Category: Reviews | Femme Art Review

Memory Mirror by Lares Feliciano: A Reflection on Recollection

Lares Feliciano

Denver Art Museum

July 4, 2021 – June 18, 2023

By Alida Kress

Lares Feliciano transforms the Denver Art Museum’s Precourt Family Discovery Hall into a timeless, vibrant sanctuary of nostalgia with her multimedia installation, Memory Mirror. Her stylized work moves viewers to confront their relationships with memory and explore the history of the marginalized communities who have shaped Denver’s history. Feliciano’s extensive use of the gallery space encourages viewers to interact with the installation’s various elements. As such, she creates a piece that invites viewers to see her work and become part of it themselves.

As I approach the gallery, I am beckoned in by the sounds of jazz softly underlying an audial collage of recorded memories. Enormous flowers bloom on vintage wallpaper adorning the walls in a 1970s supergraphics style, and from behind the colorful blossoms, grey-toned faces peer down at me.

Shadow boxes containing sentimental items donated by the Denver public hang on the wall and, across the room, two vintage chairs invite me to sit. An old TV, globe, rotary phone, and other vintage items accompany the chairs in their place on a large rug. Although these items were foreign to me, something about their arrangement felt comfortable, almost familiar.

Graphics stylistically akin to hand-drawn, children’s book illustrations are projected on a large oval frame. The cheerful animations provide visual accompaniment to the memories being recounted overhead. I felt compelled to look at each item in the shadow boxes, sit in the chairs, spin the globe, and even dial my number on the rotary phone. All elements of the installation work in conjunction to instill a sense of hazy nostalgia in me which I yearned to follow to some philosophical conclusion.

Lares Feliciano is a Denver-based artist from California who works in multimedia design to create interactive art installations. The local artist has another installation at Meow Wolf Denver, an artist collective that collaborates with local artists to create maximalist, interactive art installations at permanent locations across the U.S.^[1] At the installation in Denver, Feliciano applies her unique artistic style to breathe life into the Portals of Theseus collection.^[2] The whimsical nature of her work with Meow Wolf remains evident within this installation as well.

Memory Mirror opened in July of 2021 and will continue through June 18th of 2023. Prior to the installation’s debut, Feliciano set up an in-person event and a phone number at which the public could leave a voicemail recalling a significant memory of theirs. Participants were also invited to donate images and items of sentimental value to be displayed in the gallery. The photographs incorporated into the wallpapers are partially these images donated by participants, but most were taken from the Denver Library’s official archives and depict a wide range of Denver’s diverse cultural history.

In my conversation with Feliciano, she shared that her inspiration for the piece came largely from her dad who passed away from early-onset Alzheimer’s when she was 16. Recalling her own relationship with memory and her dad, she notes that memory is an intangible thing, the loss of which, however, is incredibly tangible. Thus, in Memory Mirror, she attempts to capture tangible markers of memory that not only reflect the associated moment in the donor’s life, but also their relationship with the memory as they recall it. She stated that the installation is not trying to make sense of memory or give it any type of order, but simply to give it a place.

In asking Feliciano about what she hoped viewers might gain from experiencing the installation, she said, “Hopefully their own nostalgia is triggered and they are forced to remember… anything.” For me, the piece was a way to interact with and process trauma. The nature of the space encouraged me to recall difficult memories and sit with them in ways I hadn’t before. The space was soft and calm, and it felt as though the words tumbling from my mouth had a safe place to exist outside of my own mind.

In an interview with Westword, Feliciano shared, “My work often evokes a dreamlike nostalgia where decades overlap and all of time exists at once.”^[3] This sentiment is incredibly apparent in the installation. While much of the installation is a call to self-reflection, just as significant is how it spotlights the history of Denver’s marginalized communities. The images Feliciano edited into the flowers on the wallpapers feature mainly people of color. These photos feature nostalgic photographs of varying levels of formality. Feliciano showcases a history of people of color in Denver by including everything from images of CU Denver’s minority student organizations in the 1950s to an image of Denver’s Bruce Randolf at his street naming ceremony. Feliciano described this part of the installation as a method to “give them their flowers,” sharing that she “had no idea what sort of celebrations have existed for any of these people, but they’re here if nothing else.”

In the wake of the pandemic, Feliciano wanted to acknowledge how hard it is to exist, but also how powerful it is to be able to remember something good. We discussed the potential of all of time existing at once, and how recognizing that is an incredible way to deal with grief and trauma. For anyone who has read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Memory Mirror is a step towards seeing every moment of life all at once, like one would behold a stretch of the Rocky Mountains.^[4]

Feliciano’s work urges her viewers to lean into the resemblance Memory Mirror holds to a relative’s living room. It encourages viewers to sit in that nostalgia either to process their relationship with memory or to learn a little more about Denver’s collective memory and the histories of marginalized communities so often written out of colonial history books.

Memory Mirror facilitates a multifaceted experience in which the viewer is invited to explore not only their own memories, but the memory of the city they are in. Feliciano has created a piece that cradles the viewer’s internal child and allows them the space and safety to sit, feel, and remember.

^[1] “Meow Wolf: Immersive Art Experiences,” Meow Wolf: Immersive Art Experiences, accessed April 2023, https://meowwolf.com/.

^[2]“Meow Wolf Denver Introduced Portals of Theseus,” Taking The Kids, January 7, 2023, https://takingthekids.com/meow-wolf-denver-introduced-portals-of-theseus/.

^[3] Kyle Harris, “Lares Feliciano Wants Your Memories for a Denver Art Museum Installation,” Westword (Westword, March 17, 2021), https://www.westword.com/arts/lares-feliciano-collects-memories-for-memory-mirror-at-the-denver-art-museum-11921404.

^[4] Jr Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five: The Children’s Crusade (London: Vintage Books, 2000), 86.

Hear on Treaty 7: The Politics of Sound

*The Politics of Sound.* Installation Shot. Images courtesy of Galt Museum & Archives | Akaisamitohkanao’pa

jamilah malika abu-bakare, Adam Basanta, Marjie Crop Eared Wolf, Maskull Lasserre, Benny Nemer and Jessica Thompson

Curated by Tyler J Stewart
Exhibition design by Jane Edmundson
November 26, 2022 – May 7, 2023

The Galt Museum & Archives

By Migueltzinta Solís

You may have heard of something that unfolded recently here in so-called Lethbridge, Alberta at the University of Lethbridge. Philosophy professor Paul Viminitz, known for saying the n-word in class and for calling a Blackfoot student’s status card his “victim card,” invited residential school denier Frances Widdowson to deliver a lecture against teaching Indigenous Knowledge in secondary education. Thankfully, a mainly student-led grassroots response swiftly changed the University of Lethbridge’s tone from defending “free speech” to – somewhat – acknowledging the grievousness of allowing a bigoted and hateful provocateur to speak on campus. Colonial sound marks and speech acts are unmistakable in this prairie city, from the thundering of the train over the Highlevel Bridge to the gunshots that echo up and down the Old Man River valley from the police department’s shooting range. But these aren’t the only sounds, histories, and voices that make up the aural landscape of Treaty 7 territory.

The Galt Museum & Archives is one of several cultural institutions in Alberta welcoming art exhibitions into their programming, allowing creative work by contemporary artists to bring historical objects, sites, and stories into the present. The Politics of Sound, as exhibited at the Galt, is interpreted for a considerably broad audience, from K-12 school groups to senior citizens to post-secondary students. The didactics which accompany components of The Politics of Sound use accessible language to present thoughtful questions and critically engaged analysis of the works, drawing connections between the artworks and the historical objects on display.

Marjie Crop Eared Wolf’s *Niitsi’powahsin Secwepemctsín*.Installation Shot. Images courtesy of Galt Museum & Archives | Akaisamitohkanao’pa

Marjie Crop Eared Wolf’s Niitsi’powahsin Secwepemctsín is a combined video and drawing work that tells the story of her project to reclaim Siksikáí’powahsin and Secwepemctsín language knowledge. Three drawings are flanked by two screens paired with headphones, the videos framing the artist’s mouth, chin, and shoulders. In the video, Crop Eared Wolf wears headphones, repeating Blackfoot words in one video and Secwepemctsín in the other. Putting on the headphones, one hears Crop Eared Wolf speaking sporadically, repeating the words recited by the language tutorial (which is only sometimes audible) she is listening to. We are brought close to witness this act of language revival and survivance, an act which is as much about the embodiment of sounds that happens through listening, as it is about the embodiment that comes from speaking.

Marjie Crop Eared Wolf’s drawings pull you in—stepping close, one realizes that the delicate red curving forms are made of individual words in Siksikáí’powahsin and Secwepemctsín, respectively. The words flow, gather, and disperse across the paper like schools of red fish, and looking at them while listening to Crop Eared Wolf’s voice, language is alive, escaping the bind of the Latin alphabet. The images created are a visual expression of the reach for her mother tongue, for the richness of knowing that comes with understanding the untranslatable. Crop Eared Wolf does not speak for the benefit of the listener, rather she speaks for herself, for her cultures. As sonar has reached into the ground to find stolen Indigenous children at Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc (Kamloops), so does Marjie Crop Eared Wolf’s voice reach into herself and across time to reclaim stolen language-cultures which have survived that same genocidal system.

