This text by CRAIG RODMORE was published alongside DANIEL HUTCHINSON‘S Paintings for Electric Light exhibition.

A Field Without Origin / Notes on Paintings for Electric Light

Gold paint exists, but when Rembrandt painted a golden helmet he didn’t use gold paint.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

Donald Judd said that Dan Flavin’s work was made up of three things: the “use of fluorescent tubes as a source of light, the diffusion of light throughout the surrounding space and upon nearby surfaces, and the arrangement or placement of the fixtures themselves.” This inventory, or what is missing from it, reveals the distance between Flavin’s fluorescent light pieces, which come so quickly to mind, and Daniel Hutchinson’s new paintings, which both incorporate and are made “for” fluorescent lights; it suggests that they are closer to the performance works of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer—since as Carrie Lambert wrote of minimalism (speaking of what Forti’s Huddle [1969], a mass of “six or seven people” climbing over each other in place, might mean for it), “art at this watershed moment was defined not so much by sculpture becoming like performance but by a curious convergence of actions and things.” It is the convergence of actions and things that characterizes—one wants to say produces—the works in this exhibition.

It is important to say of these paintings that each begins with the specification of the light fixture. The light fixtures—custom units with asymmetrical reflectors and bright, thin T5-type bulbs in standard lengths of two, four, and eight feet, assembled from a catalogue of available options—will be set on blocks below the paintings and/or suspended above them. With the size and characteristics of the fixture determined and a combination of coloured gels selected, each panel and stretcher is fabricated and the support prepared. The development of each piece is a complex negotiation of the combinations of gels, the placement of lights, the composition of the painting, and so on; but its appearance, in the end, is subject to the vicissitudes of the size and shifting position of the viewer.

These paintings, which are for coloured electric light, are not paintings of anything, and with the abandonment of the subject (architectural, natural) that had persisted in Hutchinson’s work until now, perspectival space within the painting is displaced by compositions based on an isometric grid whose size is determined by that of the brush that will be used. Axonometric projection obliterates the fixed vanishing point of perspectival drawing and, as Yve-Alain Bois showed in “Metamorphosis of Axonometry,” in doing so it “abolishes the fixed position of the spectator and creates several possible readings of one and the same image.” Bois’s is an argument, with Lissitzky, against the fallacy—the “circular reasoning”—of the conventional wisdom regarding perspective, according to which perspectival drawing “assigns to the spectator of the universal theater the place of the sovereign from which to assess the sphere of his dominion, the dimensions of his knowledge, and the extent of his power.” In fact, as “borderline cases” such as anamorphic images make clear, this sovereignty is an illusion, and “if the spectator leaves the standpoint demanded by the perspective construction, the space of representation collapses like a house of cards. The perspective demands, at least theoretically, the petrification of the spectator.” Moreover, while the lines of perspective converge soon enough at the vanishing point, the axonometric image begins at infinity and moves limitlessly backwards and forwards—this is the revolutionary space of Malevich’s architectonics: “There is no negotiation of depth; instead, it is geometrically rendered ‘infinite’: the eye is no longer fixed in a specific place, and the view is no longer trained or ‘petrified.’” The truly free spectator’s movements transform the image it beholds.

This free spectator is synonymous with the reader whose birth, as Roland Barthes famously announced, comes “at the cost of the death of the Author”: “The reader is the space on which all quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” Likewise, the painter of these pictures corresponds to Barthes’s “modern scriptor,” who “no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt,” whose vocation is not storytelling or depiction but the playing out of a performative—a “form (exclusively given in the first person and in the present tense) in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered”—and whose “hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin.”

Like the textual scriptor, who uses words and phrases that anyone can find in the dictionary and inscribes these through a system of mark-making, Hutchinson as painter-scriptor has assembled what could be called a catalogue of gestures in the construction of each composition (and like the repertoire of actions that make up certain of Rainer’s works, these simple gestures are transformed by their repetition and combination in a baffling flux). There is a correspondence between this store of gestures and the predetermined techniques, materials, and tools—such as prepared brushes—used to inscribe them and, in turn, between these and the innumerable but finite parts and combinations of parts produced by manufacturers of electric light fixtures and exhaustively inventoried in the catalogues, posters, and sample boards on display in the suppliers’ showrooms. But just as the Barthes of “The Death of the Author” is the same one who loved writing instruments and was fascinated by the typewriter, whose quarter-sheet system for taking and filing notes suffered a blow in 1967 when France converted from Imperial paper sizes to the ISO standard, and who claimed to write fragments so that he could “multiply . . . many times over” the pleasure of beginning and completing the work, we see that these strategies by no means preclude the pleasure of making—both can be part of the same productive system, and this brings us to something significant that is resolved in Hutchinson’s Paintings for Electric Light.

