archive

Exhibition

Slippage is an inquiry into the perception of time. The work was constructed out of six elements, each consisting of a video monitor with built-in speaker and a VHS deck. The monitors are placed on their side in a circle. Each of the units plays the same tape. The tapes’ visuals consist of black & white footage of road markations as seen from a driving car at night. The white road markations on black tarmac move horizontally around the circle of monitors in a mesmerizing fashion.

The accompanying audio track is based on the refrain of the Steve Miller Band’s 1976 hit Fly Like an Eagle. The lyrics of this song contain the line “time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future”. In Slippage, the soundtrack of the videotapes consists of a continually repeated, simple harmonic based on the melody that underlies the above-mentioned lyric section. This ‘tune’ is being played in an amateurish manner on a 70s home organ.

The monitors are arranged to reference the face of a clock. Due to the organ sound and its continually slipping imagery the installation also evokes a children’s carousel.

The cognitive process by which we experience time’s passage is based on understanding one moment to be different from a previous one. A musical beat, the ticking of a clock, the change between day and night, or any other regular binary occurrence is capable of letting us experience the change between two alternate states. These repetitive phenomena allow us to quantify time’s passage. Eternity thus can be described a single unchanging moment.

The work looks at the dichotomy of sameness and change, time’s passage and stasis, through the formal tool of repetition and sampling. While the work explores broader ideas about time, it references a relatively narrow time frame, that of the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s.

A further motivating principle for the work is the interplay of the timeless vs. the time-specific, i.e. the ‘classic’ vs. the ‘fashionable’, and the ‘profound’ vs. the ‘banal’.

Based on minimalist musicians Terry Riley and Steve Reich’s early works, the soundscape of Slippage is created by taking advantage of the deficiencies of contemporary electronic equipment. Each of the six VHS decks in the installation plays back at a speed that varies very slightly from the next.

The soundtracks of the various units that make up the work consequently fall out of synch and what ensues is a soundscape in the style of early minimalist composition. This type of soundscape, despite its identical and continually repeated basic phrase, is ever-changing. Because the soundtracks of each unit shift slightly against each other, the repeated sequence of notes creates continually changing rhythmical and melodic patterns.

The original song Fly Like an Eagle reveals the period in which it was produced clearly through the distinct sound of a Hammond-type organ. While this song, with its exceedingly banal lyrics, was a relatively big hit in the 1970s, the Steve Miller Band did not achieve a ‘place in history’. Still in existence, the band now tours second rate venues in smaller cities across North America.

Minimal Music on the other hand, alongside serial music and compositional innovations inspired by John Cage, presents one of the pivotal developments in Western ‘classical’ music during the second half of this century. In Philip Glass’ words, Minimal Music requires a way of listening that lacks the “traditional concepts of recollection and anticipation.”

Exhibition

Soundtrack for an Exhibition is a continuing project conceived and first exhibited as a poster produced by the Western Front, then as wall text at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery in Calgary. Soundtrack for an Exhibition is an evolving list of song titles; the basis for a “mixed tape” of recommended listening. For the Or, Terada has created a scrolling list of these titles on video. The video will be projected and will appear much like a credit sequence one might see at the end of a film. The video will be accompanied by an audio CD, available at the gallery, and complete with a recording of each song in the list. The work is a private soundtrack to an unseen movie and echoes the growing advent of web based audio download sites that allow consumers to sidestep packaged CD’s to craft and disseminate their own audio playlists.

Exhibition

At the Or, Carter uses the gallery as artifact and sculptural material, and his transformative work questions the gallery’s status as both neutral backdrop and passive environment. To this day contemporary art galleries employ an endlessly modified but rarely abandoned architectural model of a white cube. Carter’s work directs us toward this, and uses this history to create an intrusive and exciting installation.

Exhibition

In Brian Jugen’s installation at the Or, Shapeshifter, the artist creates a monolithic skeleton of a Right whale using plastic stacking lawn chairs. Jungen’s practice is one of theft and transformation, taking common household or commercial objects, and using them as sculptural material to fabricate detailed new works.

Exhibition

In Shearer’s words: “The Swinging Lumpen photolaminate paintings incorporate images from a found collection of over 100 original photos taken by a teenage girl in the early seventies. Snapshots of pets, boyfriends, parties and home interiors sharply document the existence of proletarian, adolescent suburbia. I have rephotographed the snapshots, enlarged them to life scale, and then excised the central subjects. These have then been mounted onto canvas substrates painted in “process” monochrome hues. The cutout images of forgotten friends and discarded personal possessions reach toward the “vulgar” flatness” of teen fanzines.