Adam Basanta. Installation Shot. Images courtesy of Galt Museum & Archives | Akaisamitohkanao’pa

Adam Basanta’s exhibited works dodge the entrapments of high conceptual work in favour of sociable and accessible invitations to consider unexpected materializations of sound.In The loudest sound in the room experienced very quietly, a sound as loud as a car horn plays in 30-second intervals, rendered inaudible by the thick double casing in which it is displayed. While simple, the added context of this being shown within a history museum makes me think of the narrative agency of objects which continue to speak to us from within the museum’s vitrine. This work is just a few cases away from a large brass bell, which moves me to think about the colonial sound mark of the bell – church bell, school bell, train bell – as a sound whose ideological impact continues even as it sits deactivated in the archive.

Jessica Thompson’s Walking Machine invites the listener to turn the ear toward the self. The “machine” consists of two small microphones that are attached to the cuffs of one’s pants. Through a small, handheld amplifier, the sounds of one’s walking are enjoyed in real time by the walker. While I had expected to hear my own footsteps, I had not expected to hear the creak of my leather boots amplified as well, not to mention the tfff of a dragged left heel. I was instantly taken back to a moment in undergrad when I walked into a friend’s home – a fellow proto-trans man at the time – who called out from another room, “Ah! It’s you!” as soon as he heard my footsteps coming across his wooden floor. When I asked how he knew, he told me he recognized the distinct way I dragged the heels of my oversized Harley Davidson boots. At times feeling like a pocket call to oneself, Walking Machine is successful as a prosthetic for facilitating self-listening, perhaps making a case for distinguishing self-reflection from self-hearing. As a walker, I am given the space to ask, How is the sound of my walking coded? How are my footsteps gendered? Racialized? How do I sound walking on Blackfoot territory? What does it mean to walk on this land as an uninvited guest?

Benny Nemer. *The Last Song.* Installation Shot. Images courtesy of Galt Museum & Archives | Akaisamitohkanao’pa

Benny Nemer’s The Last Song was of particular interest to me from my perspective as a trans man. A screen plays a video of a bald figure who sings – or seems to sing – Vivaldi’s La Verità in Cimento. The performer begins in a baritone and then undergoes a series of warbling breakages as the voice transitions into a soprano. The moment is prolonged and uncomfortable. I am reminded of that feeling of visceral in-betweenness when my voice suddenly changed as part of testosterone treatment. In the video, the performer’s face smooths into exaltation, triumphant in its passing as a different voice altogether. Is this the same singer producing these sounds or are these multiple voices seamlessly edited together? Is the figure the singer at all or are they lip-syncing? Is the singer trans?

Standing before the video, a sweet, musky scent envelopes the viewer/listener, compelling one to look for its source. In a vase on a plinth, a single purple lily gazes back, visually and olfactorily elegant, robust. A quote in French from trans queer theorist Paul B. Preciado is imprinted fancily on the wall alongside the ephemeral lily. In the quote, Preciado describes the experience of a transitioning voice as “a vibration which spreads in my throat as if it was a recording coming out of my mouth.” Though the didactics fall short of overtly saying so, transness importantly appears in this work not as a gender identity but as a sound, a song. The voice’s transition eludes binary linearity and becomes a composition of sensory information, a fleeting act one hears, smells, and feels. This auditory queerness becomes something not unique to trans experience, but an aural interpretation of transition that, if you think about it, can occur to anyone at any point in one’s life.

*The Politics of Sound.* Opening Reception. Images courtesy of Galt Museum & Archives | Akaisamitohkanao’pa

A trumpet that is also a bayonet, a clarinet with a sniper scope, a music box grenade that plays a song once when the pin is pulled: these are Maskull Lasserre’s Tools for A Second Eden. Fully functioning instruments that are also weapons, these sculptural objects are displayed at the ready, as if they might be deployed to the battlefield at a moment’s notice. Complete with their own custom-made hard-shell cases and mission directives – dossiers containing sheet music for various national anthems and documentation of musicians/soldiers performing with the instruments in situ – Lasserre’s instruments of war are beautiful and frightening. While impressive on their own, Lasserre’s works take on a second layer of importance through their shared staging with historical objects. A display of policing and firefighting equipment (a megaphone, a whistle, speed radars, a steam whistle, and a fire bell) from Lethbridge’s archive brings home the idea of sound as a tool for social ordering and control. One can’t help but ask the same questions of the historical objects as one did of Lasserre’s Tools for A Second Eden: What is it for? Who is it for? Is it dangerous? Interestingly, these are questions one does not always ask of art, but because of the context of a history museum, these questions seem inevitable.

Set apart from the rest of the exhibit, jamilah malika abu-bakare’s audio/photo installation listen to Black women (II) + offerings (III) is a striking space to walk into. An intricately woven mixscape of Black womens’ voices tumbles down from a directional speaker suspended overhead, including the voices of Keke Palmer, Rihanna, Angela Davis, Amara La Negra, Jully Black, and Azealia Banks. I sit on the bench and listen to them precisely speak about their lived realities of racism, sexism, injustice, and invisibility. It is uniquely important to listen to abu-bakare’s speechscape of Black women’s voices in Lethbridge, Alberta, at a time when white voices are actively co-opting the words “freedom” and “free speech” to advance racist agendas. On the walls surrounding the listening space for listen to Black women (II), offerings (III) is displayed as composites made of repeating posters with black and white macro images of jamilah malika abu-bakare’s skin, which visitors are invited to take. I turn one over to find the words of Jully Black:

“whatever you’re feeling
take it to the altar
cause i’m not the one
that’s responsible for
your feelings.”

For us here on Treaty 7 Blackfoot Territory, these last few weeks have called into question the responsibilities of cultural and educational institutions as sites of speech and discourse production. To insist on making space for critical BIPOC and LGBTQS2+ voices speaking to issues of race, gender, Indigenous sovereignties, surveillance, and nationalism continues to be a necessary and radical act. Fostering and protecting such spaces is particularly important in cities like Lethbridge that serve as cultural hubs for rural communities and small towns. Tyler J Stewart’s polyvocal curatorial approach presents questions of sound, speech, power, and relation through creative works which operate in multiple accessible registers. Through the artists’ works, sound as a discourse commodity is queered, no longer a weapon, but rather a series of aural spaces that resist further colonization and co-optation. Sound can be experienced as an expression of question-asking and relation-seeking, and not as hate speech staged by speakers who refuse to take accountability for their own words.

Slip Away in The Flickering: Gretchen Bender’s IMAGE WORLD

Sprüth Magers, London

February 3 – 25 March, 2023

By Crystal Li

The walls of CRT monitors broadcasting live television incessantly set you up to an optical battlefield. Without the accompanying soundtracks, your sense of sight is unprecedentedly amplified, generating hyper sensitivity and attention to what comes to your eyes. Welcome to IMAGE WORLD at Sprüth Magers, London, the gallery’s first solo exhibition for Gretchen Bender.

Image World presents Bender’s significance as a ‘guerrilla’ to the Pictures Generation, anchoring her critical edge over television as a rivalling numerator to media culture, politics, and society. “I thought in the early 80s you guys had done such important work on the print media—the photograph. And it seemed like the next area to similarly deconstruct was television,” she said in a 1987 interview with Cindy Sherman. All exhibited works use live television streams or clips as the source material and vary by the ascending level of intervention and editing.

When TV Text & Image series on the ground floor has meticulously chosen, mostly politicized phrases applied to the screens to superimpose over the images, Aggressive Witness – Active Participant, 1990, on the first floor follows in addition with a sinister soundtrack and a computer-generated undulating white line graphics coming from four of the twelve monitors. Wild Dead, 1984, in the final room, radiates a sci-fi colour to the assemblage of monitor, graphics, and sound. Here, Bender juxtaposes the aggressive, pulsating montage of computer-generated motion graphics and appropriated news clips of missile firing and corporate idents with a synthetic soundtrack of yelps and gunshots, commencing her signature type of installation characterized by stacked monitors and fragmented audio-visuals, titled ‘Electronic Theaters.’

Installation View of TV Text & Image series, 2023. Video by Crystal Li. Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers, London.

These works are Bender’s embodied investigation of how the people at her time simultaneously consumed and were consumed by the mainstream media when the then-now cultural landscape was encroached upon by corporate power. Now, television has already dissolved into handy smart gadgets seemingly advancing for more autonomous and individualistic browsing and streaming. These ‘media-oriented artworks’ from the 80s-90s are now in their fate of ‘a temporal limit to its meaningfulness in the culture’ predicted (and accepted) by Bender, also in her interview with Sherman. In this sense, how differently can we re-read her works at Sprüth Magers in 2023 to restore their strength in the present tense?

“I’ll mimic the media—but I’ll turn up the voltage on the currents so high that hopefully, it will blast criticality out there,” Bender declared the mimicking of structure as her infiltrating tactic to scrutinize and criticize the mass media. She is both an insightful observer and an ingenious constructor of experience. Viewing Bender’s works aside from the recurring interpretation of corporate-thick content particularly striking in the 80s, puncturing them purely by our on-site viewing experience allows us to rejuvenate her works in today’s algorithm-heavy media landscape.