These notes began with Flavin and Judd. It would have been possible to begin with Stella or even Reinhardt—the lineage is clear enough—but for the striking presence of the fluorescent light fixtures that connect this work to the post-studio modes of artistic production that emerged in the 1960s in the wake of Stella’s innovations, in which the romantic conception of the solitary artist at work in the studio was displaced by the techno-industrial romance of the artist whose works are produced through telephone calls (the one that initiated production on Tony Smith’s Die [1962] is the most famous) and visits to shops and factories—Robert Smithson’s Arco Steel and Milgo Industrial, Judd’s Bernstein Brothers, Tinsmiths and Allied Plastics, and their catalogues of ready-to-order materials and “trademarked surfaces” like Lavax Wrinkle Finish and Galvanox (finishes that Smithson listed, as Caroline Jones observed, “as if intoxicated by the alien poetry of these proprietary terms”), and Flavin’s standard fluorescent light fixtures, Union Made by the Mercury Lighting Products Company, Inc., of Passaic, New Jersey.

For Daniel Buren, the difference between these studio and post-studio practices was insufficient, and in his famous indictment “The Function of the Studio” (1971), the evacuation of the studio is brilliantly articulated in the language of institutional critique. Mirror image of the gallery and museum, in Buren’s analysis the studio is a vacuum in which fundamentally identical, interchangeable (exchangeable) objects are produced before circulating in the corresponding vacuum of the museum or gallery. (He notes, incidentally, apropos of the use of artificial light in North American–type studios, that there is “an equivalence between the products of these lofts and their placement on the walls and floors of modern museums, which are also illuminated day and night by electricity.”)

Buren’s is the critique with which works such as Hutchinson’s still have to contend. In this case, a situation is staged in which the shared space inhabited by the work and the beholder is acknowledged, revealing, instead of concealing, both the contrivance of the situation and precariousness of perception. Studio and post-studio, craft and mechanization, the solitary and the social are held in suspension in such a way as to almost be reconciled; the work was made off-site and transported to the gallery, but it functions in a way that presupposes a spectator, an individual, with agency—the perceiving subject Henri Bergson defined when he wrote that “my perception displays, in the midst of the image world, as would their outward reflection or shadow, the eventual or possible actions of my body”—and so seems to escape the ossifying effects Buren identified. The paintings bear the mark of the skilled and practiced hand at work alone in the studio, but the complex of painting and electric light reminds us that the hand that prepared the flawless grounds, the hand that mixed colour (the colour black) and made marks with such virtuosity, belongs to the same body as legs that walked about town, carrying their owner from the studio down the street to Jomar Electric on St. Clarens Avenue to pick up made-to-order fixtures by Visioneering Electric, or to Lee Filters in the east end for sample packs of lighting gels with names like Waterfront Green and Follies Pink. (The body responsible for Flavin’s light pieces was never allowed to be synonymous with the hand that produced his exquisite little seaside sketches.)

For Buren the studio “is the first frame, the first limit, upon which all subsequent frames/limits will depend,” the gallery the near-identical frame for which the work is destined. But as Paul Virilio has pointed out, “Everything is always perceived through a frame, and it’s certain this frame existed from the moment the first eye opened upon the visible field.” We therefore need to find an equivalence with the frame, which at any rate preceded the studio and museum. Daniel Hutchinson has found one way, one opening: in transfiguring the dreariness of the portable art object through the medium of coloured electric light he has allowed the autonomous work of art to coalesce with the world outside of it, revealed the influence of the individual on the work and the spaces in which it resides, and found, with a protagonist of Fitzgerald’s, that “the arc-light shining into his window seemed for this hour like the moon, only brighter and more beautiful than the moon.”

CRAIG RODMORE is an artist who lives and works in Toronto.

DANIEL HUTCHINSON is a visual artist based in Toronto, Ontario. He received his BFA from the Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver in 2004 and his MFA from NSCAD University, Halifax in 2008. He has exhibited across Canada and in the U.S., Australia and Sweden. In 2009 he received Honourable Mention for the Halifax Mayor’s Award for Contemporary Visual Art and was twice named a semi-finalist in the RBC Canadian Painting Competition. In 2013, Hutchinson’s work will appear in The Painting Project, a survey of contemporary Canadian painting curated by Louise Déry and Julie Bélisle and organized by L’Université du Québec à Montréal as well as the group show Imaging Disaster, at Museum London. Hutchinson is represented by Angell Gallery, Toronto.

The artist gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council.

Technical assistance provided by Gallery 44, Toronto.

ADMISSION | FREE

YYZ is pleased to host a panel discussion between Toronto artists Yam Lau, Andy Patton, and Québec artist Jean-François Côté. The panel will discuss Côté’s The Chorus, a video installation currently on view at YYZ.

Shot in Beijing, China in 2010, The Chorus stages the performance of “Snow,” a popular Chinese song transcribed from Mao Zedong’s poem of the same title. In this work Côté explores the psychological and spiritual impact of China’s recent transformation on its citizens. The performance of a song that signals the revolutionary sentiment of a bygone era is intended to gauge and also reveal the affective responses of the singers in the present.

The panel will provide contextual information on the production of The Chorus and explore a number of relevant topics arising from the work.

The topics include:

1. The content of Mao’s poem with reference to the deliberate conflation of myth, history/illusion, and fact- a practice that characterizes Chinese culture.

