Curatorial
2008 Maximum Exposure 2008, Gallery 1313, Toronto
2008 Refractions, Ryerson Gallery, Toronto
2006 Buildings That Spin, p|m Gallery, Toronto
2006 Fuse New Media Festival, Ryerson School of Image Arts, Toronto
Photographic
2007 - 2008 Views From My Balcony
2007 - 2008 Environmental Portraits
Writing
2008 Review - Give It Up (Toronto vs. Buffalo) at p|m Gallery (Jessica Thompson)
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Refractions
New Media Student Exhibition at the Ryerson Gallery
Guest Curated by Malka Greene
January 9 - 26, 2008
Click here to download the Now Public review by Jordan Yerman, or read it online here.
Click here to download the The Eyeopener review by Amy Greenwood, or read it online here.
Refracting the Mood
Curatorial essay written by Malka Greene to accompany the exhibition.
Newly arrived and totally ignorant of the Levantine languages, Marco Polo could express himself only with gestures, leaps, cries, of wonder and horror, animal
barkings or hootings, or with objects...
...the ingenious foreigner improvised pantomimes that the sovereign had to interpret: one city was depicted by the leap of a fish escaping the cormorant’s beak to fall into a net; another city by a naked man running through fire unscorched; a third by a skull, it’s teeth green with mold, clenching a round,
white pearl.
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
If you don’t know anything about the science of vision, refraction is almost magical – light enters our body and bends, creating an impression of the world that belongs exclusively to the person seeing it. This bending of light is the starting point for the slice of reality that is a person’s
unique point of view. And it is this individual and unique reality that drives communication and expression. It is what we hope to show others when we try to convey our experience—of a taste, thought, or memory.
But there is an inherent difficulty in capturing the ephemeral; we rarely recall things clearly or in crisp, perfect detail.
Memories, like vision, are bent and slightly skewed. They are coloured with all of the things that happened before a precise moment, and are tinged with emotion.
It’s difficult to know with certainty what
has really happened and how much of a
past has been created retroactively by a
story or photograph.
Communication is tricky. Should facts be privileged over feelings and impressions?
Italo Calvino writes in Invisible Cities of the explorer Marco Polo describing his epic journeys to Kublai Khan. Each of
Polo’s accounts offer loving elevated prose that craft an abstract but vivid image of a
city’s mood but entirely lacking statistics or literal details. As Polo becomes more
fluent in Khan’s language, the reports become more about fact than gesture, and
Khan notices that the evocation of a place is more meaningful than the facts and
figures that come to represent it. The spirit of a place is lost.
People are emotional beings and while we can be analytical, we often aren’t. In the trajectory of art history, photography presented a question for some artists: if a photographer could capture the real, what should other artists convey? Movements such as impressionism and cubism capture the feeling of a moment or place in ways that can be described as more emotionally authentic if not realistic. The glowing lights in James A. M. Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold (1875) or the multiple angles of a work like Marcel Duchamps’ Nude Descending A Staircase (1912) convey so much more mood in their respective light touches and segments than the same scenes could, if executed in a more staid manner. These abstractions — refractions — act almost like a prism that splits light into different colour segments.
Continuing along this trajectory, it is possible to see in new media that some artists are using machines to create works and experiences that correlate more closely with the human psyche. Almost a kind of technical impressionism, the works in this exhibition each refract the moment and resample it to create an image or experience with a unique mood and emotion that can take a viewer beyond the literal.
Daniel Garcia’s series cITY Of iNFORMATION is influenced by contemporary artists such as photographer and architect Michael Awad, but also makes direct visual reference to work such as Duchamps’. Surprisingly, Garcia's work is composed in-camera and shot on film; Garcia only uses a computer to knit frames together to create the larger panels. The bleak colours in some, as well as the cacophony of multiple and ghostly images, are evocative of impressionism and cubism. They viscerally convey a range of moods and conditions of the city: loneliness, luminousness, fragmentation, and hectic movement.
Befriend, an interactive video projection by Bryan Adare, Nathan Garvie, and Ella Myers quite literally refracts light: using technology to create what they have dubbed a ‘digital mirror.’ The multiple shadows created by the intervention of software and hardware disrupts time and to some extent, identity, leaving ripples and impressions of the visitors to the gallery that can outlast their stay.
A sculptural installation by Jeanette Kennedy, James Lee, and Priscilla Vogl, Breathe creates a fractured and ambient space. An experiential piece, the hanging fans seem almost alive, like birds or leaves, as they respond to our sounds. Here, the refraction is very clearly a digital one with
the microphone acting as the prism that reconfigures the audio input and turns it into a soft breeze and playing shadows.
The question of whether artists should try to realistically capture the real is a moot one. A more compelling goal— particularly for young artists searching for their voice — is to create work that can slip by the rational thought of the viewer and
wind its way into emotional places.
Click to view the e-vite, designed by Malka Greene
Click to view the brochure and read the curatorial essay.
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