*Aggressive Witness – Active Participant*, 1990. Photo by Crystal Li. Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers, London.

Rather than delving into the well-explored sense of overload in her by-now-signature ‘theatrical exposition of multiple channels’, as evoked in Wild Dead, the illusionary visual effects of disappearing and collapsing only available to in-the-gallery viewing fiercely capture both my eyes and my mind. In TV Text & Image series and Aggressive Witness – Active Participant, the all-caps phrases in black vinyl text stamped center-screen only reveal themselves to the viewers upon closer examination. Otherwise, they disappear into the moving images beneath. Our attention to the phrases in reverse does dilute the live television broadcasts at the back but very often, we are distracted by the ceaselessly fleeting images and ‘blind’ to the phrases upholding political importance. While I was there, PEOPLE WITH AIDS faded into teleshopping when HOMELESS lost to a talk show re-run. The optical illusion of disappearing further aggravates into collapsing. Our sole focus on one screen triggers the flickering of screens surrounding, except the four playing computer-generated geometric graphics. If not being watched or contentless, both the phrases and the moving images of the remaining screens slip away in the flickering.

Bender’s manipulation of our retina resembles the hegemonic nature of every public space, as put forward by Chantel Mouffe in Which Public Space for Critical Artistic Practices? ‘public spaces are always striated and hegemonically structured.’ The spotlight is always exclusively occupied, expelling the others out of the beam of light because public attention is forever limited. Technological transformations in the past decades have usurped television’s dominance, in which social media has replaced mass media and arisen as one of the most heated public spaces. In the explosion of content, competition ‘to be seen’ is no longer natural when it is heavily charged by algorithms — social media’s closest ally. In the digital domain, visibility establishes a marker of recognition and validity.

The gaze on social media is channelled by algorithms, which feeds back ‘the visible’ with more exposure in a close circuit, eventually trapping us in filter bubbles. It is how one’s current interest in fashion and cosmetics automatically closes the gate for her to ANTI-APARTHEID, NUCLEAR WARHEADS SEX PANIC, etc, and in return ‘rewards’ her with more exposure to tempting content on beauty. An algorithm, as a personalized searching configuration, is indeed an arbitrary, rigid programming pre-emptively rejecting alternativity and possibility on our account. Not only does algorithmic visibility deprive our right to a conscious selection, but it also strangles/restricts the digital living space of all visual content along with their embedded discourses and ideologies.

“We need to stay alert to the political implications of the conceptual evolutions of our newer technologies,” Bender’s cautionary reminder is timeless. Inside Sprüth Magers, the option of what to watch is still entirely available to us. Yet, in reality, the algorithmically sorted social media has quietly cancelled out the option by fixating/narrowing our eyes to only what it thinks we should see. What will slip away in the flickering has already been dictated, yet, in the name of us.

What Do We Discard? Specimen by Susan Low-Beer

September 10, 2022 – January 21, 2023

RiverBrink Art Museum

By Lera Kotsyuba

Susan Low-Beer’s ceramic sculptures are uncanny forms that play with the tension between anxiety and care. Travelling across Canada, the exhibition Specimen transforms in each iteration. At the RiverBrink Art Museum in Ontario from September 2022 to January 2023, Specimen, curated by Sheila McMath, shows Low-Beer’s ceramics meld into a quasi-domestic space. Their forms recall organs that drape over industrial forms that are a cold substitution for domestic objects of home, a bed, or a table. The discomfort apparent in rest denotes unease, and the forms, between frail organs and technological refuse, link to our anxieties about aging.

The title, Specimen, recalls a cabinet of curiosities of observation, not the clinical study of medical precision but as objects of fascination, inviting closer observation to make meaning. The exhibition embraces humour and the absurd through the familiar made strange. The uncanny nature of organic forms meeting industrial elements is displayed through the tubes and ovoid shapes to the draped ceramic forms to their rigid grid surface patterns and metal assemblage elements. The works invite closer inspection by pointedly asking the viewer to lean into their discomfort, embrace the absurd and disquieting forms, and contemplate age and decay in the Anthropocene in an era of mass waste.

Walking through the RiverBrink Museum of Art, the space itself seems caught between two worlds, that of a domestic space and a museum. Walking on polished floors in the Georgian-style building, you’re momentarily transported to a liminal space, a space outside of time. Coming upon the gallery space, the rectangular room is adorned with simple wood panelling and an assortment of small tables from different eras arranged throughout the room, the assemblage of draped and balanced ceramic objects adds to the uncanny feeling evoked by the space, both familiar and alien at the same time. The sculptures are ovoid and organ-like, with fibulae and tubes protruding from grid-patterned forms that are not quite organic, recalling metallics and plastics. The ceramic forms are glazed matte or with a high sheen, and the feeling of unease shifts to anxiety where you’re unsure if you’re standing in a medical refuse facility or an industrial scavenging ground. They may be interpreted as curiosities, their half-familiar forms inviting closer inspection. Without the framework of encased forms behind glass, the ceramics are still arranged for display, inviting the viewer’s gaze.

Glossa (2018) is a long ovoid ceramic shape with two tubes extended, searching for something, the form cradled on a stained pillow as if in a hospice. The object rests on a dresser, yet the uncanny organic form’s placement denotes care and the eerie notes of medical decay, a triage of care for an object past its prime. Although a closer look does not resolve the tension, the broken and deflated forms in the exhibition denote a fragility, a slow decay, whether technological or organic is a matter of perspective.

Susan Low-Beer. *Ocellus.* Image Courtesy of the artist.

Susan Low-Beer’s ceramics have shifted from figurative to abstract, the forms of Specimen are therefore able to convey anxieties that suffuse our age: from aging to climate disaster and mass waste, but not without a humorous touch. Ocellus (2018) is a ceramic ovoid with two protrusions, once the interior of something either organic or industrial. The dark glaze and purposeful patching elicit the understanding that an object’s lifetime of use has shaped the wear apparent on its surface. Balanced on a half-moon wood plinth with a do-it-yourself aesthetic of rough assembly, the sculpture sits on top of a polished dark wood table, in contrast with the cement blocks it rests on. The stacking of disparate objects adds humour to the display, easing the tension of clear meaning, encouraging the viewer to embrace the absurd. Low-Beer’s sympathetic gestures, of patching and the readymade plinths, are acts of care for the aged techno-organic form. Rather than a nihilistic bent, Low-Beer encourages humour as the connective thread of the world evoked by her work. There are no clear answers or solutions, but rather than seeking a resolute finality of meaning, she invites us to share a collective experience of uncertainty, and maybe even embrace it.

In Mammilla (2018), two ovoid ceramic forms are linked from within, recalling a symbiotic relationship. An act of care, their connection tube is draped over the other form as if in an embrace, while grey matter pools below. The grid-patterned surface and matte grey and blue glaze with overlaid clay seams gesture to the discard of industry, the plea for care of one form to another, and gestures to an organic tableau. The worn and aged surface once again recalls the age of the forms, their original use disguised by their removal from their original context, yet the ceramics show the maker’s hand in their patched forms, clay smoothed over long-mended wounds.

Susan Low-Beer. *Mammilla*. Image Courtesy of the artist.

Comb-Plate (2018), made of a ceramic ovoid with two protrusions placed on a woodblock, abstractly looks like an automaton that has fallen on the stairs. The absurdist humour contrasts with the disquiet of discard, whether organic or industrial remains unresolved. Wood and metal chairs, concrete slabs, and hollow wood trunks unsettle the observer, creating the tension between the plinth and artwork, to question where the work ends, and the display object begins. The exhibition offers no respite from the disquieting familiarity of objects, at once domestic and commercial, organic and industrial, clay and metal, art and curiosity, humour and absurdity are the common links.

Low-Beer’s ceramics are transformed in every iteration of the exhibition, domestic furniture unique to this iteration of the exhibition, the ovoid forms shifting the understanding of the gallery space they occupy. The tension between discard and decay and the apparent care of mending instills unease in the visitor. Rather than a finite meaning, can we learn to embrace uncertainty and humour as a form of connection? The exhibition prompts us to consider our relationship to objects and ourselves, to consider the ways and circumstances in which we extend care, and what we discard.

I know about hidden things by Juliane Foronda

“…between two beings across great distance.”

January 7 — February 19, 2022

Trinity Square Video

By Katie Lawson

Those who are a part of artistic communities and actively participate in the work of the artist, curator, or critic, know very well that the presentation of one’s work is merely the tip of the iceberg when below the surface of the water is a matrix of relationships that inform the ‘final’ product.

