1-24 September 1994
“The Dance of the Fish Brides” : Exhibition of photography by Diana Thorneycroft and a collaborative book work with writings by Di Brandt and Sigrid Dahle.
5-30 July 1994
10 June - 3 July 1993
It’s become fashionable today for art to refer to narrative. However, much work in this genre still seems inhibited by Greenbergian taboos, and the reference to narrative remains an oblique citation. My work however is fully engaged in story-telling. At the same time the photograms investigate allegorically the way a story or picture, a work of representational art, is formed.
The pictures are composed of traces of objects which unashamedly demand imaginative involvement of their intended users (children or adults naive enough to delight in artificial flowers, souvenir scarves, and plastic bugs.) More cultured people perhaps feel that we don’t need such literal props for our imaginative games of make believe. Yet the activity of the imagination is basic to art making and needs to be re-examined.
The images seem to emerge and take form out of a void. Like apparitions, the traces of objects appear to have volume, but not mass. These remarkable qualities of photograms seem analogous to the way dreams form out of night without ever taking solid visual shape. Dreams, like children’s play are a fundamental and universal imaginative human act. -Laura Lamb
7 June - 2 July 1994
1-28 May 1994
Artist Statement:
In these times when we speak of land we encounter a ground colonized by increasingly urgent concerns. What clearly emerges from the debate of issues surrounding these concerns is the need to not, not only, address the environmental and social effects arising from servicing and maintaining present cultural expectations and practices, but further, to reconsider the character of individual relationships to the land. It is this latter concern which forms the axis for my work, framed by the question of how we might move from the culturally provided, privileged status of visitor/custodian, to the condition of participating resident in an expanded notion of community.
My approach to the work has been to become involved in a specific aspect of the land and present each resulting work in a “poem” form, acknowledging the unique character of each interaction/location. The individual works share common elements; the shelter as an expression of the relationship of residency and location/materials, acknowledgment of my own presence and that of other residents and an engagement of the cycles and processes at work at the site.
It has been suggested that those who wish to re-site themselves in history/nature must confront the process of being/becoming a storyteller. Perhaps, it is through dissolving our habitual concepts in the apprehension of the world into the “yes, that too could happen” of personal stories that the process of re-alignment and restoration of the imbalances we face might begin. For; the debate surrounding our relationships to the land is part of the wider struggle over the right to control the production of histories/ideologies/mythologies and the mechanisms by which identity and legitimation are maintained. It is my hope that my work contributes to the process of reconsideration and toward the renewal of community.
5-30 April 1994
“…the great effect of the imagination on the world” is a series of remarkable night-lit, cibachrome prints by photographer Brenda Pelkey that document and memorialize eccentric yards and gardens of Saskatoon. Pelkey has sought out and recorded vernacular landmarks, created by homeowners who have embellished their property with objects, topiary and/or miniature architecture. These yards are manifestations of the interior world of the imagination “beamed down” to the material world.
The idiosyncratic yards on which Pelkey trains her camera are a direct affront to and relief from ‘beige-neighbourhood homogeneity’ - the compulsively manicured lawns and prescribed earth tones which define North American middle-class suburbia. Pelkey’s agenda is a complex one, and goes beyond merely conveying the inspired pleasure of homeowners with an intensely personal approach to the ‘Home and Garden’ aesthetic. The nature of her subject has demanded, for Pelkey, a significant re-examination of the photographic documentary tradition.
Rather than conforming to the usual role of ‘objective’ photographer and subject, Pelkey complexes the relationship by including artist/homeowner in the photographic document, acknowledging them as colleagues and as participants. (They choose their poses and where they are to be photographed within their front or back yard fantasies.) The artist/homeoweners in this series appear to be as much interested in Pelkey’s photographic apparatus as we, the spectator, are in their yards. In some respects, Pelkey is collaborating with her subject, privileging the individual and subverting the authoritative position of the photographer.
“…the great effect of the imagination on the world” invited critical inquiry on many levels. Supplanting the implied objectivity f descriptive black and white photographs, Pelkey’s composite panoramas are clearly interpretive and tinged with a surreal lushness of colour and detail. After selecting the site of her work, Pelkey returns at night, floods the sight with movie lights, imbuing the constructed environment with a dramatic and dream-like aura. This undermines the assumed veracity of the documentary photograph. To Pelkey, however, interpretations is an essential part of the documentary tradition. Why not make it obvious? Her strategy is particularly effective in this series. As well as portraying the external appearance of the yards, Pelkey is also able to convey the astonishing theatrical effect of these creations and, more interestingly, the intentionality of the artist/homeowner. Rather than obscuring the work, Pelkey’s contrivance verifies her documents of an inner reality:
“I am interested in addressing the question of what is”real” and how what is “real” is changed by individual perception. In this case the activity of the subject is “suspect” in accordance with the “social norm.” My approach in changing the real way that these places look is an attempt to loosen the constrictions of the “critical norm” of documentary photography.”