Exhibition

This is an exhibition whose fulcrum is two extravagant objects: “Lit a la Polonaise,” and “Lit a la Turque,” both 18th century French beds in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Neither will be exhibited at the Or, but they will serve as inspiration for the artworks on view; six young and emerging artists from New York City and Los Angeles have been invited to work with these beds as subject matter, raw material, or simply as a conceptual “jumping off point” in the creation of artworks made especially for this exhibition.

As part of the Or’s series of shows grounded in specific cities, this idea takes as its premise two objects that are permanent fixtures in Los Angeles, but historically and stylistically completely foreign to it. To viewer accustomed to seeing their own streets appropriated as movie sets, the very idea of a museum period room here is perhaps just a little bit funny – no more or less real or fabricated or stylistically consistent than anything else in this town. Beds like the Getty’s are virtually sets in themselves for whatever goes on inside/upon them, framing devices for sleep, sex, dreams, pain, death, childbirth, conversation. Empty beds are a little like artworks, they’re fields for vast psychic projections, albeit highly specific ones, ones that almost always include bodies.

The artists are selected based on an affinity between their own work and the spirit and meanings “embedded” in the Getty beds. Rich and complex ideas about craftsmanship, consumption, mannered but also regulated style, (the aesthetics of furniture and decoration in 18th c. France were highly codified, and of course social and sexual mores are suggested by these beds; the artists chosen to work with them are ones whose work all have a sensibility one might call “luxurious.” With the exception of Michelle Lopez, none are using particularly luxurious materials or processes, but the manner in which they conceive form and narrate desire manifests a certain grandeur.

Exhibition

Demostrationräume / A case Study is part of a series of exhibitions conceived by El Cartel, a group of curators, artists and friends committed to finding new ways of presentation according to the current realites of Venezuela’s political and artistic culture. Fuenmayor’s exhibition intends to investigate, from a curatorial stand, specific conditions of production and frustration. A case study reflects upon frustration as a psychological disorder associated to artists’ dysfunctional role in society in contrast to utopian idealistic constructs. Frustration, therefore, is here conceived as a paradoxically destabilizing artist’s resource that keeps alive a minimum degree of criticality in relation to social demands. From a psychoanalytical point of view, frustration is the most painful, and stimulating drive.

The issues of frustration are evident in this group of artists projects specially commissioned for this exhibition. Those issues include glamour, as in Diana López’ video – performance piece, Cocktail, in collaboration with José Gabriel Fernández; the theatrical approach of Alfredo Ramirez’s set of photos regarding decapitation; or mass media nonsense in Javier Téllez’ video performance piece of a Volkswagen Beetle full of as many people as possible in a charade of a Venezuelan TV entertainment show of the 70’s, trying to brake the registered Guinness record. Muu Blanco’s piece will introduce a thrift shop version of his own music and clothes store on Margarita Island in Venezuela, including a diversity of memorabilia of his activities as DJ, bodyboarder, store manager; and artist. Carlos Julio Molina is sending an impersonator, Chuki Molina, a 30 inch high replica of the artist as MC of his internationally renowned music band, La Corte; Meyer Vaisman’s hourglass sculptures, consist of a kind of alcoholic allegory of time. The pieces are recycled liquor bottles filled with sand emulating a sand clock. All of the artists taking part in this exhibition have gained an international and national recognition and they are widely considered as part of a generation of Venezuelan artists that defined the most radical and vital issues in art practice during the last decade.

Exhibition

The OR Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition of photographs by Vancouver based artist Evan Lee. Lee is a graduate student at the University of British Columbia.

In Michael Anotonioni’s film Blow Up, a photograph that was thought to have contained forensic evidence was enlarged repeatedly until the viewer began to see what he wanted in the patterns of grain—like clouds in the sky. Evan Lee’s photographs play on the concept of the quasi-scientific, so that they hover between the rational and irrational (the former accomplished by the use of photography, and the latter by means of faith, or aesthetic manipulation). Early childhood is often filled with a kind of scientific wonderment, and Lee evokes that early pre-cognitive mystery by making pictures about things which we logically understand, but might constantly re-evaluate: luminance, buoyancy, transparency and chroma.