I know about hidden things is a collaborative project initiated by writer and curator Letticia Cosbert Miller which foregrounds Filipina-Canadian artist Juliane Foronda’s ongoing research concerning feminist hospitality, radical care, and traditions of gathering. The exhibition took place at Trinity Square Video in Toronto from January 7—February 19, 2022, yet lives on through its accompanying publication, an art object in and of itself. Foronda and Cosbert Miller invited Danica Evering, Camille Georgeson-Usher, Karina Griffith, and Ronald Rose-Antoinette to become entangled in the process of the exhibition’s making, meeting regularly in the development of the work. Each collaborator would produce contemporaneously a text to accompany the work, not as didactic works of criticism but as a manifestation of a network of relationships based on symbiosis. The artworks in the exhibition consider the role of physical, emotional, and ephemeral support structures, the concealed labour of care and hospitality in spaces and so-called inanimate objects. The texts that make up the printed edition become a support structure for the visitor, a generous gesture that welcomes the reader into a collective dialogue.

*I know about hidden things,* publication materials. Photo by Katie Lawson.

This approach to publication embodies feminist practices of lateral citation: to cite one’s peers, friends, cohort, and colleagues rather than citing upwards, towards a hierarchy of ‘legitimized’ scholarship, making visible the de-centered labour within artistic communities that so often goes unrecognized in the ‘final’ presentation of exhibitions or artworks. The printed edition that accompanied the show compels me to think about publication as a form of democratic dissemination, which opens this network of relationships to those who in turn hold and care for and think alongside an artist, curator, or critic. The texts are packaged in a sculptural bundle, with each writer’s contribution taking a distinct design, material quality, and typographic form. What holds this bundle together is a thoughtfully folded shell, which has the primary descriptive exhibition text and checklist on it in an embossed pink that I found myself running my hands over as I walked around the gallery with it in my hands. Foronda’s work becomes the literal and figurative container or carrier bag for the contributions held within.

I was struck by a phrase in Ronald Rose-Antoinette’s contribution that points towards an atmosphere diffused through a workshop held by Foronda, “the function of which is to betray the totality power wants us to recite.” Power might be understood as predicated on notions of totality and singular authorship, ways of working that are rejected even within the context of what is ostensibly a solo exhibition for the artist, sharing that space with those deeply engaged in the process of its very making. Rose-Antoinette’s ‘Support the Notes’ is a series of poetic fragments that dance across double-sided peach paper, with a deep yet vibrant blue serif text. It feels atmospheric and ethereal, with a level of subtlety embodied in two of Foronda’s works that, in particular, speak softly: magic hour and valuable and flawed. magic hour consists of two barely-there projections of past light rainbows, aimed at the infrastructural supports of the TSV space, reminiscent of the reflections of light that might dance across a room with the shifting sun. valuable and flawed uses small quantities of wood, paper, stone, and tape which take the form of makeshift wedges in the minor space between the floor and the base of the eastern wall. These two works draw the eye around the architecture of Trinity Square Video, with its tactile delights and quirks as a post-industrial space with historic resonances. How is the space of the gallery its own structure of support?

Juliane Foronda. *magic hour*, 2021. video projector installation, images of past light rainbows
Images courtesy of the artist and Trinity Square Video. Photography by Darren Rigo.

One can feel held by a space or a place, after all, as Camille Georgeson-Usher reminds us in ‘On being elsewhere – these archives of guilt.’ Perhaps the most narrative in form of the text contributions, she describes the embodied experience of returning home, to Galiano Island, and how that immersion allows her to feel deeply across time, deep time, feeling the remnants of care from ancestors in the trees, the water, and air. Across this long, narrow yellow paper, which folds down into a square, Georgeson-Usher wonders how to contend with feelings of guilt, getting lost, and displacement. Questions of reciprocity arise in reading this work alongside Foronda’s exhibition. If a place, a space, or a so-called inanimate object can provide and impart care, who cares for them in return?

The spoon is an object that Foronda returns to in her practice and finds its way into the exhibition through unit of measure, a series of plaster casts from the concave bowl of spoons. More specifically, spoons that were used during a residency at MeetFactory in Prague in Fall 2021. Their smooth, ambiguous forms rest on a low lying plinth painted the same soothing peach tone as the feature wall of the gallery. The spoon in its shape and function is not so different from using one’s own hands in sharing and consuming a meal, a practice that is common outside of Western dining traditions. Beneath the surface of this work, I am reminded of how place settings can carry colonial coding and inscriptions of race and class. Karina Griffith’s Did you lay the table? Yes, I set the table consists of a pale manila, single-sided half sheet of paper with deep purple sans serif text, a series or list of eighteen ‘rules embedded into traditions of drinking, dining, and hosting.

Juliane Foronda. *unit of measure*, 2021. plaster casts of the concave of spoons.
Images courtesy of the artist and Trinity Square Video. Photography by Darren Rigo.

Danica Evering offers a series of text fragments, which literally unfold across the many-paneled, accordion-creased paper, which when collapsed fits in the palm of the hand, much like Foronda’s spoon casts. In one panel, Evering wonders how the ephemeral becomes solid, how “plaster makes this archive tender.” The vibrant green text on soft grey paper draws in quotes from Eugenie Waters, Mark Clintberg, Jennifer Doyle, and Tegan Jones, serving as a further expansion of the matrix of relationships held within this project. This contribution takes up aspects of Foronda’s work most literally or explicitly, as aspects of the exhibition come in and out of focus—the false sense of security given by the examination table paper, a direct response to the work coping mechanisms, and questions of harm and harm reduction. There is only one panel that has the text rotated 90 degrees to the left which strikes me as an outlier, and it reads: “between two beings across great distance.”

I have to remind myself that I know about hidden things went from concept to realization during a time of pandemic and isolation, with Foronda, Cosbert-Miller, Rose-Antoinette, Griffith, Georgeson-Usher, and Evering working virtually across great distances. It is no small feat that their collaboration feels so intimate and deeply connected. There is a warmth and tactility to both the exhibition and the publication that draw the visitor in, much like a good host. Is feminist hospitality an attempt to close or narrow that distance between us?

I feel compelled to mention my own personal connection with Foronda, who I feel very grateful to have had in my life as a friend and peer over the last six years. We met just before she moved to Iceland for her MFA, and what would follow was a period of writing one another lengthy emails and letters that moved between the personal and professional. We would send what others might deem the ‘scraps’ of our day-to-day life across oceans as a part of our growing ongoing long-distance kinship—rocks, dried flowers, transit stubs, and exhibitions pamphlets scrawled with notes, home-mixed spice blends, confetti, stickers, pins, postcards, a carefully selected stamp, a packet of dehydrated sourdough starter. We are both collectors, or hoarders, of curious objects and thoughts. I have been grateful to move between guest and host in this enduring exchange, and I can’t help but imagine the many copies of the I know about hidden things publication existing out in the world, a gift and care package from Foronda. In a part of a recent interview in Contemporary Art Stavanger, a quote from Foronda has stayed with me, that captures the ethos behind her practice, this project, and an unending process of being in relation has stayed with me: “The research alone will only go so far if it’s not shared.”^[1]

^[1]Foronda, Juliane. “Interview: Juliane Foronda” Contemporary Art Stavanger, November 23, 2021. https://www.contemporaryartstavanger.no/interview-juliane-foronda/

You can also find this review in the second print issue of Femme Art Review on Queer and Feminist Collaboration.

The Potentiality of the Returned Gaze

proximity, pleasure, plasticity: looking at performance at Dazibao

© Installation view of the exhibition *proximity · pleasure · plasticity. looking at performance*, Dazibao, 2022. Photo: Marilou Crispin.

By Maria Isabel Martinez

April 21 – June 23, 2022

Chukwudubem Ukaigwe, Deanna Peters/Mutable Subject,
demi-mesure (Clara Cousineau + Marion Paquette), Every Ocean Hughes, Francisco González-Rosas, Freya Björg Olafson, Hannah Wilke, Ivetta Sunyoung Kang, Lisa Smolkin, Manoushka Larouche, NIC Kay, and Wan Yi Leung

The three keywords framing the exhibition, proximity, pleasure, plasticity: looking at performance cause me to search for the words in the works rather than allowing the works to speak amongst themselves. It’s as if by this move to name, we are being instructed on how to look—perhaps this is a problem with titles more generally. proximity, pleasure, plasticity is a group show featuring twelve artists at Dazibao, an art center in Montréal, developed by Emma-Kate Guimond, the Exhibition and Special Projects Coordinator, under the direction of France Choinière. As I move across the dimly lit space, one work offers a glimpse of a titular word only to have it dropped as I continue to another piece. The “looking at performance” part of the title can signal a few things: how someone appears; the act of viewing that an audience member participates in; the position of a camera towards artists and performers, a technology that captures a momentary happening within a permanent loop. But if, as written in Dazibao’s exhibition poster, we’re meant to consider the relationship between viewer and viewed, then the three P’s of the title disturb such a simple directive. Instead, we’re thrust into an exhibition of pluralisms that tries to fit within its titular constraints while begging to step outside them. The wordplay here is its own performance.

