Exhibitions 1999 - 2000
January 6 - February 5, 2000
Still Life
Bianca Hook, Euan MacDonald, Carl Reglar and Fraser Stables
Lee Rodney, curator
Meanwhile ... it hesitates for a moment, and pretends to stand still1
Eddi Amsel, a young boy featured at the beginning of Gunther Grass's novel Dog Years, does not own a camera, though he has "glass pinhead eyes" and a penchant for "everything that drifts, hangs, runs, stands, or is just there." The novel's narrative flow, like many novels, is carried by a river. But it's also arrested by an early scene, an extended passage that conveys little more than the movement of Amsel's eyes. While his friend, Matern, paces at the river's edge searching in vain for a stone, Amsel lingers behind. Amsel likes to see things at a distance, as he sees fast, so fast that things move very slowly and sometimes stop. He waits.
While Matern teeters at the edge of the bank (hand outstretched and empty), Amsel catches a glimpse of a small object (a pocket knife, a gift from Amsel) stopped in flight at its zenith. Before the object begins its descent into the river, Amsel, both narrator and time keeper, tears his eyes away. Figuratively speaking, he has taken a picture so he stops looking. We learn nothing of the knife's impact on the water or its eventual disappearance.2
Amsel is like a camera and, like Etienne-Jules Marey, the inventor of chronophotography, he is fascinated with things in flight. In the name of science, Marey developed a photographic gun to analyze the flight of a bird. Though Marey's subjects were live, chronophotography made life still for the purpose of incremental analysis. In this way, the scientific ideal of observation is similar to the "controlled trance" that Paul Virilio speaks of, "a control of the speed of consciousness."3 Marey's studies had the effect of flattening movement so that it was unchanging, homeostatic. Matern throws, Amsel captures, Marey shoots: in their various ways, they all kill time.
Still Life brings together work that speaks to the process of killing time-not waiting necessarily, but something less conscious: moments of clarity that result from spatio-temporal lapses. This is not the ecstatic trance of a mystic-it is something more ordinary, perhaps brought on by boredom. These works in photography and video convey the atemporal embodied within generic objects or situations. Without event or place, they image indifference.
The light table is a white substanceless field that enables formal precision and clarity; like a substitute for the sky, it denies and defies time. For Carl Reglar, it is the field for a taxonomy of insignificant domestic objects-buttons, marbles, ends of yarn, string, pins, nails. Though inert, these types of things tend to circulate, collecting in one's pockets and ending up for no particular reason in a jar on a windowsill or desk. The series provides an inventory of the jar's contents, individually stopped in time and space.
Bianca Hook's images are fragments of a collection of beige, plastic farm animals. Like many toys, they appear both comic and tragic: each animal figure appears suspended, either drowning or floating in a liquid form of its own substance. The collection hangs in clusters and each group is punctuated by a blank frame, a semi-transparent colour that appears to extend the field in irregular intervals. Though highly organized and contrived, these photographs retain a casual quality that references the snapshot-the items are caught moving through the frame as if ephemeral or fleeting. The stillness of the image, however, belongs to the medium rather than the object itself.
In the mid-nineteenth century, cameras went up in order to look down, and they took to the skies in kites or balloons. The first aerial photographs were those of Paris, then Boston, and the ensuing succession of experiments in the late nineteenth century was a race to capture a "better" world picture. This reached a kind of visual apotheosis in 1968 when the earth became the ultimate icon born of the flying eye, the fantasized image of Zeno's static cosmos. We can only suppose that this pregnant image at one point generated a kind of euphoria, which has since been flattened by the continual presence of the televisual.
In Euan Macdonald's polaroids, the object is altogether absent. He uses the snapshot as a kind of cheap trick-the instant ready-made image shot from television. Macdonald references the monotony of the Discovery Channel, airshows or his own videos (which are in themselves endless meditations on the single cliched object). These are random images, by-products of the iconography of flight and space travel.
In the early days of cinema, just after chronophotography had been reconstituted into moving pictures, audiences were quite satisfied watching simple movements, those of clouds or smoke.4 They also watched films over and over, as once wasn't enough. Moving pictures thus provided a kind of anodyne effect from the real, as repetition ensures that nothing really goes away.
Fraser Stables' Stranger (1998) and Euan Macdonald's House (1999) are looped videos that waver between still and moving image. They examine the flow of non-events from a fixed camera position. In Stranger (1998), anonymous blue figures walk slowly, regulated as if on a moving sidewalk, the type typically found in transit stations or airports; but the cadence seems to be even slower. The irregular interval of white light, the space that separates figure from ground, stretches and contracts like an elastic membrane of time and space attached to the walkers themselves.
In House, the screen is compositionally split at the shoreline. Though the sagging structure in the top half is ostensibly still, it appears to move, slowly inching in the opposite direction of the river at a speed of its own. In Interval (1996), the yellow line of the freeway marks out both a practical and compositional division for two-way traffic. Macdonald has framed his shot so that the split occurs as a formal device in the middle third of the screen. This is the area where, in a traditional perspectival composition, one would expect to find a horizon line and vanishing point to indicate the illusion of depth.
Like a snapshot, the videoworks in this exhibition flatten or equalize the subject on display. This vivisected concentration on the banal has a leveling effect, capturing movement and denying change. Photography and video are here reduced, and there is a formal parity between still and moving image that recalls cinema's beginnings, the "cinema of attractions" (no story, no actors, no sound)-a situation wherein spectators were enthralled by repetition rather than verisimilitude, a suspension of time that allowed the viewer to be both anonymous and everywhere.
Lee Rodney
Biographies
Bianca Hook studied at the Alberta College of Art (Calgary), graduating with honours in 1993. She attended the Yale University Norfolk Summer Painting Program in 1992. In 1998, she completed an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing at Concordia University (Montreal). She currently lives and works in Montreal.
Euan Macdonald has exhibited widely in Canada and the United States. In 1999 Macdonald had a major solo exhibition at the Girloch Gallery in Oakville and the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo, Japan. He is representated by the Robert Birch Gallery in Toronto and currently lives in San Francisco.
Carl Reglar was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (Vancouver) in 1995 and received an M.F.A. from Concordia University (Montreal) in 1998. His work has been exhibited in Vancouver, Montreal and Minneapolis. He is currently enrolled in the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at McGill University (Montreal).
Fraser Stables was born in Scotland and currently lives in Houston, Texas, where he is participating in the Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston). Upcoming exhibitions include The Very Thing, curated by Robin Metcalfe and Susan Gibson Garvey for the Dalhousie Art Gallery (Halifax).
Lee Rodney is an independent critic and curator whose primary research interests lie in the areas of video, film and architecture. She is currently undertaking a Ph.D. in Historical and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
1 Gunther Grass Dog Years, 1963, p. 19
2 It returns at the end of the novel again as a gift to Walter Matern, which provokes a similar lapse lapse of consciousness. He then casts it into a canal.
3 Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (trans. Philip Beitchman) 1991, p. 30
4Marey had no interest in moving pictures, though his experiments lead to the development of the cinema, which in its early days was uniquely focused on "movement-image" and, like its photographic predecessor, had the capacity to extract "from vehicles or moving bodies, the movement which is their common substance." Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image (trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam) 1986, p.6