Archives 1998 ()

20 November - 18 December 1998

Artist Statement
I employ photocollages as a means of fragmenting and de-contextualizing my immediate urban environment. Because these photographs of architectural detail are undeniably traces of the “real”, they are able to be endlessly rearranged, more in the nature of theatre props under the direction of the imagination. These photocollages are a for of thought experiment, a way of theoretically dynamiting the monumental piles of the city which undermines unilinear histories and holds forth  possibilities of personal and political change.
One of my long term projects has been to investigate how the much distorted echoes of imperial Rome, filtered down to a remote province like Saskatchewan, can be transfigured to create a model of the current culturescape. This Rome, reproduced from the photographic “bricks” of Regina, refers not directly to the lost original, but to the work of the 18th C. painters of imaginary views of Rome, whose use of historical representation was already fictitious. These artists of the cappricio (Piranesi, Panini. Hubert “ruins” Robert, etc.) created imaginary combinations of classical monuments and ruins for travelers making Grand Tour. Their functions was analogous to present day snapshots and postcards and foreshadowed the phenomena of mass tourism and culture as consumer commodity. Regina (and Winnipeg) is far from Rome, but as these complexities ramify and the images recede farther and farther from “reality”, they paradoxically become more and more accurate at depicting the image-saturated, intertextual conurbation we now live in.
Most recently I have been exploring the representations and conventions of speculative futurism and science fiction (seen as Fredric Jameson describes it as “an apotheosis of post-modernism”) to create hybrid urban images. My new work combines photographic fragments from many different cities to create a megalopolis somewhat in the nature of the legendary Hongcouver. In this series reiteration and collage are used to create a mental architecture that shows a future in ruins before it happens, or the remote past of some imaginary future world and which poses questions about the uses of the future as a representation.

13 October - 7 November 1998

In my work over past few years I have been attempting to find a meeting point between subjective experiences of desire, and popularly circulated representations of the desired and desiring female body. The roots of these investigations lie in an examination of sexuality and sexual behaviour, particularly in its inconsistencies, my own included, which are problematized within dominant social discourse.
My current body of work began with the idea of trying to record and trace the origins of self confessed instances of desire in woman who are my contemporaries and peers. This was formulated partly as a search for some fundamental reflection of their and my desire, and also as an effort to determine whether that search was misdirected: whether desire, as it is popularly  and even theoretically understood, is accountable.
The project changed in form, though not in purpose, when I found an interest in navigating the computer as both machine and environment. My former insistence on documenting the voice of my subjects became displaced by the realization of a territory of overwhelming information  and no voice / all voice with no body / lots of ‘flesh’ and no voice. The Internet presented me with the materials and forum in which to articulate my current ideas as a silent/private conversation between my own recordings, the public eye and the revelations of strangers and friends.
The ramifications of new technologies of communication are familiar from the past in the advent of print, film, the telephone, radio, television and video. The experience of engaging with the resultant rapid changes in consciousness, and their effects on our bodies, is simultaneously stunning and familiar. The twofold experience of the ‘real’ and the digital has lent to my project the essential elements of allowing for ambiguity in my, and the viewers, position, and the possibility of fresh perspectives on desire.

- Kate Monro

17 September - 9 October 1998

25 July - August 22 1998

“Breast Wishes” is a project that has taken three years to realize and has as its real time parallel Shari Hatt’s own experience within a medical system. She began by seeking a breast reduction for many reasons, not all of which are for discussions here as choice should be the operative word in our discussions of our bodies. What ensued was an ongoing ordeal of medical mistakes and ill performed operations which have left Shari’s body marked permanently and her relationship to it heightened. It is from this standpoint that the work has been produced, a place which complicates issues surrounding the body and of choice, the body and sexuality, to the body as sign.
“Breast Wishes” brings us to the point where theory fails: materiality. Though to attempt to fix the body in the material alone also falls flat. Bodies tend to “indicate a world beyond themselves” 1, not least of which is the world of the viewer. Hatt’s desire to control her body’s appearance was also an attempt to control how her body would be received, her body being her self. THe obvious complication being the surgeries’ failure to produce the desired physical result of a healthy, smaller breasted woman. Instead, she has been left with an ongoing physical, financial and mental burden. The extended complication is that which requires discussion in a larger context: the immutable body. It is this systematically complex organism we inhabit that is still where others can have access, and is certainly where reception and subjectivity begin.
This body, more specifically, this female body has been increasingly medicalised over the past century. The abolition of midwifery in favour of the “scientific” birth under guidance of doctors began a process which ultimately undermined the common knowledge of women and their ability to aid and inform one another. Instead of turning to each other for the information of experience we were taught to distrust ourselves and our “old wives tales”.
“Breast Wishes, the bookwork” enters into the diaspora a series of women’s stories that might add to our understanding the complexities of living the female body. The stories appear as postcards with their text inscribed across the breasts. This inscription neither fully obscures or enhances these images of breasts as they are not here for your viewing pleasure, they are the carrier of information, aware of their codified reception as sexual signifiers, their physical marking of the adult female and the source of a complex relationship between the external and internal worlds. Hatt presents these stories as a means of reminding us of the information of experience and the knowledge that is to be gained by listening to one another. She presents them as cards as they are messages intended to be sent.

26 June - 25 July 1998

Forward:
As you recede, I advance. I arrive with notebook, with camera preparing to apprehend an altered person, an unknown situation. In place of affection I bring devices for recording evidence of your person. I sit for hours, for years and eventually I learn to wait. There was no choice. Patience met me halfway.
These photographs record your long and final disappearance. The terrain of those chaotic, despairing years was strewn with your shattered speech and skewed understanding. Your memory, lost.
The attention I bestowed so grudgingly upon you at first brought me finally to a feeling of love for you.

Introduction:
These photographs were taken between 1976 and 1991; the year I acquired my first 35mm camera and the year of my mother’s death.
The scene opens in my parent’s apartment at St. Clair and Bathurst Streets in Toronto. Several years earlier my mother began to exhibit a complex of bewildering symptoms. After undergoing extensive tests at Mount Sinai Hospital she was diagnosed as suffering from Alzheimer’s Disesae; a disease with a name we had never heard before. Nothing prepared us for the events to follow. My mother was admitted to the Psychogeriatric Ward at Queen Elizabeth Hospital on University Avenue and in November, 1978 she was placed in Cheltenham Nursing Home.
She spent the last two years in Branson Hospital on life support and died there in May, 1991 at the age of 72.
It is my hope that this document will provide insight into the relationship between the giver and the receiver of care; inform the work of caregivers, medical educators and doctors; and affirm the experience of family and friends of the chronically ill.

17 April - 15 May 1998