A gaze mediated through a lens can be oppressive or liberatory depending on who holds it and what sort of image is produced. proximity, pleasure, plasticity’s plurality gives space (literally and figuratively) to a diversity of experiences. Erected in the middle of the large room is a single wall; one side features Francisco González-Rosas’s Identity templates for a disordered body (2022) and Wan Yi Leung’s Alone with the cat in the room (2018) plays on the opposite side. As the title suggests, González-Rosas’s work addresses identity and the virtual self through a drag persona, while Leung’s work touches on the power dynamics of desire and a sexual economy. Curatorial decisions like these suggest that queer and feminist understandings of the three titular P’s are suffused throughout the space and the pieces form a type of coalition toward challenging an obtuse spectator. As many of the artists put their bodies on display, the boundary between subject and object collapses. As the artist addresses their audience, we become implicated in their projects and begin to feel like the artist is the one doing the looking after all.

In Ivetta Sunyoung Kang’s Proposition 1: Hands (2020), the viewer becomes a participant. A video plays directly across from the entrance, and below the projected image, a mat has been set up for gallery goers to sit and enact the gestures Kang performs on screen. The movements are based on a South Korean children’s game (“Make Electricity on Hands”) which Kang has transformed into a massage therapy. The project encourages the viewer to take a partner’s hand in theirs, sense its properties, and with friction and other movements, enhance its warmth and sensations. The video opens by declaring: “This video is a proposition on tolerance of the uncertainty ahead of your future” and it suggests that our anxieties could be endured through contact with the other. Kang offers proximity, pleasure, and yes, plasticity through this exercise, but it requires that the viewer accept their desire for these conditions. We must see ourselves the way Kang sees us.

The role of the viewer as the subject in Chukwudubem Ukaigwe’s The Shivering (2020) collapses once more as the Black male participants in the video gaze back. The camera shivers and the participants appear blurred. The description of this work states that the blurred image “mirrors the fragility of their experience” and the camera’s shaking is indicative of the instability of viewing itself. Can we trust a camera as a technology of documentation? The piece prompts me to consider whether one could ever be an accurate observer. Moving image culture often portrays narrow depictions of Black masculinity as either violent and threatening or as targets of brutality. However, Ukaigwe puts this binary into disarray, as the subjects are still and the camera pans over them with a slight tremble. I find myself straining my eyes to get a more accurate look at the people on screen. The individuals looked into the camera, at times face-on and other times with their backs to the lens. It’s this mutual gazing that disrupts the neat binary between the viewer and the viewed: the participants appear to be as equally aware of us as we are of them.

The exhibition raises questions about how the presence of the lens alters our proximity to each other and the reverberations that surface from that emergent closeness. At times, the works seem to be reaching in different directions—Wan Yi Leung’s Alone with the cat in the room and Demi-mesure’s (Clara Cousineau and Marion Paquette) aestheticized and choreographed video performance de nature intérieure for example. But this plurality serves as a gathering of different “pleasures,” splitting conventional definitions of the titular words into fractals. Proximity occurs explicitly in works such as Deanna Peters/Mutable Subject’s Something between my face and your face is always interesting (2021), a livestream examining virtual distance.

Plasticity might be the hardest “P” to track across the exhibit, though the works serve as apt examples of engagements with the mutable quality of relations between the self/selves, technologies, and each other. The viewer/viewed dynamic takes on its own process of plasticity, through moments of closeness and delight at engaging with aesthetic experimentations. Ultimately, it is the camera and performativity that unite the pieces: how the artists exert themselves through the image, and raise questions, or taunt, the viewer about the fluid and sometimes disconcerting nature of spectatorship.

This review is featured in the second print issue of Femme Art Review on Queer and Feminist Collaboration.

Velvet Terrorism: A Story by Pussy Riot’s Russia

*Punk Prayer,* Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, 2012, courtesy of the artists.

November 24th to January 29th, 2023

Kling&Bang

By Irene Bernardi

Velvet Terrorism is the first exhibition by the Russian feminist performance art group Pussy Riot. The exhibition at Kling&Bang in Reykjavik, Iceland is curated by Dorothee Kirch, Ragnars Kjartanssonar, and Ingibjargar Sigurjónsdóttur. Velvet Terrorism narrates the history of Russian totalitarianism through the memories of Maria (Masha) Alyokhina, a founding member of the group since its first performance back in 2011. With their mix of music, art, and rebellion, Pussy Riot became an icon of the opposition against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his oppressive policies from his second election in 2012 to the Ukraine War in 2022.

The exhibition displays itself as a massive punk-rock journal, full of pictures, writings, colorful duct tape, and video installations. In a sparkling font, the exhibit’s title opens the door to the first video, an original work by Icelandic artist and curator Ragnars Kjartanssonar. The artist films a group member while she urinates over a blowup of Putin. Her face is hidden under the iconic ski mask, the eyes are focused on the camera with an unmoved and resolute look. This act of defiance ends with the performer kicking Putin’s picture, which falls on the ground surrounded by splashes of urine.

Kjartanssonar’s work welcomes the audience, who gets thrown into a creative chaos of pictures and screens that saturates the room up to the ceiling. The art pieces chronologically tell the story of Pussy Riot. Not only does it show their actions and performances, but it reports the media’s lies about the arrest of Masha and Lucy Shtein – an activist and Masha’s partner – following the 2012 performance of the song Punk Prayer in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Masha paid for this performance with a two-year sentence in a penal colony in the Ural Mountains, more than 1000 km away from Moscow. The performance also gives the exhibition its title, since “Velvet Terrorism” is the moniker that Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov, considered to be Vladimir Putin’s spiritual confidant, used to address it.

*Policeman enters the Game*, Moscow’s Final World Cup, 2018, courtesy of the artists.

Once Alyokhina and Shtein were released, protests and performances didn’t stop—on display the visitors can see the most iconic performances like Policemen Enters the Game, when activists demanded the stop of police abuses and the release of every political prisoner by invading the playing field during the World Cup final in 2018. Another one is the “homage” paid to President Putin for his sixty-eighth birthday when Pussy Riot placed rainbow flags over five government buildings in Moscow. Many other actions and demonstrations led Alyokhina to serve house arrest until April 2022. In protest of the declaration of war against Ukraine, Masha cut off her electronic wristband. This demonstration cost her a new sentence for having broken the terms of probation which started in to which she was obliged September 2021.

*Rainbow flags,* Moscow’s Culture Ministry building, 2020, courtesy of the artists.

In the last room of the exhibition, two videos ironically show the ankle guards as if they were in the window of a jewelry store. The exhibition seems to end there, until a security guard tells the visitors they need to leave their belongings and proceed through a cramped little room where the Russian national anthem is played at full volume.

Once the visitor leaves this temporary prison, they return to the exhibition’s entrance by going through a tunnel where pictures and videos of the latest Pussy Riot performances are shown all over the walls. At the entrance, the visitor learns about the presence of many surveillance cameras all over the exhibition, a clear allusion to the oppressive media encirclement in Putin’s regime.

The exhibition, which launched on November 24th and will last until January 29th, 2023, originated from the collaboration between Ragnars Kjartanssonar and Maria Alyokhina. The artist helped the activist leave Russia after her latest sentence and Alyokhina started a European tour with the Pussy Riot members to promote her book Riot Days, published in 2017.

Velvet Terrorism is undoubtedly a complex retrospective. It aims to show the group’s strength and its desire to emerge and state the truth. The exhibition uses an irreverent punk attitude by turning the objects that characterize a violent dictatorship into artistic subjects. Whether it is a prison, a whip, a surveillance camera, or a Putin image, Pussy Riot can use it to mock the regime and regain power and freedom in their hands.

Check out Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia at Kling&Bang in Reykjavík, now extended until January 29th, 2023.

LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS by Rea Sweets

LMD_DOCUMENTATION-5586 — Rea Sweets. LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS installation shot, Charles Street Video. 2020. Photo by Roya Delsol. Images courtesy of the artist.

LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS

Charles Street Video

Organized by Margin of Eras Gallery

February 14th – March 14th, 2020

By Adele Lukusa

LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS is both a figurative and literal invitation to Rea Sweets’ bedroom. Tucked into Margin of Eras Gallery’s Charles Street Video space, on the second floor of Toronto Media Arts Centre (TMAC), the immersive installation explores being a neurodivergent, mad, and disabled individual pursuing higher education. Swept in red lighting and underscored by soft indie tunes, the disheveled and realistic bedroom evokes the artist’s presence: a desk with stacks of discarded clothes, notebooks, and food; a bed and screen-printed pillow to rest your head on; and two towers of stacked empty prescription bottles, with an LED sign with the word “take your time” sitting between them. Slide the headset over your ears, and get transported to an all-nighter with Sweets typing rapidly with coughs. A short film documents her executive dysfunction. And if you’re lucky, you could converse with Sweets herself (or scribble messages in her guestbook if you miss her).

LMD_PORTRAITS-8277 — Rea Sweets. LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS installation shot, Charles Street Video. 2020. Photo by Roya Delsol. Images courtesy of the artist.

If madness is messy, then Sweets embraces it passionately and unabashedly. At its heart, LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS is an ode to Sweets’ relationship — or rather, her break-up with post-secondary education. Through the interactive nature of the work and the accompanying public programming, LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS also demonstrates how vulnerable art can foster community dialogue.