by M. Somani

Critical discourse on photography lives in a twilight of limitations and possibilities, a twilight that gives the practice of photography a comfortable home and refuge in its state of perpetual crisis. The most striking areas of confusion deal primarily with how the subjective/objective characteristics of photographs are read: the position and psyche of its author at the moment of capture—the moment of infinitesimal duration; the mechanism of the camera and the process of realization and development; and lastly, the product of his or her endeavor, the picture itself. Ascribed to these functions/motions of the photographer—in collusion with the mechanical apparatus—is the assumed lack of compulsion behind the photographic mark, and how this is at best read as a more subtle, and perhaps worldly, form of deliberateness. In virtual opposition to this lies of course the ever-present, deliberate, psychic mark of painting, a taunting specter whose critique of photography remains forever silently effective for those seeking some kind of equivalence between past and present media. It is a strange form of justice to which photography is subject. Painting, having been historically lured by the ‘modern’ and ’popular’ surface of photography and the print to its own eventual demise, rises from its proclaimed grave to take its place in the conscience of photography. Indeed, the practice of painting today comes very much from this point of a conscience: each medium acknowledges the other in so many ways, but always with, as it were, a hidden inferiority complex, which brings even greater attention to their own deficits. It may to some degree be a false problem, yet photography’s continual crisis, not only with painting but with other media including the history of photography itself, shows little sign of wear.

Radical change in photography is a contradiction in form, and it may need to be recognized that discourse on photographic development has become a discourse of change primarily in perception. What could be suggested is that this critique, born out of the recognition of lack in the photograph (at a time when loss of self and God was culturally well entrenched), is in contemporary practice continually circumvented by the medium’s own methods of reason. Photography’s functional mechanisms in this sense have the greatest potential to create moments of believable subjective “grace”—accomplished by a critique of reason through reason. The world implicates everyone in its evolution of events: every moment is a moment of complicity of the individual with the world, and of faith. As the eighteenth century German anti-enlightenment philosopher J.G. Hamann stated-against the contemporary belief of creating a systemic knowledge of the world based upon reason-our own existence and everything around us can never be proven, but must be believed. As simple as it may sound (the Cartesian subject robbed of intellect, and forced to choose between absurdity and practicality on the terms of faith), this point of view in fact stands within an alternative history of practice and thought which may to some extent be called ‘the hidden discourse’. Lest it be thought that the word ‘hidden’ here refers to a pure, moralistic form of art—this in fact is not, and cannot, be the case. Complicity, as mentioned above, prevents any clear separation with social circumstance (which includes the art world), but the strength of the ‘hidden’ discourse is that it functions all the more critically as a symptom of those same circumstances, a symptom which increasingly in art is becoming pre-meditated and deliberate. It is present in much of contemporary practice but little recognized and acknowledged.

What interests me about the pictures by Evan Lee is how they quietly explore the suspension of disbelief within the possibilities and inadequacies of photography. This is, of course, only one aspect of the pictures, but as captured moments they occasionally present the kind of hidden qualities I speak of, which rise to the surface here and there. The photographic moment is inherently imbued with a moment of belief in its perception of the world. This function is, further, purely mechanical and prone to indifference. From its obvious limitation of always existing as fragment, and by its false comparative values with real experience this moment of belief must, in a sense, be taken for what it is not, and accepted on those terms: photographs as fictions of the world. What they tell us, if anything, must at first be believed before evaluated. Here the lack of compulsion in the mark, its so-called objectivity (and indifference), has its greatest influence, pitted as it is against the potential depth offered by the project, and/or the body of work. There is a deathly air around a photograph, and even looking past this ready-made quality, this patheticism of the surface continues to influence our “belief” and taint the conviction of the artist present in the picture. Just as the objectivity of the photographic capture was previously described as circumvented by its own reason, the mutant process I am describing would have the resulting moment of subjective “grace” itself become a site of doubt. These, I think, are the reciprocal conditions of doubt and faith under which Lee takes his pictures.

In what area of experience, of living, does this belief find the most consistent expression? One answer may lie in our most habitual, common, and automatic motions. Everyday objects are hierarchized primarily through their use value, and our engagement with them is for the most part influenced by this value. With the mundane aspects of our lives the same applies. In these habitual moments of experience faith takes precedence over calculation and reason, and they are the closest we come to achieving equivalence with our surroundings, with nature. This realm of experience is saturated with (often banal) instances of faith, and for Lee this space become approachable in order to depict instances where our suspension of disbelief is entangled within moments of possible poetic absorption. In most of the pictures in this exhibition there is a close proximity to the familial home and the studio (and in the case of 40 Armoured Cars- somewhere in between), as if the artist only needed to look close at hand, in a process of exclusion rather than inclusion. In Lee’s focus there is a strong mark of the surrealist, but without the psychedelic manipulation of the subjects or the form of the pictures. They are made to speakthrough the care with which they seem arranged—on their own terms, without formal manipulation—to become estranged and, at times hallucinatory. (In this regard I think specifically of New Sneakers.) They are then immediately brought back by their familiarity, their myth subsequently dispelled. Lee’s photographs explore these events relating to the habitual, and the objects surrounding them to intensify the picture’s power of expression regarding the pictorial suspension of disbelief, and to further the compulsion of the photographic mark, that often-cited weakness of the photographic surface.

