropes of adventure which inform our travels, the people pictured hede avoid the domain of shadows. Has this darkness yet to be scripted by a guide? Or is this compliance with the requirements of touristic discours; for again, mysitifcation necessarily demands an absence in order to make its presence known. There are always spots which we cannot photograph. sacred ground upon which we cannot tred, and this denial is as meaningful as the allowances made. Those places with we cannot possess, by means of camera or text, are those which incite our imagination and provoke the awe suitable to such a place. They too are part of the ceremonial agenda.
Frohlick’s photogrphs make use of such ahllowed gloom, but not to reify the venerated tombs of the dead. Rather, the darkness here acts to illuminate the limitations of our knowledges and explanatory systems.
These phtographs in effect invite us to come to temrs with what is unknowable and unpresentable; in many ways they push us agains the limits of representative tales, while allowing us to ackonwledge that which we would rather ignore: that the complexity, difficulty, and opacity of a past and place, remains- as alway- beyond representations’ reach.