Incorporating disability and madness into her art had not come to full fruition until Sweets signed up for Ryerson’s Cripping the Arts in Canada and A History of Madness.

Both classes are rooted in disability justice and encourage students to think critically about the ways in which society has created and enforced “normality” in relation to disability and madness, while examining the overlap between those two communities.

According to Eliza Chandler, former artistic director at Tangled Arts + Disability and disability studies professor at Ryerson, the term “mad” refers to individuals with a history of mental health diagnoses or experience with the psychiatric system, which may include institutional stays, prescribed medication use, therapy, and other medical intervention. Members of the mad community may identify as consumers, survivors, and current or ex-patients of the psychiatric system. Historically considered a slur, “mad” is currently being reclaimed by those classed as mentally ill or neurodivergent. It can encapsulate all who experience oppression due to sanism.

“[Mad] a small, monosyllabic three-letter word, but it really did afford me the kind of freedom to stop pretending,” said K Zimmer, a poet and English Literature student at the University of Toronto.

LMD_PORTRAITS-8426 — Rea Sweets. LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS installation shot, Charles Street Video. 2020. Photo by Roya Delsol. Image courtesy of the artist.

“Language is power,” said Sweets. By learning about terms like neurodivergent and mad, as well as hearing students speak about madness and disability, Sweets could better articulate her own experiences, specifically her executive dysfunction that had only been exacerbated in university.

“It’s like your capacity is always on cooldown mode,” said Sweets of executive dysfunction. “You’re smashing buttons, trying to get yourself to do things but your body-mind says ‘We can’t do that yet. We’re still recharging’.”

Within a university setting, Sweets routinely had to pull all-nighters to finish essays when professors refused accommodation.

“No matter how much you accommodate me, or think you’re leveling the playing fields, it will never be as if I am on the same level as of a neurotypical student,” Sweets says, “I’m still going to have to sacrifice my health or in some way, shape, or form.”

Art was a way to motivate herself to create beyond the academy. “At least if a situation is incredibly shitty, I can make and mold something out of this, she said. “Creating artwork for myself as a form of agency is really important for me.”

For folks like Sweets, stepping into mad-positive spaces is essential. Classes in disability studies were the first time she felt “welcomed and encouraged.” Instead of handing in an essay for her final Cripping the Arts assignment, Sweets asked if she could submit a proposal for a showcase idea. Chandler gave her the okay, and so LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS came to be.

At the front of the room, Sweets is on the mic asking about the ways madness manifests itself in art. By Sweets side are fellow mad student-poets Zimmer and Twoey Gray, as well as Max Ferguson, her mentor. Though set up as a panel discussion for the public, the conversation shared by these four artists is filled with uncommon honesty and vulnerability.

There’s no sugarcoating their experiences of sanism, of the ways pursuing post-secondary studies has impacted their desire to succeed academically at the expense of themselves. Their stories are being told, not as a heartfelt tale to make others feel better about themselves, but to embrace the good with the bad that comes with being mad.

Gray described the panel as a very “affirming” space, a sentiment echoed by Zimmer.

“There were times [when I thought], ‘Oh, I’m royally fucking up’,” they said, “[But] I could trust that I was going to be accepted in that space.”

LMD_PORTRAITS-8310 — Rea Sweets. LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS installation shot, Charles Street Video. 2020. Photo by Roya Delsol. Images courtesy of the artist.

The comfort, acceptance, and vulnerability present within that discussion is an extension of Sweets and the artwork itself. Take, for example, the wall of actual diary entries, email exchanges, and therapy notes speaking to her madness, a kind of vulnerability described by Gray as “hypersharing.”

“In some ways, the more naked and exposed and vulnerable I am, the more I’m giving [to the audience] and the more affirming my artwork happens to be,” said Sweets.

It’s what makes Sweets’ artistry so brave, according to Ferguson. “She’s incredibly good at balancing being approachable and being brave,” he said, “And she inspires others to be brave.”

When doing outreach for this show, both in-person and online, Sweets ensures she can be at the gallery. In order to accommodate for COVID-19 measures, she also narrated an online virtual tour of the exhibit through Facebook Live.

“Listening to and seeing the comments is inspiring,” Ferguson said, “It’s inspiring to see [Sweets’ art] inspire other people.”

That inherent reciprocity is what distinguishes LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS and all of Sweets’ work.

“That has helped me feel like [sharing] my vulnerabilities are worth it and I feel less like an open scar,” she said. “It doesn’t burn. It’s good.”

Colour and Commodity: Marilyn by Sara Cwynar

Sara Cwynar

Marilyn

27th February 2020 – 30th April 2020

The Approach

SaraCwynar_redlips — Sara Cwynar, Marilyn, installation view at The Approach, London. Courtesy the artist and The Approach.

By Adi Berardini

“Cezanne…it’s Susan,” the voice in Sara Cwynar’s film Marilyn echoes. Cezanne jewellery boxes act as a signifier of high-class wealth, opening multiple times throughout the collaged-footage film. Suddenly, I have flashbacks of every time someone has mispronounced my name—something that many women likely know well. I have to introduce myself saying, “it’s Adi. Eighty like the number.” Then, I think of how it’s depressing that I have to assign a numerical value to my name in order to be remembered. Isn’t remembering someone’s name a sign of fundamental respect?

In Marilyn, featured as an online exhibition at The Approach, Vancouver born, New York-based artist Sara Cwynar addresses how the commodification of women’s desire is not only prevalent but ingrained in a capitalist society. On the inspiration of the title, Cwynar explains how “the X-Rays of Marilyn Monroe’s chest sold for $45,000—even the inside of her body was up for grabs.” Often with a seductive, vintage feel, the film specifically uses soft pinks and siren reds to display the relationship between colour and commodity. The narrator chimes in with, “colour, decided by someone else, handed down, placed upon us.” Reminiscent of shopping for lipstick and attempting to find the perfect colour, it causes me to dwell on how individuality can be both a myth and a marketing ploy. I think of how it’s ironic that women don’t have full autonomy over our bodies, yet there are hundreds of shades of lipstick to choose from.

SaraCwynar_image — Sara Cwynar, Marilyn, installation view at The Approach, London. Courtesy the artist and The Approach.

“I’m telling you these reds aren’t real,” the narrator states in a voice reminiscent of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.

The lips are referred to as a red wound, a seductive and vivacious symbol, but also one that is tied to violence. A hand strokes a lavender rose; the film repeatedly zooms in on a fashion editorial, a shot of a woman posing with matte red lipstick. Cwynar is interested in the production of photographic tropes and how they are just as manufactured as the makeup that the models wear. She has worked as a graphic designer for the New York Times, and frequently shoots her colleague Tracy Ma, since Ma is also familiar with media construction and its inherent power imbalance, particularly as a woman of colour. Footage of make-up manufacturers reel, showing the creation of buttery foundation and saturated glitter eye-shadows. While the cogs of the machine hypnotizingly churn, the darkness envelops us, consumed by the same cycles—a loop. Cwynar is fixated on the same few poses the models for popular e-commerce sites repeat. The film speaks of the idea of “a New Woman, “a Face,” and how the patterns were invisible to us before.

“I thought of the women of antiquity who were accused of lying for making up their faces.”

SaraCwynar_image2 — Sara Cwynar, Marilyn, installation view at The Approach, London. Courtesy the artist and The Approach.

The film is primarily narrated by a man’s deep voice and a woman who chimes in at times, almost like she’s trying to get in a word during a meeting where a male colleague takes up too much space. The artist is pictured trying to lip-sync the narrator, an act that seems like a reclamation of what he’s saying in a tried but failed manner. The inter-spliced narration is in reference to a myriad of philosophers and cultural icons such as Descartes, Barthes, Plato, Sontag and Eileen Myles, and focuses largely on colour, art, capitalism, and gender. The artist says phrases like, “Women create life, men create art but not anymore, suckers,” and “I know I have a body of a weak, feeble woman but I have a stomach and a heart of a king.” Suddenly, the clearance sale is filmed from the vantage point of an escalator— “60% off!” the red tag reads, illuminated by fluorescent mall lighting. There are deliberately too many media snippets to contemplate simultaneously, enacting the oversaturation of advertisements one subconsciously faces during a trip to a shopping mall or scrolling through their phone.

“A new image comes without warning.”

SaraCwynar_men_bust — Sara Cwynar, Marilyn, installation view at The Approach, London. Courtesy the artist and The Approach.

A key aspect of the film is how nostalgia fades in a capitalist ploy. It also evokes how companies re-appropriate trends and nostalgia to sell their products to consumers. I witness not just the plaster nude bust, but the staging and the men behind it, setting it up. Several shots of a blonde woman’s slick red manicured nails are seen stroking a cherry convertible. Sliding by are a plethora of lipsticks, collaged over a shot of Claude Cahun and vintage film photographs of near-nude women. The voice of the narrator evokes the posts of Instagram influencers, inherently narcissistic in nature, but oh so deep. These days, it’s impossible to tell if someone genuinely likes something or they’re trying to sell it to you. The voiceover proclaims that she loves the times, she can buy anything she wants, but it’s hard to believe her when her face is visibly stressed, tears welling up in her eyes. She searches for pleasure where she can get it, but it hardly seems to be authentic—the glamour fades just as feelings do.

