Of Kith and Kin
November 4 - December 4, 2004
Davida Nemeroff: All These People, Susan E. Evans: Saga
Cynthia Greig & Richard H. Smith: This is Not My Father
Opening Reception, Thurs, November 4, 6 to 8 pm

Essay by Alison Kenzie

Writing of photographer Diane Arbus's unfinished Family Album, Anthony W. Lee notes that families offer "a way to name how people belong . . . to each other" (60).1 On one hand, these ties of belonging can satisfy crucial human needs, and their absence or loss can be devastating. Equally, however, "belonging" to others can bring a considerable weight of responsibility and even threaten individual growth or personal freedom. Is it any wonder that the push and pull of family relationships can absorb us from childhood to adulthood?

Gathered together in Of Kith and Kin, artists Davida Nemeroff, Susan E. Evans, partners Cynthia Greig and Richard H. Smith, and Lyla Rye explore the concept of family while interrogating the mechanisms used to represent it. If the diversity of these artists' approaches affirms just how complex family matters can be, it also suggests that art remains a useful vehicle through which to investigate how people belong to each other and how this condition of belonging can be understood.

The photographs of Toronto-based artist Davida Nemeroff may well revive viewers' own traumatic memories of posing stiffly for yearbook photos, wedding portraits, and the like. As with many formal photographs marking crucial rites of passage, these works from Nemeroff's All These People series (2003) identify her sitters' public and private roles through a kind of emblematic mise-en-scéne: the sitters' attire, props, and setting provide clues as to who these people may be.

The works' close links to Renaissance paintings increase their formality (and for some viewers, their familiarity). If the triptych The Last Seder immediately evokes Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper (1495-98), the young girl in Guide strikes a distinctly Mona Lisa-esque pose. And with the tongue-in-cheek Adivad, Nemeroff seems to fashion herself as a modern-day version of Botticelli's Venus.

Perhaps these resemblances are only to be expected. As Julia Hirsch argues in Family Photographs: Content, Meaning, and Effect (1981),1 the iconography used in today's family portraits can be traced back to photographs created in the earliest days of the medium--and many 19th-century photographers were themselves looking to the secular portraits of the Renaissance for inspiration. Given the half a dozen centuries that have passed between the Renaissance and now, it is remarkable how strongly Renaissance conventions of family portraiture persist. But as we carefully arrange our bodies and stare stoically into the middle distance, we tend to spend more energy trying not to breathe or blink than we do considering what these constructs might mean.

Davida Nemeroff, Guide, from the All These People series, 2003

In All These People, Davida Nemeroff provides viewers with many opportunities to question such conventions. For instance, the studio backdrops used in Scout and Guide draw attention not only to these portraits' reliance upon Renaissance iconography, but also to the artifice of this iconography. How likely is it that the youths would be called upon to cross a waterfall or scale a mountain? How grand really are the accomplishments of scout and guide? Wrinkles captured in the flimsy backdrops undermine the gravitas of both the sitters and their portraits. And while the circles highlighting the youths' faces might at first seem to suggest divinity, they finally serve to augment the secular ordinariness of the sitters and to recall the camera's optical field. The camera, finally, is perpetuating these constructions in the 21st century.

"Family album viewing can be intensely boring," notes Philip Stokes in the collection The Portrait in Photography (1992). Dubbing this experience "visual 'muzak,'"3 Stokes arrives at a term that paradoxically does and does not describe Saga (2002-3) by Susan E. Evans, who is based in Jamesville, New York. The very absence of images in Evans's frames or albums, on walls or coffee tables makes it all the more obvious that family photographs deemed acceptable for storage and display will generally show the same thing: the success of the family unit in completing socially-acceptable rites of passage and in mimicking the gestures and behaviours already circulating in other forms of visual media.

Precisely because Saga seems so generic, Evans can invite subversive readings of her family narratives and heighten viewers' awareness that context is everything. If viewers are momentarily thrown by the phrase, "Jack trying to mount Skipper," for example, they can quickly recover their composure by incorporating the phrase back into the context of a well-adjusted family. Recognizing (and potentially challenging) the rules and expectations that create the context can become viewers' next logical step.

Susan E. Evans, Saga, 2002-03, framed photograph, Courtesy of Ricco/Maresca Gallery, Chelsea, NY

What's more, the cheerfully mundane texts in Saga can become truly depressing. Their field of white-on-black resembles a void. As memories fade, a visual record of the family's time together will constitute that family's history. What will Evans's records reveal about this family's daily reality, the off-camera moments that so often give the lie to images in a family album?

Detroit-based partners Cynthia Greig and Richard H. Smith use video to explore these questions in a very intimate way. Where Saga is generic, the video installation Black Box: This Is Not My Father (2003) is painfully specific; it stands as the sole moving record of Cynthia Greig's father, who died in a plane crash two years later, on a voyage decided upon at the time the footage was taken. Both installations nonetheless confront the same devastating prospect: the loss of a meaningful family history. Taken on its own, the brief footage Cynthia Greig recorded of her father singing seems woefully inadequate. It depicts a performance before a camera lens. The information it offers is scant: the easy-going nature of Greig's father; the closeness between her father and a friend; the men's trust of the person holding the camera; the unsteady camera movement suggesting informality or spontaneity.

