Steele + Tomczak collect strangers’ confessions

vanews — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 18:03:09 +0000

Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, still from We’re Getting Younger All the Time, 2001, from the trilogy …before I wake, 2001-12.

I called my best friend and we pretended to be a radio show. I’m looking forward to seeing if my tomato plants live. I’m afraid of heights, even though sometimes my brain forgets but my body remembers. My favourite colour is blue. I had a nightmare about my partner dying. I dreamed about a dog I saw that looked like the dog emoji.

Photographic confessions line the walls of the Dalhousie Art Gallery and the entry way to the Arts Centre. As you push open the door to the main building before making your way downstairs to the gallery, you’re confronted with a photograph of someone else, a single person, pushing through a different door. The image is overlaid with text, the one-sided answers to an interview with questions you can only image.

In my own answers above, I infer: something funny, something you’re looking forward to, your favourite colour, something you’re afraid of, a nightmare, a dream.

Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, installation view (detail) from …bump in the night, (Halifax) 2014-17.

Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, installation view (detail) from …bump in the night, (Halifax) 2014-17. Via Paul Wong/Facebook

Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, Digital Print of …bump in the night. Detroit. Via steeleandtomczak.com

These photographs belong to a series titled …bump in the night by Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak. They’re part of the exhibition The Long Time: The 21st Century Art of Steele + Tomczak curated by Paul Wong (May 5– July 16, 2017). But the titular reference to century isn’t just a temporal marker; it points to the technical and aesthetic about-face of media art that occurs as the analogue shifts to the digital.

Each work in the exhibition marks this shift, while noting the slippery moments where the distinction between “now” and “then” is rendered poetic, humourous, dark, urgent or otherwise irrelevant—more often than not, all at once. Wong’s curatorial choices, including a dominating, deep purple wall, foreground the interplay of these contrasting elements and allow each juxtaposition to flow into the next.

These contradictions are apparent in …bump in the night, as fears and dreams sit comfortably next to each other, familiar with their unease and unpredictability. The series, an ongoing project for Steele and Tomczak, depicts students from Vancouver, Detroit, Windsor, and Halifax just before graduating high school and college. The students’ answers betray the transitional moment they’re caught in. Their words are earnest, clumsy, self-conscious, naïve and wise, and, when superimposed over top posterior portraits of their bodies, they demonstrate that transition can be the moment when interiority becomes externalized; when private becomings are made public; when others can see that while you’re not quite where you want to be, you’re going somewhere. In these moments, identity is suspended between external and internal modes of construction, as observers are able—invited or not—to partake in the construction of the self. As the artists state, these instances of collaborative self-definition allow viewers to “close the distance between us and them” and recognize the similarities in our hopes and fears, while allowing the subjects to “speak for themselves.”

The intimacy of the students’ answers felt like an invitation to imagine my own—they’re listed above. I wondered if I am as honest as the subjects in the photographs, who admit things like the fear of losing family members or the hilarity/humiliation of hurting yourself in front of an audience. I traced my moments of self-censoring and noted where I took pains to push past it. I wondered if there is a subconscious desire for this kind of vulnerability and interiority to be made visible, to be expressed through the body, to be seen and interpreted by someone else.

As I round the corner and encounter …before I wake, a three part video work that took twelve years to make and, as Wong explains, acted as the impetus for the exhibition, this question feels even more pressing. Here, the relationship between self-censoring, the subconscious and the body is made explicit. In the central video work, Entranced, Steele and Tomczak are filmed separately as they undergo hypnosis. The psychotherapist’s voice fills the room while a transcript of the artist’s answers to the doctor’s questions is shown, silently, next to a close-up shot of the patient’s hypnotized face.

…before I wake is in part a response to Steele’s diagnosis with breast cancer, when the couple was confronted with the possibility that one might die before the other. The two video works that flank Entranced, titled We’re Getting Younger All the Time and Practicing Death, depict the physical realities of aging, and the physical and psychological closeness and distance that can exist simultaneously between two bodies. Reading the three pieces together, the friction between body, mind and desire is tested and examined. While We’re Getting Younger All the Time and Practicing Death illustrate how the body communicates in ways the mind cannot, in Entranced, the mind catches up with the body and the couple’s subconscious responses are revealed. In this piece, the couple, so commonly known for producing bodies of work as if with one voice, speak with two very distinct voices.

