Archives 2002 ()

14 November-14 December 2002

Medical images have the potential to contain extensive information about the workings of our individual human bodies. More and more, medical technology is able to uncover hidden information about our genetic histories.  With the primacy of the scientific over the anecdotal, medical imaging reveal information that is both inaccessible and mysterious to us who inhabit these bodies.
In the project “Bred in the Bone”, medical images are suspended in front of lights in reference to the reading of these same MRI images in a medical setting. MRI images are evidence of that which exists inside, of that part of the person that is otherwise invisible. By selectively enlarging these technologically based images, the MRI fragments enter the realm of aesthetics, as objects of visual elegance.
These medical images are merged with traditional family photos. The family images are inserted directly into the medical ones by physically poking thousands of tiny pinholes into the MRI images. The pinholes when viewed from a distance form images of ancient and recent relatives, peering through the authority of the medical layer.
While contemporary medical technology is able to unearth much original and highly specialized information about one’s body, individuals within a family and community context also have a unique perspective on this same information. We have access to the legacy of anecdotal  connections to long dead relatives - background that is parallel but exterior to a scientific framework. The merging of images allows for both sources of information to be visible at the same time.
The activity of poking holes in paper is very slow and methodical. The accumulation of pinholes acts as evidence of the passing of time, in contrast to the instantaneous nature of the slice of medical information. The poking also references the act of sewing, and emphasizes the participation of the physical body in the process. In piercing the actual photographs, these sterile and elusive medical images are returned to the personal, the corporeal, and the domestic sphere.

11 October-4 November 2002

Althea Thanberger | not afraid to die

Andrea Cooper | COLD

There is no tragedy quite like desire…
As a child I spent hours playing with Barbie, pretending I was a Charlie’s Angel, or sneaking into my Mother’s high heels. Addicted to pretty ladies, glossy magazines, and anything pop culture, I am a pit of useless Hollywood information. At age six I realized the rugged terrain, and sloped hills did not lend itself to skirts or high-heels. The places and people that oozed from the T.V. did not look or sound, like any of the ladies I knew. This is my reality. Sandwiched between geographic isolation and American culture, I formed my own culture of amazon personas that successfully integrated themselves into the backdrop of St. John’s.
Creating fictional characters, I use my own image to explore the concept of identity. Director, model, and subject, through digital photography I create portraits that are not self-portraits. The images and text investigate female identity, sexual agency and fantasy. The lines between fact and fiction are blurred.
My fictional characters exist within a narrative that probes stereotypical images of women. The grand scale of my fifty-foot women highlights the unreality of my own obsessions. I am average looking 150- pound woman. I am not a movie star and home is Newfoundland. The environment that I place my characters is jarring. Newfoundland is not Hollywood. On the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, the weather is precarious; the land is rugged and incapable of supporting 6-inch heels. This is my reality. How does this relate to a second reality that is fed to me through television, Internet, movies and magazines?
My own ‘culture’ and ‘identity’ has become mutant among the persistent barrage of everything American that has been fed to me through the media.
COLD is a series of ten photographs that consider the relevance of place and home in the formation of identity. COLD confronts unfilled desire, and my own want and longing to be someone else. Someone prettier, someone more glamorous, someone from somewhere else. It also plays on stereotypes of small towns being boring. My fifty foot dull blonde and vacant femme fatale inhabit a grey snow covered city drinking beer. She does all of this in her slip and six-inch high heels, alone. The photographs are humorous and jarring.
My work investigates ideas around identity, in particular the female sexual self, and questions its physical and psychological boundaries. The use of own image is used in innovative and interactive ways to query the importance of culture and the significance of stereotypes. I explore contemporary issues and digital technologies while grounded in and committed to this place and culture.

James Prior | James Pierre and Pom Pom Two Hearts Beat As One

“James Pierre and Pom Pom: Two Hearts Beat As One”, is a narrative photographic series that simultaneously examines both the comedy and the tragedy of James Pierre’s existence. The story that is presented follows the monotonous life of James Pierre, a lonely middle-ages male, who is living an awkward life in the feminine spaces of his deceased mother’s home. Unwilling or unable to move on in his own life, he seemingly continues to find companionship and comfort in his cat Pom Pom.
The series invites a variety of conflicting interpretive levels but most obviously presents a comical approach to loneliness and masculinity. The predictability of the specific moments, like birthdays and Christmas mornings, makes the viewer laugh at our commonality with this man’s lonely life. However, in examining the pathetic nature of James’ character, the viewer is initially placed in a position of judgement. A sadness exists in James’ lonely life and the viewer is left with a paradoxical impression, uncertain whether to ridicule or pity this pathetic, cat-loving man.
In a culture that is laden with representation, the common man’s cry for pity can often seem cliche. “James Pierre and Pom Pom: Two Hearts Beat As One” embraces the cliche and turns it into what seems to be a humorous consequence of one man’s pathetic and predictable life. As the viewer shifts from light to dark, however, the narrative of “James Pierre and Pom Pom: Two Hearts Beat As One” ultimately reveals a character that the viewer can utterly believe. It is only then that tragedy triumphs and the once comical side of James Pierre subsides. Punctuated with one large, single image of the exterior of James’ average home, the series reveals elements of truth within the once obvious fiction.

