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?

Mathieu Léger, “On a Silver Platter,” 2014. Exhibition view in Galerie Sans Nom, Moncton, NB, Canada. Installation. Photo credit: Mathieu Léger

Editor’s Note: This review originally ran in the Fall 2014 issue of Visual Arts News.

In Acadian author France Daigle’s 2012 novel Pour sûr, Antoinette opens a game of Scrabble against her husband, The Cripple, with a controversial 125 points. Her word, dialyse, she argued, to her husband’s chagrin, contained two vertical words—“y” and “a.”

“It wasn’t the 21 points that bothered The Cripple,” writes Daigle, “it was the principle of the thing.” While The Cripple and Antoinette play—mixing French and Acadian words—they discuss a local murder, Oedipus and psychoanalysis. The domestic scene encapsulates Daigle’s project, exploring the concept of value/values through the lens of contemporary Acadie.

It’s within this milieu that we can situate Acadian artist Mathieu Léger’s exhibition Sur un plateau d’argent / On a Silver Platter (Galerie Sans Nom, Moncton, April 25 to May 30, 2014). The show was composed of second-hand silver plates engraved with texts that, as guest curator Jennifer Bélanger explains in her curatorial statement, “address the impacts on the ever-changing geographic Acadian landscape … reference storied genealogy” and “… directly illustrate the impact on the inherited Chiac dialect.” A few examples: “best déportation ever;” “tu m’corriges en-an-on;” “fricot.”

The concept, like the engraved text, is a one-liner. The castoff silver plates, as “cultural detritus” of British aristocracy, are reappropriated by Léger using the culture the British sought to destroy.

This is Léger at his most digestible, serving the concept “on a silver platter.” An overview of his oeuvre, though, reveals the work to be more than ironic revenge. Recently, he’s been preoccupied by abstract narratives. A stretch of slush-soiled snow (Demography of Virulence, 2012) says more than what’s depicted—the speed of the plow, the placement of streetlamps and muddiness of slush, etc. His ongoing drawing series, Transects, riff on how “scientific concepts can be analyzed through mark-making.” In another photograph series, he describes aerial shots of trees: “When things get overlooked, other things become apparent.”

Frequently working with photography, the aphorisms populating his blog explain his predilection: “Sometimes things seem off, because they are”; “Similar is not always same”; and “Perspective renders different opinions of one line.”

Given the abstruseness of his oeuvre, the straightforwardness of Sur un plateau d’argent / On a Silver Platter is intentional and requisite. The show was immaculately installed and lit, eliminating the chance of aloof viewing. Léger drew you in, seduced by silver.

Adroit, he had complete control, preying on viewing sensibilities, which sees the focus placed on the engraved text, on his orientation of the pieces.

What we don’t admire is the plate itself. This neglect addresses notions of value and values in the relationship between idea and object. In this case, the idea is nothing without the object. The object, however, as “cultural detritus,” has no value, and, arguably, isn’t the object once it becomes vehicle for the idea.

Yet, we value the “art,” not the plates. This is our error, and reveals our value system as stagnant. In discussing his work with Canadian Art, Léger said, “I’m questioning every aspect of artmaking and the art world, and the place of art within culture. And the place of culture within society.” Why should his decision to engrave the plates, and arrange them in a display, engender value?

To recall Nietzsche, the great critic of morality, objectifying value, or prescribing value to an action, out of custom was “dishonest, cowardly, lazy!” Values should be determined in context, informed by “the acquisition of new experiences and the correction of customs.”

We engage art staidly—stupidly, if you consult Nietzsche—with customary values, and the values of fame and fortune, inhibiting the creation of new customs. As such, contemporary art may be invaluable to distill our zeitgeist; it’s rendered popularly irrelevant.

So what of Daigle and Léger’s interest in values? Acadian culture in both instances is posited as a potential touchstone, one of play, value-bending, miscommunication and bastardized tradition.

The cultural confusion of Acadie fosters a context for new customs, as R.B. Kitaj outlined in the First Diasporist Manifesto: ”If a people is dispersed, hurt, hounded, uneasy, their pariah condition confounds expectation in profound and complex ways.”

This is invoked in two pieces in Léger’s show, one reading “assimilable,” the other “assimilable.” This is the perspective Léger desires. Rather than point- counterpoint, the strikethrough creates a new value premised on the past. It’s an edit, an engagement—not erasure. It confounds expectation, being similar to its opposition.

Similar isn’t always the same, because it’s tinctured by history, cultural provenance, context. Engaging with his cultural context, Léger visions new values to provoke us to see if we’ll do the same. But we don’t. Sur un plateau d’argent / On a Silver Platter is a perfectly palatable contemporary art, and Léger wants us to choke on it.