Cynthia Greig & Richard H. Smith, Black Box: This is Not My Father, 2003, video loop still

Greig and Smith's manipulation of this footage emphasizes the fragility of the history that these images embody. Slowed down or edited with an audio track, the footage begins to acquire new meanings. A plane, waves, a reenactment of the plane's black box recording found after the crash—with these fragments, viewers can assemble a narrative about Greig's father. This narrative becomes more transitory with each repetition of the video footage. Because the black box reenactment is longer than the video itself, audio meets visual at slightly different intervals. Meanings accumulate, are reinforced, shift.

Presented as a continuous loop, Black Box does not bring us any closer to an understanding of who Greig's father was or what father-daughter relations were really like. Nor does this portrait of Greig's father somehow predict what his relationship to Smith could have been, given more time. By virtue of its medium, Black Box can literally move away from the still, silent image of the family portrait. But like formal photographs or snapshots preserved in family albums, it may reveal more about those who make, keep, and view it than it does about its human subject. As its title suggests, the video is not Greig's father. Rather, it is a powerful tribute to a father's life that suggests the importance of having visual traces to help order and understand familial relations, no matter how imperfect or incomplete both happen to be.

Making and examining visual traces of familial relations has engrossed Toronto artist Lyla Rye since the birth of her first child in 1999. Like such earlier works as Byte (2002) and Carnal (2003), Rye's installation Young Girl at an Open Window (2004) features her own daughter. A feeling of loss suffuses this family portrait, too, for Rye is aware how quickly her daughter passes through life stages, and how unrecoverable they are. As she documents and deals with this loss, Rye confronts the different ways that she and her daughter experience the world, and probes the nature of perception.

Rye's daughter is both everywhere and nowhere in Young Girl at an Open Window. Though she appears in each component of the installation, she constantly eludes the eyes of the camera and viewer as well as the windows' frames. An effect of the girl's Houdini-like quality is that it suggests she both conforms to the structures of the adult world and is able to work outside of them. She plays with a dollhouse 'constructed' from traditional values and mimics the roles and behaviours that its domestic setting encourages. At the same time, her version of the dollhouse includes frogs on the floor and dogs on the sofa. And though small and uniform, her dollhouse windows will allow the passage of tongue, hand, and eye.

Rye's use of window motifs in each component of Young Girl at an Open Window strengthens a dual reading of the child's relationship to the adult world. As their eyes scan across the vitrines' surfaces, viewers are constantly asked to look through, to gaze at the young girl as one might regard Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665-6), whose imagery Rye evokes. At every turn, Rye confounds a clear sightline. The dollhouse acts one of many screens. In her still images, Rye leaves some forms indistinct; and in the video, she disperses her daughter's unified image much like mirrors in a kaleidoscope, challenging the viewer's perception of both depth and time. Somewhat disoriented, viewers may feel that they themselves are "at an open window" looking at the girl and being watched by her as she impishly moves behind the dollhouse walls.

Though it is too early to proclaim Rye's daughter a future Adivad, it is tempting to imagine her growing conscious of the values and roles that she cannot now perceive. Most certainly, she will witness technological changes in the ways that family portraits are created and preserved. What will surely not change is the importance of representing family in an effort to define how (and to whom) one belongs.

Biographies

Susan E. Evans was born as Juanna Ramos in April 1966 in Yankton, South Dakota. Upon adoption, she was given the name Susan Eileen Evans. Starting her photographic studies at the age of eight, Evans received her BFA in both Photography and Holography from Goddard College in 1991 and graduated with honors from Cornell University earning a MFA in Photography. Currently Evans teaches photography and digital imaging at the Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, NY. Evans is represented by Ricco/Maresca Gallery in Chelsea, NY. and Gallery Sink in Denver, CO. as well as appearing in galleries and museums worldwide.

Cynthia Greig has exhibited her work in the US and abroad including exhibitions at the Houston Center for Photography, The Alternative Museum in NYC, and Focal Point Gallery in England. Shortly after completing her studies in art history and filmmaking at the University of Iowa, she met her collaborator and mate, Richard Smith, while working on the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

Davida Nemeroff is a recent graduate of Ryerson University’s School of Image Arts with a B.F.A. in Photographic Studies. Her work has been published in such magazines as Contemporary, Hive, and PhotoEd Magazine. Informed by an appreciation for iconic imagery, Davida’s work bridges the gap between fine art and popular culture. She uses this connection with a playful sensibility to create portraits that have an enigmatic sense of familiarity. Her series All These People has been published as an e-book by EN Press available on lightreadings.com. Davida Nemeroff lives and works in Toronto.
DAVIDA NEMEROFF - www.afikomen.ca

Lyla Rye is an installation artist who lives and works in Toronto. She has shown across Canada and internationally for the past 15 years. She was a founding member of the Toronto collective Nether Mind. Recent solo exhibitions include: Cambridge Public Galleries, The Tree Museum and The Grimsby Public Art Gallery. She has exhibited in group exhibitions at The Power Plant, Toronto; New Langton Arts, San Francisco; Pace University Digital Gallery, New York and Downtown Art Space in Adelaide, Australia.

Richard H. Smith works as a film editor in Detroit, and has edited several independent documentaries. In 2000 he received an Emmy award for editing "Come Unto Me: The Faces of Tyree Guyton," a documentary about the controversial Detroit artist who transforms abandoned homes and crack houses into art to incite action against urban neglect.

Alison Kenzie is an independent writer/editor, educator and curator based in Toronto. Since 2000, she has been working for numerous Ontario galleries and arts organizations, such as The Art Gallery of Windsor, The University of Toronto Art Centre, and The Art Gallery of Ontario. Curatorial projects in 2005-6 include exhibitions at The Thames Art Gallery, Chatham and the Varley Art Gallery in Markham.