6 September-4 October 2002

As part of the Floating Gallery’s mandate to support artists who strive to advance the medium of photography, we are pleased to bring “Landscape & Decoy” by Halifax based artist Helen Verbanz.
This exhibition is an exploration of illusory, still and moving images, based on Verbanz’s reflections on the post-industrial environment. Using projected excerpts from Fellini’s film “8 1/2″ onto oversized bird decoys and translucent black & white photographs suspended over mirrored mylar sheets, Verbanz creates what she calls a “visual phantasmagoria”. In her artist’s statement, Verbanz describes her project as comprising, “objects and images (which) are fluid, merging and shifting between the real imagined, dream or fantasy, becoming a tabula rasa for projection.”
Verbanz creates an eerie and bizarre dreamscape that intercepts and challenges the audience’s ideas of real and unreal, fact and illusiveness.

FG: Have you always worked in a mixed media manner?
HV: Yes. I have always enjoyed working with mixed media. It makes me feel like I’m inventing something new. In the installation of “Landscape and Decoy”, I became engaged in photography’s allusion to motion and stillness. I added the mirrored mylar beneath the suspended photograph, causing the image to appear increasingly fluid or static depending on the light. By introducing another three dimensional element, for example, the decoy film projection, I added an absurd twist to the installation. New spaces and lighting conditions always provoke interesting challenges to me when using mixed media.

FG: Does your interest in the industrial landscape stem from any socio-political concerns?
HV: My work  is usually influenced by the social environment. I often took a commuter train from N.Y. riding  past the dominant look of the industrial landscape in N.E. New Jersey. On the one hand, I felt surrounded by the massive power of factories and refineries. These traditional symbols  of economic stability, also a destructive force environmentally. But on the other hand, I felt constantly surrounded by the pervasiveness of the media industry such as images from film, t.v., and photography, as their message rushed by, often leaving an illusory impression. It has become for many people a reference point for reality. The factory image became an interesting exploration as I displayed it on illusive materials creating an instability to its symbol of permanence.

FG: Nature and Industry make absurdly strange bedfellows. Is this why you’ve chosen Fellini excerpts  for the projection?

HV: We try to reconcile inner and outer reality through our dreams. Film and photography are media that can influence our perceptions and fantasies  and thus work their way into our dreams.  I chose to work with that particular excerpt of film because it shows: a stage/set, media, clowns, and performers and other people dancing together. The performance of dream, and fantasy enacted in this sequence appears harmonious and celebratory, and is a reconciliation by the director to ward off his own broken reality. The post industrial landscape in my work represents our hubris through technology or dreams that have turned into  nightmares. My work revolves around this strange relationship between the power of dreaming to regenerate but also to deny reality.
FG: Would one be correct in seeing an allusion exist to the fable of the goose that lays the golden egg?
HV: It is so absurd now to consider animals as pests, a wildlife are displaced into unwelcoming human environments. A few months ago, the front page of the “National Post” showed a huge picture of Canada geese grazing on golf courses. The caption read that the state of New Jersey was “overrun by these pests and drastic measures to get rid of them were needed”. Many of these birds don’t migrate anymore since their natural calendar of flying away is upset due to climate changes. So, in a sense these geese can be seen as sharing the fate of the goose that layed the golden egg.

FG: Is Landscape and Decoy a Canada-specific project or could its relevance be maintained in other parts of the world?
HV: I think the work is just as relevant in other parts of the world that possess or aspire to a similar social infrastructure but feel pressured to trade-off the benefits of progress against the environment.

2-30 August 2002

Nature, by virtue of the human languages that construct it, is always anthropomorphic. Real nature is nameless. Life on earth is a seamless texture of protoplasm dancing to a cacophony of sensations and pumped by the pulsating rhythms of stone and sun, water and gravity, carbon and oxygen. Obsessed with measuring its detail, we’re virtually blind to the whole. In this infinitely complex cosmos, every description is an error of omission producing instead, a multitude of human natures… a litany of paradises lost and re-imagined. Theological allegory or Hollywood melodrama, nature myths have always mapped our sense of yearning and wonder. But this awe is increasingly interrupted by a sidelong glance taken from our horizon of post-modernity. The highway back to Eden is long overgrown with a tangle of image and artifice.
(Taken from artists website)

28 June- July 26 2002

24 May-21 June 2002

The interest the artist maintains for the subject matter, meat in its raw form, grew out of a personal disgust he gradually developed towards it which originated from his capacity to eat meat, but inability to stand the sight of it in its raw form. By expanding his observations of what we ingest, he realized he was attracted to that which initially repulsed him.
Lawrence is interested in questioning the concepts which are arbitrarily assigned to definitions of beauty and ugliness; repulsion and attraction; the status of human in relation to animal; and the implications of using the terms meat or flesh in a descriptive context. The fine line which sets the boundaries for these dichotomies is one he explores in this photo(graphic) project, demonstrating that perhaps the similarity between terms is greater than we imagine.