In September 2012, Eyelevel Gallery, an artist-run centre in North End Halifax, was more than simply a venue to take in contemporary art. It transformed into the headquarters of the World Portable Gallery Convention, complete with a stately desk in the main space, a row of wristwatch faces on the wall displaying international time zones, a red light blinking insistently on an answering machine and refreshments compliments of global social networks served from the in-house Feral Trade Café. While development was officially underway on the downtown Nova Centre, a mammoth complex featuring a $164-million convention centre, convening of a different kind was being explored a kilometre away. For a month, Eyelevel served as a hub for a collection of portable galleries from around the world, each hosting their own unique exhibit. Spaces like Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s Nanomuseum, consisting of twin 2×3” picture frames, and Judy Freya Sibayan’s Museum of Mental Objects, where the artist’s memory holds the work, sought to crack open the ways we experience art.

Artists have always sought alternative exhibition spaces outside the white cube: think Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, a suitcase that held miniature versions of his oeuvre. WPGC co-curators Michael McCormack and Michael Eddy, considering the current discourse surrounding the much-debated Nova Centre and the value of networking, had the idea to turn Eyelevel “into this larger than life kind of space,” McCormack says. Throughout the month, art was available “by chance or appointment,” meaning the public could stumble upon an exhibit at a local picnic or softball game, or call up the Eyelevel to receive a special delivery. Galleries were dispatched by Fixed Cog Hero, Mathieu Arsenault’s “existential bicycle courier” service, so that art could appear on doorsteps as easily as a box of garlic fingers.

Hannah Jickling’s Coat of Charms is one example of a gallery that travels well. Jickling, who created an online archive of profiles of mobile spaces for Vancouver’s Or Gallery in 2005, curates the inside of a thrift store trench coat. For the WPGC, Jickling exhibited—or flashed—a set of kaleidoscopes by Portland-based collective F* Mtn. “With this iteration of the Coat of Charms, I was really interested in the gesture of flashing with the coat, that exhibitionism somehow provides grounds for an exhibition,” Jickling says. “So when I was wearing it, I got into this gesture and was thinking, what if art-viewing can become this illicit surprise that is non-consensual?” Jickling emphasizes the importance of non-institutional spaces to queer, feminist artists, linking this importance to her role as a “pervert” startling her viewers. “We owe a lot to perverts!” Jickling says. “When we think about portable galleries and their potential, we have to remember the true innovators, the people who see things from the margins and make their own culture all the time.”

McCormack says that one of the things he’s most drawn to in portable galleries is “that one on one, person to person interaction.” Nowhere is this more evident than in Gordon B. Isnor’s Alopecia Gallery, installed on the bald patches in his beard area (“alopecia” means hair loss). Isnor admits that having a gallery on your face can be weird. “I’m sort of socially awkward,” he says. “If I go to parties or social events, my general inclination is to leave very quickly.” So, it’s usually up to others to approach him, but as he reflects, “if (the viewer) does feel shy, they can’t partake at all.” For the WPGC, Isnor exhibited a very quiet audio piece by Duke & Battersby that not only encouraged, but required, a social exchange, as listeners had to almost place their ears directly on his cheek.

For two of the galleries participating in the WPGC, the intimacy lies in the fact that they exist (or existed) in their curators’ homes. 161 Gallon Gallery is a space of diminutive volume in the residence of artists Daniel Joyce and Miriam Moren, while Paul Hammond and Francesca Tallone ran Gallery Deluxe Gallery in their apartment attic from 2005-2007. Hammond and Tallone never conceived of their gallery as mobile until they were invited to resurrect it at the WPGC. “A huge part of the gallery was the sort of ‘transportation’ that occurred when you went up the ladder into what looked like an attic storage space, from a residential kitchen, and suddenly found yourself in another world,” Hammond says. To recreate this experience, the artist being installed, Chris Foster, was also part of the reconstruction, helping to build a wooden box on stilts so that viewers could enter the gallery from below, peeking up to see yet another replica: a miniature motor home toting a gallery.

An element of tongue in cheek goes hand in hand with the unconventional experience of mobile galleries. That blinking red light, for example, was part of the P.R. Rankin Gallery, managed by McCormack and Convention coordinator Elizabeth Johnson, a site for the public to leave prank messages. McCormack explains that, for many of these pieces, “there’s sort of a joke to it, but it’s also serious at the same time.” Often, artists are enjoying the novelty but also being resourceful, reacting to the lack of opportunities, for example, for emerging artists to show their work.

The spirit of portable galleries, Jickling says, “challenges the role of ‘the expert’ and re-invents the terms and conditions under which art is produced and received.”