Juan Ortiz-Apuy’s Fountain Mist is disorienting, like the moment a dream snaps into a nightmare. You are not here. A spectre haunts the mixed-media installation, stalking through the sheen of blues, oranges, and yellows—the spectre of someone else’s dream being imposed on you, also known as advertising.

The dream is at its eeriest in a series of six framed digital collages (96 x 73 cm) that line two of the walls of the Owens Art Gallery. Each collage in the series of alternating Sunlight-yellow and Windex-blue backdrops foregrounds a glittering silver hand, with fingers slathered in paint. The thumb and middle fingers touch, pinching as if to snap, presenting objects ranging from a perfume bottle to a parrot. The formulaic goal of advertising—to produce new desires and promise their realization through a proffered commodity—is superficially obscured given the absence of brand names and inclusion of various other seemingly random objects in the frame. These collage images are unified by their origin in the stock databases from which Ortiz-Apuy downloaded them.

“One of the important things about the installation I think is the logic that I used for putting it together. I was interested in this idea of stock,” Ortiz-Apuy remarked in an interview with the Owens Art Gallery. “Stock, for me, represents this idea of mass production of something that is equally reproduced ad infinitum.”

“Fountain Mist” sounds like the name of SodaStream flavour, and of course it is one. It is also the name for the colour of a paint. Two additional product names are inscribed in the exhibition, “Bestå” and “Olov.” Ortiz-Apuy has combined the Ikea products—a storage unit and a desk, respectively—into a disjointed white display table, which sits atop a 6 x 8 x 1 foot black box at the centre of the room.

Various objects have been placed on the table. A small yellow-green pot with three artificial bananas rising out of it like preening dolphins. An unlabeled lime shampoo bottle. Two 3D-printed sculptures of amalgamated stock objects, shaped like skeletal models of knee joints, doubling as desk lamps or hour glasses. The only organic item, a bonsai tree, is also the only one that rests on the black box.

The black box’s presence in the centre of the room makes it harder to know how to navigate the space, though you do not long for the floor arrows that direct your movement through Ikea showrooms.

Ortiz-Apuy has left the Ikea stickers on the white display table, perhaps since the Swedish names are so suggestive in light of the exhibition’s interest in how commodities speak. Bestå translates as “remain” or “consist of” and Olov as “ancestor’s descendant.” Ortiz-Apuy complements these connotations by including two small stone talismans from his native Costa Rica, which are each more than 400 years old. This gesture of including the artifacts situates the commodity form in a larger historical frame. It might likewise hint at the hopefully damning question of what future anthropologists could glean about capitalist social relations through the mass consumption of—and reverence for—global, yet Swedish, standardized furniture that is produced on the only kind of supply chain possible, i.e., one that simultaneously concentrates and disperses exploitation. The stickers say “Made in China” and “Made in Poland,” referencing Ikea’s two biggest suppliers of cheap labour.

The hands in Ortiz-Apuy’s digital collages do not “make” anything; they are ornamental, there only to present objects. Assembled elsewhere, the prefabricated objects on display produce an intense feeling of dislocation that resonates with how commodities are produced and circulate within
capitalism.

Such dislocation is integral to the commodity form, given the nightmare of commodity fetishism. As Marx famously describes the phenomenon in Volume 1 of Capital (1867): “the definite social relation between men themselves […] assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”

Ortiz-Apuy’s objects interact, though not so much in the obfuscating, sense of exchange-value, but rather through replication and juxtaposition. Ortiz-Apuy describes the associations between objects in terms of the archaeological concept of “sympathetic magic.”

“I’m interested in mimesis or, more than anything, sympathetic magic,” Ortiz-Apuy told the Owens. “This idea of something sort of drawing power from something else by means of likeness or imitation.”

Power coursing through and between objects…might this be how an advertiser dreamily repackages the nightmare of commodity fetishism?