Pelkey’s minutely fragmented composite panoramas interrupt the seamless autonomy if the single-image print: she wants to remind the viewer of the reality of the photograph, of what they are looking at.
Aside from her interrogation of documentary photography, Pelkey’s work is the focus of other intersecting critical questions and issues. Pelkey’s investigation, and in turn her documentary, serve to initiate a questioning of the relationship between private property and public identity; the conflicting and overlapping points of view among homeowner, photographer, and spectator; and the place of popular culture within contemporary art theory, criticism and practice.
The yards represented in Pelkey’s photographs are about community landmarks, which commemorate and connote the personal, the individualistic. The yards, intended to be viewed and read by the public, challenge the authoritative historical voice of conventional public monuments marking events, upheavals, and disasters, which have been designated as important. Pelkey’s record-keeping acknowledges a personal interpretation of contemporary history and so extends the conventional definition of the monument and of a public art.
Obviously sympathetic to the idiosyncratic sensibility behind these gardens and yards, Brenda Pelkey sees them as denoting stubborn strongholds of personal identity within the homogeneous morass of suburbia and its attendant consumerist culture. The domestic sites represented in this documentary project offer a portrait of an enduring drive to record and express an individual lifetime: its history, its mythology and its events. The artist/homeowners of Pelkey’s survey have the same impulses to create and record as folk artists.
3-26 March 1994
(Careful, 1992)
3-26 February 1994
“Re-vision - the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new cultural direction - is for women more than a chapter in cultural history; it is an act of survival.” Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence
“Critical Details is an exhibition of photographic works which address and revise certain institutional histories and absences in the representation of women. Extracting details from images of women found in public collections, books, magazines and movie stills, Nina Levitt creates works which critique prescriptive codes of femininity and sexuality. Her photographic interventions also reveal and re-enact lesbian desire in the places where that desire has been repressed - in the archives of popular culture. Many of these source images may not necessarily pay homage to those transgressive Women who disrupted conventional notions of femininity at the visible surface of their bodies as well as by their personal practices.
Two pieces in the exhibition deal specifically wit representations of women in Montreal as found in portraits from the Notman Photographic Collection (McCord Museum) and the homophobic Montreal tabloids from the Archives gaies du Quebec. Other works are based on photographs of famous women (such as Hollywood director Dorothy Arzner, cowgirl Calamity Jane, photographer Alice Austen) as well as unknown women.
(excerpted from Press Release by Oboro Gallery Montreal)
LESBIANS ARE NUMEROUS IN THE COUNTRYSIDE
Excerpts of text from exhibition:
You often hear there’s nothing new under the sun. That may be
true but there’s certainly something new (sexually speaking) at our
popular resorts.
And this novelty (it is important to remain silent!) is the lesbian
wave that is striking our beaches and resorts.
Like those little flats for men, now there’s a new fashion among
chic women; cheating on their husbands… not with another man… but
with another man’s wife!
4-29 January 1994
A self taught photographer, I chose to restrict my activities to picture taking and the darkroom from 1985 to 1991. A project grant from the Canada Council allowed me to initiate new research in 1990. At the time I began to develop various presentation concepts for the work from the first few years of my production. I gradually came to the point where, in addition to identifying and isolating the different bodies of work constructed over this first period of contact with photography, I established links with other important parallel or outside interests such as literature and music.
“Continuous present is one thing and beginning again and again is another thing. These are both things. And then there is using everything” (Selected writings of Gertrude Stein)
In this way (among others), Gertrude Stein confronts our loss of sensitivity and judgment in domestic matters. She is able to shake our conception of what might appear to be simple, obvious or basic.
In a completely different milieu, artists associated with industrial music movement, it seems to have effected a similar deconstruction. There exist here an inherent rejection of any sentimentality. Their refusal to set up natural categories of normative and reductive sexuality is also fundamental.
The images in “Wilt On” are the result of a fascination with the organic, with the ideological slips occurring in different morphological and physiological phenomena, and the characteristic of human relations. Fascination with some very visible, tangible aspects of everyday life between women and men which somehow stay invisible socially. “Wilt On” originally taken from a sentence by Gertrude Stein - is not a reference to physical aging but to the aging of the passions. It therefore involves a fascination with the abandonment and total inaccessibility of the individual; and by extension the unhealthy and irretrievable ambiguities present in male/female relations.
In giving this photographic body a structure, I have chosen a sound installation. Sound and sight reference allow for the inclusion of additional sense levels, counterpoints, correlations, etc. These elements should act as a counterbalance to the linear and the univocal, with the possible emergence of romanticism resulting from the use of the photographic sequence.