Episode
March 17 – April 16, 2005
Robert Duchesnay: Rituals of the Anti-Social
Leslie Peters and Dara Gellman: Pearl
Opening: Thursday March 17th, 6 to 8 PM

This exhibition is presented in association with the 18th annual Images Festival, April 7-16, 2005. www.imagesfestival.com

Robert Duchesnay, The Traditions from the series Rituals of the Anti-Social, 2001

By Andrea Carson

Episode brings together Robert Duchesnay’s photographic series entitled Rituals of the Antisocial and Leslie Peters and Dara Gellman’s collaborative video entitled Pearl. Both works feature suburban bungalows, closed off and unapproachable, as props or backdrops for a larger narrative in which banal exteriors belie the American Dream. These images bring to mind Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village, where the technological revolution has engendered a disconnection between our own personal experience and that of a global communication network. In popular culture we see evidence of this disconnect in the frustrated isolation of characters from the television program Desperate Housewives, in suburban teenager’s affinity for Gothic subculture, and in the late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain’s desperate rebellion against his hometown, Aberdeen. Beyond the discussion of a failed utopian dream however, the works in Episode examine the agencies by which we perceive such a phenomenon, as well as the use of these means to pose questions about the human condition. Duchesnay’s black and white photographs make use of the bleak, disjointed theatrical settings of film noir, while Pearl examines movement and sound in relation to image.

Peters and Gellman were struck by the ways in which generic images, such as the one found in Pearl, are manipulated to create drama for television’s "true crime" programs. In Pearl (whose title refers to the house’s former occupant, found murdered there), the artists have exaggerated the techniques used by the shows’ producers to convey a portentous aura. In this way, the work succeeds in shifting our attention away from the subject toward the means by which our perception is manipulated. To achieve this, the original zoom-in of the camera has been considerably slowed down, reversed, and looped into a smooth, tentative back and forth, while a snippet of the show’s ominous soundtrack has been stretched out and slowed down into a thunderous echo. This treatment dictates our reading of the house as a sinister environment, holding the viewer in a state of ongoing suspense.

Leslie Peters and Dara Gellman, Pearl, 2004, single channel video, sound

The house, by definition, is a welcoming, inviting environment. As Gaston Bachelard states in The Poetics of Space, "…the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind. . . . It is body and soul. It is the human being’s first world."1 There is an assumed aura of safety linked to the image of a house, which transforms into suspicion immediately upon the introduction of suspense (brilliantly demonstrated in the heightened anxiety of Hitchcock’s Psycho). Thus we find the house in Pearl immediately suspect, as the expectancy in the difference between past and future, certainty and uncertainty, comfort and suspicion is magnified. In dream symbolism, the exterior of the house signifies the outward appearance of an individual; looking at Pearl, we are confronted with a closed visage—the uninviting door, the camera stopping short, the distance created by the video camera, the unfamiliarity and lack of movement. If this were a happy home, there would be life, or at least indications of life. Our suspicions are aroused instinctively by the lack of the aforementioned signs. When suspense as filmic device is isolated as the only moment, as in Pearl, it ultimately comes to echo the universal suspended moment—life. Precisely because the story of the house is never revealed, the dynamic created between what the viewer knows to be true (i.e. one’s own experiences with houses, cinematic conventions, etc.) and what is unknown about this particular house, encourages the fetishization of the outcome.

The compelling nature of suspense in film often stems from its juxtaposition against a seemingly ‘normal’ family environment, as in the film noir of Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, or Alfred Hitchcock. Robert Duchesnay’s Rituals of the Anti-social are private performances caught on film, using a noir-ish language to heighten the solitary, disjointed nocturnal scenarios that reveal his own personal moral attitudes; they are acerbic commentaries, clumsily staged. The artist, as scenographer, has sought to create a narrative within a "controlled theatrical setting" and the work, grouped as diptychs and triptychs, reveals an obscured and private narrative from frame to frame that is left open to interpretation by the viewer.2 By using the melancholy of film noir in scenes of domestic interaction, which he further references by positioning himself alongside artificial characters such as mannequins, dolls, and other props, Duchesnay has referenced a detached disillusionment that shows up the emptiness of the American Dream through the dream-world of desire. Suggesting the plight of a human being suspended in a manufactured fantasy world—the artist questions how one can be expected to relate to such unobtainable dreams. Clearly, the works suggest that one cannot. In Daycare, a floodlit castle—presumably a suburban child-care centre—brings to mind baseless, unsubstantiated schemes or ‘castles in the air,’ as well as the re-appropriation of fantasy architecture for fast-food franchises. The Project places the artist and his mannequin-wife (Stepford-wife) around the back of the bungalow, surprising her with his plans for a ‘dream’ house, further suggesting the house as unattainable dream. As Bachelard says: "This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms." 3 The darker Sacrifice shows the artist with hands aflame before his "wife," revealing, with dark bemusement, his feelings of suffering and pressure in the quest for the trappings of success.