FG: How was this project affected your own ideas of beauty?
SL: My opinion of beauty as a concept has not changed much. My interest in creating this series was to explore the paradox between dichotomies and exaggerate them. Concepts like beauty and ugliness are so romantic. But making images and receiving feedback on them has made me realize how subjective their interpretations are, including my own. Beauty makes reference to the senses and sometimes the formal qualities of the images overpower the object itself.

FG: The role and impact of the grotesque has a long history in the world of art. Have an particular artists or movements influenced or inspired you?
SL: Most of my inspiration comes from outside the realm of photography. I get lots of inspiration from painting. Hieronymus Bosch’s work has struck me in the way he has depicted the duality between reason and instinct  and the good and evil that is within us. I think he succeeded in addressing a subject that was addressed by psychoanalytical two centuries later. Andres Serrano has also been an influence for his textural sensibility and use of mise en scene. After the initial shock of looking at his images, they manage and seduce.

FG: Why did you choose photography as the medium to convey your ideological position?
SL: I try to envision my photography as a painting. Photography has a very strong power of representation which painting often doesn’t have. Making an attempt to blend the qualities of photography with the power of synthesis in painting is what I’m mostly consumed by.

FG: Technically speaking, where and how did you set up your shots? Did you consider your subject matter as if it were sitting for a portrait?
SL: A big part of the creation process relied on the selection of the pieces, with luck or coincidence sometimes playing a role. Once I have found a piece that could translate into what I needed to suit my concept, I would take it to my studio and “manipulate” it:seek an angle, a lighting that would, at the same time, reveal and create an illusion. I let my instincts dictate what the final images would look like. Sometimes the results were more than I expected. For example, the image of “the gaze” achieved the goal of portraiture: it manages to capture an emotion as expressed by the animal.

FG: What did you use as materials for “Raw” and where did you get them?
SL: I went into the butcher shops of various ethnic communities. Usually these places receive the dead animals whole and them transform them into pieces. I used various parts of the cow/beef, goat, pig/pork that are sold to be eaten.

FG: What would you like your audience to consider while or after looking at this project?
SL:My goal is not to tell the audience: don’t eat meat, or this is good or bad, but rather to have them question the entire process from the living animal to how it becomes the abstract piece of meat available for consumption. I would like them to see the reference to the human body and the violence of the images. The tight frame of the images brings the viewer so close to skin, raw flesh, and fluids that they become erotic. So, I would also like the audience to consider the eroticism of the images.

19 April-7 May 2002

To many people, John Paskievich is a maker of documentary films and videos. But he has also worked extensively and intensely as a photographer. The evening of April 19th presents Winnipeggers with a special opportunity to see his remarkable efforts in both media. The Winnipeg Film Group will be screening a retrospective of John’s motion pictures in conjunction with the Floating Gallery’s exhibition of A Voiceless Song: Photographs of the Slavic Lands.
While collecting images for this massive project, John was based in Vienna and traveled to Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine and Russia. His photos, not unlike his motion pictures, are personal documents of a human landscape fecund with tales of joy and grief and his own intimate interpretation of his surroundings.
John’s cinematic vision is evident in this extraordinary body of work, on loan from the Canadian Museum of Canadian Photography, and we are pleased to introduce to a new audience, this local artist’s voice.

FG: Have you stopped taking photographs? If not, are you working on anything now?
JP: I haven’t stopped taking photographs though I am mostly doing film work. I have a fair amount of material on contact sheets but I haven’t printed any of it.

FG: Has your photographic experience informed your motion pictures? If so, how?
JP: I like documentaries where the visuals are interesting in their own right and are more than just illustrations for the narrative. I love ethnographic films which rely only on visuals and dialogue.

FG: Your photographic work is couched in a particular documentary style, one which is closely aligned with social activism. Are there particular photographers work that inspired you?
JP: I admire the work done by people like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and others who worked for the Farm Security Administration in the USA. These people, I think, are better described as humanists rather than social activists. I definitely see myself as a part of the humanist tradition.

FG: Are there contemporary photo-based artists whose work you admire?
JP: I love the work of the Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikailov whose work I recently discovered in book form. I think Larry Towell is the best photographer working in Canada.

FG: Were you one of the original members of the Floating Gallery?
JP: Yes I was, We started the gallery in the mid 1970’s in a tiny store front space on Osborne St. It was called “Floating” because our gallery was only temporary and we knew that we would have to look for other places to show work.

FG: Do you believe its necessary to have a gallery in Winnipeg devoted exclusively to photo-based media?
JP: A photography gallery is a wonderful thing. It’s wonderful to see work in it’s original form.