Archives 2003 ()

10 October-21 November 2003

Constellation of Meanings: (Re)Capturing “Young Europa”

I spent a very pleasant week (July 7 to 12) in the artist residency of the St-Norbert Art Centre in order to work on a site-specific project for Le Bestiaire:Instincts Gregaires/The Bestiary: Instincts of the Herd now presented at Platform: Centre for photographic and digital arts. Through a series of cyanotypes (ancient photographic process) The Bestiary: Instincts of the Herd explores the nomenclature of the bestiary and its various ways to anthropomorphize its subjects. The installation presents through anecdotes and allegories how animals become the intermediaries of human passions, obsessions, vices and other human customs. For the ‘Winnipeg version’, I added a work based on Leo Mol’s Young Europa, located in Assiniboine Park. It is an allegorical monument based on the myth of the rape of Europa by Zeus who transforms himself in to a Bull. This sculpture is often used as a background for wedding pictures and is a good example of a very ambiguous use of animal imagery.
My work underlines that the imaginary is also/always part of socio-political engagement. Borrowing many ideas from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, I have attempted to make visible some of the various “agents” that take part in the constellation of meanings around Young Europa. My conversations , more particularly with Louise May, Doug Melnik and Vera Lemecha, also enriched my understanding of the context surrounding a rereading of Mol’s work. Indeed, the problem of endangered species does not only apply to animals but also to artistic practices. In a symptomatic way, nothing can better predict the disappearance of an artistic practice than the ‘numerous nymphets’ of Leo Mol (and many/any other classical sculptors of the “Nude”.) With their empty gazes and stereotypical gestures, the ‘nymphets’ look like animals caught in heavy bronze traps from an outdates patriarchal era.
Louise May explores very well the ‘medusing stare’ of the bronze nymphets–where death is to become a statue- in a recent performance (see last Inversions Women and Humour by Mawa.) But while I was spending my afternoons with the nymphets, I also witnessed another function for this magnificent garden. The garden also serves as the background for many ceremonies: matrimonial, funerary and/or more simply anniversaries organized (mainly) by Winnipeg’s very important community from Ukrainian descent. It is also noteworthy that the “Ukrainian” Garden is adjacent to a much smaller English Garden. As Bourdieu would point out “Culture” is never a neutral territory; it is always a contested one where questions around power and powerlessness, voice and silence subject-hood and objectification all converge. As a citizen, I applaud that the Ukrainian community is given a voice and taking space (real and symbolical). As a woman, I mourn that this has been accomplished through the silence of the nymphets. As an artist, I am left with (re)capturing the constellation of meanings around Young Europa.

22 June-8 August 2003

breath taking curated by Sharon Switzer + Carla Garnet

Opening 27 June at 8pm

Launch 27 June at 8pm

PLATFORM: Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts is a venue for exhibition, production, and education pertaining to all aspects of photo-based media. Through the creation of an interactive dialogue, we contribute to the artistic climate of regional, national, and international artists.

Our primary interest regarding the exhibition of photographic projects is to showcase those artists whose work not only demonstrates a high standard of technical prowess, but also embodies the desire to re-evaluate the aesthetic and conceptual boundaries of the medium. PLATFORM strives to showcase the scope of photographic and digital art practices, from innovations and re-discoveries arising from the traditional print, to advances stemming from digital photographic techniques, to the outer limits where photography dissolves into other media classifications.

25 April-6 June 2003

The artists have each produced a series of images which explore the potential unease on a visceral level. These three bodies of work use the raw material that can be found within an urban or domestic situation to consider the relationship between the immaterial and the physical world. Echoes of the unconscious  ring throughout the works, confounding a purely rational interpretation. These images effect both a representation and a transformation of their subject. Each piece presents us with a form which has been somehow dislocated, so that it may acquire other kinds of value, generating the possibility of fictional or cultural resonance. Through the process of image making the original subject is aestheticised, exaggerated the natural in its most sensual dimension.

Ratman | Clare Charnley

The innards have been cut out , scraped away. The rats have become surface. We are invited (imaginatively) to render our own bodies tiny and insert them within the emptied skins. Yet on another scale we have the option of identifying with the fingers that dissect the little carcases. A sense of play is suggested by the series of rich photographs. The rat images retain traces of their origins as the rat stars of horror movies and fairy tales, as pets, and as the carriers of our neurotic fears of dirt and disease.

Cobwebs (Series) | Penny McCarthy

Each image shows a magnified section of cobweb. The images are the product of a project which involved the collection of 200 cobwebs from a variety of locations across Britain. Some were taken from Penny McCarthy’s house. from under the bed or inside of cupboards, others from roadsides or gardens or sheds. The photographs are
produced using each web itself as a negative. They contain fragments of dust, broken insects and plant life. When exaggerated to this scale the images are suggestive of maps or body scans or even detailed drawings generating the visual equivalences between telescope, microscope and macroscopic images. Connections are drawn between these many different types of matter. The original source for the images is almost secondary, as the viewer may find personal or fictional rationales for the photographs.

Blind Flesh | Alex Wright

Earthworms, floating in a white space, are presented on a huge scale, their bodies anthropomorphised. These blind, but sensuous creatures suggest an intelligence of the flesh which precedes, or circumvents, the intellect. The semi-translucent bodies of the worms could be seen to suggest calligraphic characters, except that as signs they are illegible, the language referenced impenetrable. These ‘figures’ are symbolic of nothing, yet they hold many echoes of meaning. Playing with the boundaries between seduction and disgust, these huge worms evoke a childish fascination.
promo card scanned