Significantly, as with Pearl, the action centers around, yet never enters into the house. The manner in which Duchesnay has retained the props as props, rather than possessions, serves to keep the viewer from entering into any illusion. In a kind of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, there is a disassociation from the scene allowing for a more thorough understanding of the artist’s viewpoint. This "alienation effect" between the viewer and the image is exemplified in the deliberate separation of the narrative across several images. This work is a commentary, by the artist, for the artist, stemming from both the general and the intensely personal, appropriating genres and styles in order to tap into a universal awareness. The house functions as a potent symbol of desire, standing in for the place we cannot return to. As Czeslaw Milosz says in Josef Koudelka’s Exiles, "an archetypal exclusion from the Garden of Eden repeats itself in our lives, whether Eden be the womb of our mother or the enchanting garden of our early childhood." 4

In Episode, distance is measured in many ways; each work in this exhibition makes self-referential use of filmic devices to suggest the ways in which both suspense and desire have altered our point of view toward utopian ideals.

1 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, (City, Press date), 6-7.

2 Robert Duchesnay, 2004, Artist Statement

3 Bachelard, Ibid, 61.

4 Czeslaw Milosz, "On Exile," Exiles. Photographs by Josef Koudelka. (New York: Aperture, 1988) 2.

Biographies

Dara Gellman and Leslie Peters have worked collaboratively as video artists and curators since 1996 under the name VVV. Their collaborative works have been exhibited and screened at international venues, including Galerie Powerhouse La Centrale, Montreal, Images Festival of Independent Media, Toronto, 8th Festival Internacional de Video/arte/electronic, Lima, Peru, and the 6e Manifestation internationale vidéo et art électronique, Montréal. International premieres of their recent work include Interference at the Sydney International Film Festival, and Deliberate at the 20th International Short Film Festival Berlin. A retrospective survey of their collaborative practice will take place in 2006 at the Centre d'Art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie in France.

Originally from Australia and now based in Toronto, Dara Gellman is a video artist, cultural organizer and educator. Her single channel video and installation works have been exhibited widely; her seminal video alien kisses has shown in over 15 countries. Dara was the Director of the 2003 Tranz Tech Toronto International Media Art Biennial, and is currently the Project Director of Video Art in Canada, a web based educational initiative to promote Canadian video art history.

Toronto based artist Leslie Peters has been actively working in video and multi-channel installation since completing her studies at the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1997. Leslie was the Spotlight Canadian Artist at the 2004 Images Festival in Toronto. This work was subsequently exhibited in Lima and Cusco. In addition to exhibiting in the U.K., Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Australia and France, her work has been shown at the Power Plant, National Gallery of Canada, and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Robert Duchesnay is a multimedia artist educated in Montreal and London, England. Currently at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, he is well known for his documentary artwork concentrating on Buckminster Fuller’s architectural legacy and was instrumental in "saving" two outstanding Fuller structures, the Montreal Expo 67 Geodesic dome and the Dymaxion Dwelling Machine (circa 1946) in Wichita, Kansas. More recently, Duchesnay has been working on developing a peculiar and dramatic photo fiction series featuring childhood archetypes such as parental figures, bears, automobiles, and suburban architecture.

Andrea Carson is currently based in Toronto, where she writes on contemporary art, architecture, and design. After having spent six years in London, UK, where she received her MA in art criticism from City University, she returned to Toronto in 2003. She has written for Contemporary, Artnet.com and Canadian Art among other publications.