The deliberate and intimate quality of the pictures comes through the manipulation, and sometimes central placement of objects. Their generally modest scale reinforce this, and sometimes inadvertently through their standard-format size makes some represented objects approach the grotesque. Lee’s picture making is strangely suited to this pursuit of the chosen moment of representation (and by its duration of focus made unnatural) and how compulsion is expressed though it, as proof and witness of the world through a particular psyche, one which incessantly strives for the beautiful. Beauty and faith, two terms that are maddeningly unclear and whose conditions remain just beyond our grasp, hover somewhere between clarity/truth and kitsch. They find parallels in photography, which can only depict these aspects somewhere below the image’s surface. The representation of beauty may not be beautiful in itself, though it is here that I would bring in the importance of the momentary suspension of this doubt. Like photography, the terms of beauty and faith deal mainly with threshold conditions that make the exploration of them so appropriate (in some ways absurd, even) for photography. I find that the metaphor of the threshold can in certain moments be equally translated to and projected upon the mundane techniques and mechanisms of photography. The threshold, which promises but rarely delivers in the way we would ideally want (through a clear presentation that we cannot imagine, and therefore do not know)-is part of the weight of living. Further, the conditions of beauty that we speak of is implicated by its reference to the history of pre-photographic images, commercial imagery which includes photography, cinema, and TV. But has this basic function not always been so? Conditions of beauty differ and change historically in every field of art.. Likewise, their interpretation (however disputable) is always retrospective and anachronistic. It would be presumptuous therefore to know precisely what the elusive qualities of beauty would be presently, and this very “unknowablility” bestows upon it an aura of the greatest criticality and importance to our time. Its potential for flux, for agility in means of communication, from the sublime to the common, and beyond, that is what makes it (even in times of the highest social conflict) a present and relevant opposition to the presumptuous didacticism of both criticism and the social order at large. The notions of beauty and faith must, by this function, remain ill defined, grasped best by chance and intuition.

Lee’s pictures are explicitly oriented in the onset of possible narratives—which remain possibilities, and this need to interpret a story begins to wear with time. It is instead replaced by a self-reflexive story about the process making of the piece, its motivations and intentions, but this too becomes less compelling with time. Clarity here becomes dialectic process that ultimately breeds doubt, and by an odd collusion of intent, a reciprocal engagement that asks us to suspend that doubt. The represented scenes themselves speak from such a voice: a patch of grass becomes the site of a subtle, other-worldly occurrence, two balloons frame and conceal the intangible substance of air. These moments of wonder and interiority are never too comfortable, and by their familiarity and prosaic terminology, they tend to dispel a self-sufficient pictorial drama. Having said that, they surely intend to evoke, and this in my opinion they do quite successfully.

Where does this leave us? The answer is perhaps precisely where the pictures want us to be. We stand at a point where the sincerity of the photographs as objects must be taken by a perceptual leap of faith, or not. The scenario becomes a repetition of itself at each turn, a loop from which there is escape only at a certain price. This becomes a stance that asks, however subtly, no small question. It involves, from the voice of the pictures themselves, the divergence of fact and truth for the reception of the photographic fragment. The two, fact and truth, at some point cannot be equated in the ephemeral world of these pictures. Either there is the fact that I am just looking at a representation of some sneakers, or there is the truth that certainly there is more to these shoes than their normal symbolic investment. This latter tangent, which historically could even be linked to Van Gogh’s painting of his worn shoes, may say something about the conditions of living today-its increased hidden values of pathos, that are nonetheless there, perhaps more intensified because of its being ‘somewhere below the surface’. It is this point of divergence which photography can depict, but it is its limit as well, since photography cannot get beyond the uncomfortable situation of having to make such choices. Yet to some degree I think that we automatically do, intuitively, if only for a brief second.

Exhibition

A fundraising exhibition of fakes plagiaries and rip offs. Artists have been invited to make copies of favorite works by other artists, to benefit the Or Gallery.