In Becoming, a four-channel video projection, buildings replace bodies as sites of aging and transition. Displayed on floating screens arranged in an arc formation, the videos depict the between states of four different cities: Vancouver, Berlin, Toronto and Montreal. A fifth video in the series, Becoming: Halifax, is displayed on a separate wall. The videos map locations in each city at various stages of construction, deconstruction, gentrification, and decay. Instead of the textual ruminations and admissions in …before I wake and …bump in the night, themed jokes interrupt the images of urban landscapes in Becoming. Each city has its own comedic punching bag: Vancouver=economist; Berlin=philosophers; Toronto=urban planners; Montreal=insurance agents; Halifax=fisherman. As each screen shifts rapidly between streetscape and text, you often catch the joke but miss the punchline.

In an experience not unlike passing through a city in transition or existing in a body in transition, the works in The Long Time transmit the sense that you’re missing or meeting something, getting just a trace of what came before and what is coming next—the city as index, as rhizome, as archive/the body as index, as rhizome, as archive.

Found in the Fog

vanews — Sat, 12 Sep 2015 22:24:34 +0000

Image: Michael Pittman, “Hob”, acrylic, india ink and graphite on cradled birch paper, 81 x 121 cm. on view at St. John’s Bonnie Leyton Gallery, May 2 – 30, 2015.

As we walked downtown, my friend described how two old hags had chewed on either side of her neck the night before. It wasn’t the first time. “I’ve learned that the trick,” she told me, “is that I just have to let it happen, to remind myself that it’s not real.” This was a hag dream, a form of sleep paralysis where one wakes to discover not only the inability to move, but the presence of a dark figure and a saturating feeling of dread. On the island of Newfoundland, hag dreams are as common and acceptable a topic as the weather. This is a place where one is often told to carry a biscuit to appease the faeries. Here, there is a word for meeting a figure in the fog—a “fetch”—which may show itself as a ship, a stranger on their deathbed or even oneself. The Dictionary of Newfoundland English describes such as an encounter as “annoyingly familiar at sea.”

Michael Pittman’s new body of drawings and paintings reveal memories as a form of specter. A memory can be a lonely, haunting thing. It is a singularly personal experience that can’t be relayed adequately to others and, over time, can become increasingly tentative to the one who experienced it originally.

“This body of work started with drawing a big red trike stuck in the thin, creaking ice of a newly caught pond,” Pittman says. “It was a memory from my childhood combined with an early lucid dream that seems as real today as it did when I was four—having become virtually indistinguishable from reality with the passing of years.”

With these works (on view in the exhibition Stories at St. John’s Bonnie Leyton Gallery, May 2-30, 2015) Pittman’s narrative is contained in the layers of making and undoing. His aesthetic echoes the uncertainty found in the familiar, and explores these ‘hauntings’ as the shifting lexicon for approaching new encounters. His paintings are a palimpsest of erasures and washes that navigate multiple half-seen associations. My Brother’s Mask (2015), for example, describes the distance felt with those one knows well. Around the figures float hints of mundane objects and events from various times, clues for a story the viewer will never fully grasp.

Pittman lives in Grand Falls-Windsor, where his family is based. He learned from his mother that knitting, once made, can be unraveled. From his father he learned that bedtime stories can be made up as one goes along. The birth of a son has done very little to slow down an exceptionally prolific practice that includes paint, film and sculpture. Becoming a father has caused Pittman to focus on the stories of his childhood, searching for the language to relay them to his son. Fatherhood has also meant less time to indulge, less time to frustrate a work with corrective gestures. By Pittman’s own admission, his previous works could occasionally be pushed a step too far: “[There’s an] obsessiveness to part of my process that I do not fully understand and can’t rightly explain, except to say that [it is] necessary.” He moved to ink drawings as he cared for his newborn. In addition to allowing him multiple objects to work on at once, this medium let him step back from the keenly malleable yet precious quality of paint. Able to be tight and intensive on paper, his painted work has become more intuitive. He has discovered the benefit of letting go.

This new body of work shows that the substance of a story exists not only in the forgetting, but in the flotsam that floats to the surface in the remembering. In the drawing Breach (2015), a large whale is densely wrapped in fabric, resting directly underneath the outline of a ship. To ‘breach’ means to come to the surface: “It creates a gap through which things could be either accessed or lost,” Pittman tells me. Here, a whale is usually an enormous yet ethereal figure seen from above, made foreign by the thin meniscus of water that separates it from the viewer. In this work, it is the observer that is tentative. The tangible is found below the surface.

Dreams – visual arts news

Steele + Tomczak collect strangers’ confessions

Found in the Fog