“To choose when to look and when to be looked at, that is the essence of true freedom.”

Cwynar addresses how in art women are thought of as objects and not subjects. With an array of commodified colours in her palette, the films address the painful reality of a society that uses the idea of “freedom” as a marketing method to sell back a sense of feminist empowerment. I can’t help but think we’re trapped in a system that’s difficult to escape.

The end of the road: Julia Frank’s Fine Corsa

1FC_Eye_Entrance1_JuliaFrank — Julia Frank. FC / Eye, Color print on semitransparent textile. Galleria Doris Ghetta. 2020.

By Victoria Dejaco

Preface: Julia Frank’s solo exhibition FINE CORSA at Galleria Doris Ghetta opens with a large curtain of fabric, an all-seeing singular eye. Through FINE CORSA, Frank addresses the environmental concerns of the warming planet we live on through cosmogony. The exhibition contains an artificial crystal—a large, melting block of contaminated ice filled with microplastics. The crystal causes the viewers to dwell on the power of our actions that taint its very nature. Frank asks us how long our human-made illusion can last if the earth’s ecological imbalances are ignored.

The exhibition is situated in the current Northern Italian Covid-19 hotspot. Regardless of its physical inaccessibility, the following text and visual material provide stimulus and relevance during this difficult time that we all face. The new work is accompanied with a text by Victoria Dejaco, a curator, art historian and her lifetime partner, in the form of a love letter. They are both from the same Northern Italian region but have left the area years ago because of its conservative and homophobic ideology.

Upstairs, the upper floor of the gallery is a curated exhibition by Siggi Hofer which has opened simultaneously. Altogether, even under sad circumstances, it seems historical because for the very first time two gay artists, born in the same area but who moved abroad, decided with united forces to provoke what they have been escaping and fearing for years.

Vienna/Ortisei/Vienna, February/March 2020

Dear Julia,

Your exhibition opens with an eye printed on a semi-transparent textile installed like a curtain separating us from the exhibition space. Not two eyes. One. Like we use it to look through a looking glass or a microscope. An invitation to look closer? One left and one right eye, a pair of eyes would be a familiar sight. It’s the one, isolated right eye that is unfamiliar. Seeing something unfamiliar influences our perception. Not long ago we had a conversation about how—in order to save energy—our brain constantly categorizes patterns and acts/reacts accordingly. It also means that we as humans are less susceptible to the details and irregularities of the everyday because automated categorizing blanks them out. To look at a pair of eyes is not irregular, and our brain would recognize the pattern as known. However, the single eye is alien enough for us to switch from a process-orientated everyday into a different rhythm—one that prepares us mentally and physically for the exhibition and focuses our attention.

Because our blind spot is approximately 30 cm in front of our noses, metaphorically this begs the question of how many other things we ignore that we have right before our eyes? The simple apology that puts an end to the fight? The heartfelt salutation that would turn the stranger into a friendly neighbor? Even solutions to the big challenges of our times might be similarly simple. A thorough global redistribution that also produces less CO2? Maybe we just cannot see it clearly yet. We don’t have much time left for good solutions and their implementation. In the race against climate change, we are already “in fine corsa,” if not behind schedule.[1]

Possibly, this is the most important outcome of any artistic practice: the invitation to look closer, to dwell on a topic, to decipher a riddle, to engage with an object longer that we are used to from the scrolling on platforms in our everyday hustle under constant and simultaneous impulses. Who will preserve this skill in the future to ponder on a question as long as it takes for the solution to arise? Or to lose oneself in a painting like the one at the beginning of your exhibition?

The time and skills for contemplation are getting scarce. We find “Contemplor” from “contemplare” in the Stohwasser, the Latin dictionary that always quotes the first person singular of every verb: “1. inspect, regard: contemplator (imp.) cum to observe, when V. 2 metaphor. contemplate, consider. E: templum: observation room.” The last remark is relevant for your exhibition. Temples (or cathedral) are rooms of observation. A room, in which we have time for contemplation, for observation. Not too long ago I read in the Swiss newspaper NZZ:
“In the 1980s […] society’s need for clearly defined spaces of art increased. Their closedness was experienced as reassurance, their institutional character is seen as a confirmation of certain values that seemed to disintegrate in a pluralistic, multicultural media society. […] Enhanced by a previously inexistent public interest the museum became the new community building: Incidentally, those new museums were called the new cathedrals.”[2]
With precise mise-en-scène of the lighting, you turn your exhibition into a cathedral, a temple (for observation). Already in medieval Gothic age, the dramaturgy of light was orchestrated for maximum enhancement of contemplation and worship. Cathedrals were built in order to have dim light in the entrance so that the eyes would need to adjust to the somberness and then be blinded by the rising sun through the colored windows of the apsis in the East during morning congregation.

3FineCorsa2020_ExpoView1_JuliaFrank — Julia Frank. Fine Corsa, Installation shot, Galleria Doris Ghetta. 2020.

The two light sculptures are oriented towards the poles. One towards the North, the other towards the South. Shining bright, albeit their ephemeral presence. Besides the wall text, they are the only source of light.

Light is also the guidance for the viewer through the exhibition: leading from the first sculpture in the South, along with the text work and the second sculpture in the North to the last installation, that closes the apocalyptic atmosphere of the exhibition with a symbol of hope.

The first wall work on the blue membrane on the left wall after passing the eye-“curtain” is part of a series of works in a technique you developed a few years back. The surface of the insulating material with layers of microplastics has as many familiar associations as unfamiliar ones. The newest work is the smallest one yet with a diameter of 150 cm. The works can’t be much smaller by nature because you are 170 cm tall and the synthetic layers applied under gas pressure are pressed together in the folds of the material under the weight of your agile and muscular body, pressed into one another and partly detached from the surface again. The viewer is looking at the backside of the layer of “paint” because the frontside was collapsed to become the middle or bottom layer.

To question things and to think outside the box is second nature to you. In general, sculptures are three-dimensional and have more than one obverse. Pictures, on the other hand, even abstract ones, from an art-historical point of view, traditionally don’t show the viewer their backside. However, we experience the layers of color in your works mainly through their backsides. A very sculptural approach to “painting.” Fittingly, their making is rather a performance than a work process. I am hardly surprised, that you succeeded in transferring the vehemence of stone carving (which you already mastered prize-winningly as a teenager) to the practice of painting. Who else? 80% of your artistic output was done without a studio to work in. Artistic production is like breathing to you; intrinsically interwoven in your actions and thoughts.

The rectangular versions of the membrane work have a cartographic character. Now you have turned the form into a circle and immediately it resembles a distant planet.

Or the iris of an eye? The single “components” of the surface are multi-faceted in their form, individual like configurations of clouds and as co-incidental. The clods seem as fragile as eggshells. Or moss lichen. Or corals. A piece of untouched nature. Or, on the contrary, like the garbage patches of plastic trash floating in our oceans trapping sea animals.

After all, the surface is made of microplastic particles undulating on the blue insulating membrane, like the residues of plastic that regularly get retrieved from the insides of dead sea animals. Every year a million birds and 100,000 ocean mammals die around the planet from ingesting plastic or being caught in it. Also, we humans apparently consume the weight of a credit card in plastic every week.[3] Plastic sediments in the bodies of mammals similarly as on the whole of our planet: in clods and layers. Future civilizations will be able to tell the period between 1970 and 2030 AD from the sedimentation of plastic in our geological strata.

Also, the layers of your wall work function like strata of sediment of colored plastic particles. Residues of this sediment can be found in the ice blocks that form the main body of the sculptures, that melt in front of our eyes, while we decipher your signs in the dimmed light.

18FC_Icewhite2020_detail2_JuliaFrank — Julia Frank. Fine Corsa, Installation shot. Galleria Doris Ghetta. 2020.

Your exhibition is plunged into darkness. Another contribution to sharpening our senses. Light only plays a role as part of three artworks and one wall installation. Implicitly you are showing us that light>enlightenment> (in-)sight comes from the works of art. Both sculptures are composed of a grid on which the ice blocks are resting, a frame, and a rotation motor, that moves a tube light up and down. It looks like a scanning process. In intervals of a few minutes, the wet lights are moving down and up the ice blocks, then switch off again. The first sculpture has a red light. Despite the light source being a cold light, the red color brings a feeling of warmth, a fire that melts the ice. We might think of spring, the sun that melts the ice and awakens nature since the exhibition takes place only a couple of weeks before the official start of spring. But the ice is melting with the room temperature that changes depending on the visitors in the exhibition space. The more visitors in the room, the warmer it gets and the faster the ice will melt. The more people there are on the planet, the more our planet is “sweating…”

Coincidentally, this exhibition takes place under a frightening global state of emergency. Nothing like humanity has ever experienced before. Due to the global pandemic spread of Covid-19 whose European epicenter became Lombardy towards the end of February, the Italian government banned meetings of more than 100 people in the week before Saturday 7 March, the date of the exhibition opening. Initial partial and local restrictions in Lombardy soon applied to the whole of Northern Italy. 48 hours after your unofficial opening, the whole country goes in lockdown. All cultural institutions have to close. 72 hours later, we are both back in our apartment in Vienna when all boarders to Austria shut down and everyone passing the boarders on Brennero, Sillian, and Passo di Resia by train, highway, or state road gets fever checked. In the following weeks, governments [from] all across Europe and most Western countries take up similar measures to curb the spread and “flatten the curve” of exponentially growing infections. International flights are reduced to a minimum. No international conferences are held. The Olympics are postponed for the first time in history. No festivals. No concerts. The CO2 values drop world-wide in the following days. After four weeks under lockdown, in Wuhan, where the virus first broke out emissions are reduced to the point of a blue sky showing behind the lifted smog.[4]Natural light reaches the citizens again.