Carl Stewart, “Halifax diptych (Green Street),” 2010. Found fabric, jade, beads. Photo: Lawrence Cook

For many Haligonians living in a city full of students and other transient young people at a time of widespread bedbug fear, the sight of used mattresses may arouse disgust or serve as a reminder it’s end-of-the-school-year time again. For Carl Stewart, each mattress isn’t merely bedding, but a source of fabrics, often strange and wonderful. The Ottawa textile artist’s work has frequently focused on queer identity, but in his Halifax show at Eyelevel Gallery of two-dimensional wall hangings and quilts made from fabrics salvaged off curbside mattresses, fragments (May 13-June 16, 2011), he looks at what happens to the bedding we sleep on after we discard it.

Born in PEI, Stewart started his post secondary studies at the University of Prince Edward Island before falling in with the weaving department at Charlottetown’s Holland College School of Visual Arts. After taking a tour, Stewart immediately picked up an application and dropped out of university. “Best decision I ever made,” Stewart says. He had never done “anything like” weaving prior to starting the program. The program largely focused on what Stewart calls “production weaving,” which was targeted at the tourism industry and involved making place mats and tablecloths. Stewart quickly found himself focused on “art weaving,” working on figurative pieces with male nudes.

Moving to Ottawa after college, he continued weaving and exhibiting his work. In the late 1990s, he began combing the internet for images of gay porn, creating “erotic tapestries” and large-scale work that could rival the Bayeux Tapestry — Stewart’s 1996 work, called “Nice Shoes, Faggot,” was an 80-foot tapestry with video made “in reaction to and in commemoration of” a young waiter at Ottawa’s Chateau Laurier, who a group of teenagers chased, robbed and beat in the park behind the hotel, as he left work to walk to his home in Hull.

The mattress series took root in 1996, as Stewart noticed the discarded mattresses and box springs lining the streets on his walk to work. As a textile artist—a broke one, with little money for materials—he was struck by the variety in coverings on the mattresses.

“I was really surprised by how beautiful some of the fabrics were, these satins and brocades and really wacky prints,” he says. He started clipping small swatches that eventually became larger until “I was literally skinning whole mattresses.”

He first presented the work in 1998, when he was still stitching together small bits of mattress. Stewart’s pieces have grown since then — the bulk of the work in the eyelevel show is 18”x18” fabric samples, decorated with rhinestones, beads, embroidering and paint. Other pieces are more collage like quilts of mattress swatches.

For his Halifax show, Stewart traveled to the city months before the exhibition to collect mattress samples and used fabrics from both Halifax and Ottawa in the show. He did the same for a 2005 Toronto show and also clipped labels from mattresses on a London visit. “I see this as this sort of unwitting collaboration between the people in Ottawa and the people in Halifax, where the fabrics come together,” he says.

Stewart chooses mattresses “for their patterns, for their stains, sometimes for where they are.” He’s interested in the stories behind fabrics from certain places, often comparing those from rooming houses with those from affluent neighbourhoods.

“We have this whole idea of what is clean and what’s not,” he says. He notices patterns within the mattress styles, different eras, the abundance of low-end mattress designs and the variations on the term “chiro” in mattress brand names. In one of his favourites, a bright pink pattern, a couple in eighteenth century attire court in a garden and a rhinestone-eyed owl watches over them. “It’s this total eighteenth-century toile, but it’s on a mattress that was made in the ’60s. I just find it really kooky.” Others have garish vinyl-coated 1960s flower patterns, rocket ships and old-fashioned illustration recalling nineteenth century catalogues.

Asked about connections between the series and his other work, Stewart says the cue is in the show’s title, fragments—the bits and pieces that create a narrative. “It’s increasingly a common thread in all my work,” he says. “All we know is the address (and the objects)—we don’t know anything about the people.” Or, as he puts it more succinctly, “Who else but a fag is gonna sew on stinky old mattress fabric?”

Stewart doesn’t clean his fabric samples and sometimes picks pieces especially for the stains, but he started putting samples in the freezer in the past few years out of concern over bedbugs, and he tries to be vigilant about what he picks up. Though he began the project for the fabric, Stewart reads deeper into the themes the mattresses bring up.

“There’s all kinds of things that come into play. There’s class, there’s the socioeconomic thing … there’s the relationship to the body,” he says. “You see something lying there, and if you see someone taking it away, I think a lot of people get this weird little shiver down their spines, like, ugh, I could never sleep on that … I think that people have a really visceral reaction to the work sometimes.”