6FC_IceRed&Cartography2020_JuliaFrank — Julia Frank, FC / Ice (rot). Ice, metal, rotation motor, electrical parts, wet- lamp, LED, translucent red film. Galleria Doris Ghetta. 2020.

The unnatural red light of your first sculpture reminds us of infrared light rather than sunlight. Infrared light is also associated with layers in art history since infrared reflectography is used to reveal underlying layers of a painting or sketches in a non-destructive manner because different pigments of color absorb the light differently. It hence references the synthetic layers of your membrane work too. But it is associated with a second function that relates to your work: The infrared spectroscopy is used in waste management to detect and filter plastic in waste separation processes.

The light bar installed prominently at the far end of the room combines two different practices of yours for the first time to my knowledge. The installation unites the text works that until now have appeared on paper, as photographs, on mirrors, or in shop windows with your sculptural practice. The text, in this case, is applied to a light bar. It connects the wall installation with the freestanding sculptures. It is mounted on the same height as one of the objects too and the residues are frozen into the ice block connect the sculpture with the wall work on the blue membrane. You give the viewer clear signals that for you nothing exists independently, that everything is connected. If this concept of interconnectivity would be clear to humanity, we might stand a chance…

The wall text reads: “You are my last breath. Tell me you care for me. You are the first and the last thing on my mind. We probably risk too much. Is this part of our destiny? You give us all we have, but it’s not enough and your patience has run out, we let it happen. The time is now. All eyes are on the clock (but) the time takes too much… Do we end our waiting? The atmosphere is charged. In you I trust. And I feel no fear as I do as I must. Seduced by the fear… I will not hesitate. The time is now, and I can’t wait. I am empty already too long. Tempted by fate. And I won’t hesitate. The time is now, the time has come.”

14FC_TTIN2020_Zeit_JuliaFrank — Julia Frank. Fine Corsa, Installation shot. Galleria Doris Ghetta. 2020.

Each sentence opens doors to multiple interpretations. The text could be read as a prayer. The worship of planet Earth. Seeing it as an equal partner, to not take the planet and its resources for granted as the basis of our livelihood. No fear of the grand gestures that are necessary for course correction. To shift the metaphor of the Earth as “Mother” to the Earth as “Lover” creates a more emphatic, equal relationship between humanity and the natural world.[5] “You give us all we have, but it’s not enough and your patience has run out.”

The second sculpture is illuminated repeatedly by clear cold-white light shining through the melting, impure ice. This ice block contains the residues of the layers of plastic from the performative membrane works. The lettering on the wall that picked us up in the South at the first ice block, lead the viewer in the North, where a second block is melting away before our eyes. You found a poetic expression, but your message is clear: the poles are melting.

21FC_IceWhite2020_JuliaFrank — Julia Frank. Fine Corsa, Installation shot. Galleria Doris Ghetta. 2020.

Also, outside around your exhibition during these first warm days of March, huge ice sculptures are melting. In the winter in Ortisei, Val Gardena, the valley where your exhibition takes place, up to 30-meter high ice sculptures are traditionally created along the river and in prominent places. They are created by a sprinkler system with a huge tree-shaped scaffolding underneath. It sprinkles the structure with water during the cold winter days that freezes into a big white-blue weeping-willow-resembling frozen waterfall. At night they are illuminated from inside. A bright glow comes from inside the frozen sculpture. They give the landscape the semblance of a magical world. The light behind your second block of ice has a rather disenchanting effect. It shines a clear light on the impurities of plastic scatterings inside the ice.

The South Tyrolean landscape, UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Dolomites, is a multifaceted and fascinating region in the Italian Alps. Mediterranean and alpine.[6] International and vernacular. Bilingual. A transit country and yet largely untouched and undiluted, for example in terms of language development (so many dialects!). Harald Pechlaner talks about a prominent facet of South Tyrol, tourism, in an audio piece that is set on a porphyry “seat.” You asked Harald, with whom you have already travelled half across Europe exploring the non-places along the most frequented routes, to take on the roles of tourist, resident, and critic around the topic of tourism and to alternate between those perspectives. You present this audio piece with headphones on a rock. The stone has a sprawling shape adapting to ones, hips, and thighs, inviting to linger. To observe, to rest, to contemplate. Listening on headphones, we know, creates an intimate space where one loses awareness of the noise level of the outside world. You give the listener the opportunity to dive into the globally omnipresent problem of the familiar abroad and the foreign at home.

27FC_detail_Amethist:Geoide_JuliaFrank — Julia Frank, Fine Corsa installation shot. Rock, Local porphyry rubble, MP3 Player, headphones Audiorecording by Harald Pechlaner. Galleria Doris Ghetta. 2020.

The surface of the stone is replicated on the wall of your last installation. A cave wall with cracks in it makes the viewer approach in curiosity to discover what is hidden behind. In Plato’s allegory of the cave, the true forms are behind the viewers, who are satisfied with shadows on the wall. In your narrative truth, purity, hope all hide behind the wall. As it happens, when you intensively engage with space over a longer period of time, you have intervened in the architecture of the gallery and used the space between the exhibition architecture and the building itself. In a custom-made display, different spotlighted gems nestle behind openings that look as if they were cracks in our dimension and the entrance to another. Hidden behind the wall are four rock crystals which are gems of pure quartz and amethyst, a variant of quartz. The rock crystal is generally assigned to the month of April, the month you were born in.

The Earth is made of 65% of silicon a mineral that derives from the rock crystal. In the Classical world, it was thought to be petrified ice. “Crystal” comes from the Greek “krystallos” which means “ice.”[7] We come full circle: At the end of your Parcours the crystals represent symbolically the rock strata of the planet, the sediments. Layers of history and the history of our planet before it was ours before the Anthropocene began to erode it. Before we added plastic to its historic geological strata.

Around the world, various cultures attribute healing powers to the quartz and in particular to the rock crystal, who can be found almost everywhere on the planet. Among the ancient Egyptians and the Romans, the Aztecs, Mayans, Celts, Tibetan Buddhists, Aborigines, Native American and African tribes, it is a supporting tool in diagnosing diseases. Hildegard von Bingen described its effect on the eyes, against ulcers, heart problems, and stomach troubles.

The rock crystal is a symbol of hope and renewal.[8] We encounter here the hope for healing. Originally you probably related the metaphor of healing to the climate disaster. Now, in an awful coincidence, simultaneously we are hoping for the healing of the over 500.000 infected[9] followed by the healing of the economy. The hope, that this disaster won’t be forgotten and give us a chance to find better methods of developing as a collective species. The last message of your exhibition is hence one of hope. A glimmer of light, the only thing we need, to see, to realize. We turn to leave the exhibition towards the entrance and look at the single left eye staring at us—the mirror image of our first impression when entering the exhibition.

Love, Victoria

[1] Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, first edition 1969, new edition 2008/2017, Lars Müller Publishers, Zurich.

[2] Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, 23.09.2016, https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/kunst_architektur/museen-sind-die-kathedralen-von-heute-unterhaltung-und-erkenntnis-ld.118166 (Last accessed: 17.03.2020) (translated by the author)

[3] CNN Health. “You could be swallowing a credit card’s weight in microplastics each week.” June 17, 2019. (Last accessed 17.03. 2020) https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/11/health/microplastics-ingestion-wwf-study-scn-intl/index.html

[4] https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/coronavirus-china-luftverschmutzung-101.html (last accessed 17.03.2020)

[5] “We treat the Earth with kindness, respect, and affection. […] We will stop the rape, abuse and poisoning of the Earth” from the Ecosex Manifesto, (http://sexecology.org/research-writing/ecosex-manifesto/) (last accessed: 17.03.2020)

[6] South Tyrol accommodates many industry leaders of international relevance: Microgate (https://www.stol.it/artikel/wirtschaft/suedtiroler-teleskop-spiegel-fuer-die-nasa-und-co), Durst, Leitner (last accessed 17.03.2020)

[7] https://www.edelsteine.net/bergkristall/ (last accessed 17.03.2020)

[8] Ibid.

[9] The Number of infections globally still rising. 476.000 on the morning of March 26th, 2020. 523.000 on the evening of March 26th, 2020 when I finished translating the text from German. 9 Yuval Noah Harari, The world after Coronavirus. (https://www.ft.com/content/19d90308-6858-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcca75) (last accessed: 25.03.2020)