Installation view of Séripop’s “The Face Stayed East , the Mouth Went West” at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery.
Photo : Yannick Desranleau

Though some mark 50th anniversaries with gold, Séripop’s The Face Stayed East, the Mouth Went West marks the 50th anniversary of Charlottetown’s Confederation Centre by opening with more striking elements.

Interested in exploring entropy in bright colours and on a grand scale, Séripop—who are Montreal-based duo Chloe Lum and Yannick Desranleau—inject a measure of disorder into the glassed-in exhibition room that serves as a subterranean entrance to the Confederation Centre Art Gallery.

While I was visiting, another gallery visitor asked, “Can I walk through this?” It’s a fair question, as the installation appears at first blush as a tangled and unfurling construction zone made up of a giddy and gaudy palette reflecting pop and mod aesthetics that appropriately recall 1964, the Centre’s inaugural year. A cartoonishly oversized and bent styrofoam dumbbell greets new arrivals, sitting in front of swathes of Tyvek, rope, and vinyl tarpaulin draped over scaffolding stretching nearly the full length of the gallery room.

Installation view of Séripop’s “The Face Stayed East , the Mouth Went West” at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery.
Photo : Yannick Desranleau

Three lightboxes propped up by beanbag chairs—one hot pink and protruding tongue-like from under the lightbox’s weight—display overlaid theatrical scenes in which the players are packages of wrapped materials falling into place in a Photoshop-reimagined version of the Centre’s gallery rooms. The extension cords that power the lightboxes—intentionally bright orange—hang loose as further interventions into the pedestrian traffic lanes.

“You’re not entering a room full of artworks, you’re entering the artwork itself,” Confederation Centre Art Gallery curator Pan Wendt comments on The Face Stayed East, the Mouth Went West and installation art more generally. “And this building didn’t anticipate it.”

Séripop’s installation reacts in large part to the artists’ impression of the Centre, and Wendt suggests that the difficulty of navigating the installation plays on the difficulty of finding one’s way around the Centre itself.

Desranleau and Lum conducted in-depth research about the
building in Montreal at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, whose archives house the storied history of the Confederation Centre’s genesis from its designers’ initial modernist hope for a Brutalist building that was “complete unto itself,” says Wendt, to a lawsuit that developed with an allegedly incompetent construction company, eventually resulting in the architecture firm pulling out of the project completely. The building’s use has veered from its architect’s original vision of concrete perfection to one that has come to include gardens and marble, among many other unforeseen features. Séripop comment on the building’s history with an installation that parallels the pop-influenced installation aesthetics of artists like Jessica Stockholder and Davis Rhodes.

Desranleau explains the duo work with “flexible, friable” materials, using “actions like scattering, instability, and weathering.” He says, “Usually, the more flexible the
material we play with, the harder it will be to plan its reactions, whatever the conditions are.”

Lum and Desranleau are formerly of the avant-garde noiserock band AIDS Wolf, and earned their stripes plastering Montreal in show posters in the face of anti-postering bylaws, eventually expanding to larger outdoor installations. Desranleau says, “Our departure as installation artists came from what we felt was a critique of institutional control of that space, although in a very oblique way.”

Séripop’s Confederation Centre installation playfully critiques the surprising amount of change that has gone on within the Centre’s bulky fortress-like walls.

“Our installation in the entrance gallery wants to evoke this notion of history that gets recorded within the materials, and is meant to be a reference to the evolution of the material aspect of the centre itself,” says Desranleau. “By putting these objects in action,
documenting them, and then re-configuring them again within the installation, we were re-enacting a similar narrative to the one the material of the building has lived in the past 50 years.”

Despite some imperfections now showing in its concrete, one hopes the Confederation Centre’s level of entropy will stay well on the safer side of chaos in its next 50 years. But in a Centre whose theatre mainstay ends on the hopeful line “Anne of Green Gables, never change,” Séripop’s work is a timely reminder to Prince Edward Islanders that things are always in a state of flux and change is the only constant.