2. The treatment of portraiture and landscape in Côté’s early work and in The Chorus.

3. The relationships between persons and the traditional Chinese architecture seen in the work.

JEAN-FRANÇOIS CÔTÉ earned his Ph.D. in visual arts and art history at Université Laval with a grant from the Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture. Solo exhibitions include presentations at the Studio d’essai of Méduse; at VU; at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in the context of the 8th Bienal de Video Y Nuevos Medios de Santiago, Chile; in the context of the Mois Multi; and at the Yuanfen Gallery of Beijing, China. Côté was Professor in Time-Based Art and Photography at York University in Toronto. He is now Professor in Media Art at Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. He received support from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and from the Canada Council for the Arts.

YAM LAU was born in Hong Kong and received his MFA from the University of Alberta. His most recent works combine video and computer-generated animation. Lau also publishes regularly on art and design and has exhibited his work widely in Canada, USA, Europe, and China. He is a co-founder of the community based art project “Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art” in Beijing, China. Lau is now based in Toronto where he is an associate professor of painting at York University

ANDY PATTON is a painter and writer who teaches at OCAD University. He recently went back to school to study the calligraphy of China’s Northern Song dynasty and the aesthetic thought that accompanied it. Patton has lived and worked in Toronto since 1977.

OPENING RECEPTION
FRIDAY 10 MAY 2013, 8:00PM-10:00PM

For his solo exhibition at YYZ, Daniel Hutchinson has produced a series of site-sensitive paintings with coloured fluorescent light components under the title Paintings for Electric Light.

Seeking contingency rather than autonomy and emphasizing the primacy of perceptual experience, these pictures are produced considering carefully composed external relations–the gallery’s architecture and the relative positions of pictures and lights–and the moving spectator who perceives new conditions at every spatial location. The internal compositions of the paintings are geometric patterns that draw formal cues from the light fixtures, as well as the shapes of the supports, and the shapes of the cast light or shadows inside and outside of the picture plane.

These paintings for electric light continue the artist’s interest in the métier of painting, the tradition of the monochrome, and the interactivity of retinal opticality, but depart from the critical relationship to pictorialism his paintings have always maintained. Representing a completely new approach to painting for the artist, these works embrace the necessity of total non-objective abstraction and sculptural relationships.

DANIEL HUTCHINSON is a visual artist based in Toronto, Ontario. He received his BFA from the Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver in 2004 and his MFA from NSCAD University, Halifax in 2008. He has exhibited across Canada, in the U.S., Australia and Sweden. In 2009 he received Honourable Mention for the Halifax Mayor’s Award for Contemporary Visual Art and was twice named a semi-finalist in the RBC Canadian Painting Competition. In 2013, Hutchinson’s work will appear in The Painting Project, a survey of contemporary Canadian painting curated by Louise Déry and Julie Bélisle and organized by L’Université du Québec à Montréal as well as the group show Imaging Disaster, at Museum London. Hutchinson is represented by Angell Gallery, Toronto.

The artist gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council.

Technical assistance provided by Gallery 44, Toronto.

Read CRAIG RODMORE‘S A Field Without Origin / Notes on Paintings for Electric Light, an essay about DANIEL HUTCHINSON‘S exhibition.

JEAN-FRANÇOIS CÔTÉ | THE CHORUS 
SATURDAY 13 APRIL 2013 – SATURDAY 01 JUNE 2013

This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Images Festival, April 11 – April 20, 2013. For more information visit imagesfestival.com

OPENING RECEPTION | SATURDAY 13 APRIL 2013, 1:00PM-5:00PM

PATTY CHANG & NOAH KLERSFELD | CURRENTS
This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Images Festival, April 11 – April 20, 2013. For more information visit imagesfestival.com.

LAX comes to YYZ in this installation by Patty Chang and Noah Klersfeld. Originally created for the newly renovated Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX, the Los Angeles international airport, this project turns the airport inside out, exposing the internecine workings of baggage transport systems.

In this iteration of the installation, two kaleidoscopic videos play one after the other. First, sixteen screens show sixteen different journeys on the conveyor belts from the check-in counters to the baggage sorters. The position of the camera puts the viewer in the place of the luggage, thus revealing a normally unseen world, but also taking the viewer on a barebones funhouse ride through the efficient and very blue interiors of the non-public side of the airport. Then the sixteen screens simultaneously show the repeated image of a houseplant making that same journey. The comic homeliness of the houseplant, so out of place in this environment, speaks to the vulnerability of all things that travel, be they human or inanimate, as they are inspected, processed and transported through environments that range from rudimentary to luxurious. The untroubled journey of the houseplant also shows us how surprisingly gentle the massive system of conveyer belts can be. As Klersfeld puts it, “We wanted to pull back the curtain and give travelers a glimpse of the inner workings of this massive global transportation network in a personal way. A houseplant is a very distinct icon of domesticity. It’s vulnerable but strong.”

PATTY CHANG is well known for her performative works, which deal with themes of gender, language, and empathy. Working predominantly in video, Chang initially uses the medium to document her performances, often utilizing the camera’s potential to misrepresent. Her work has been exhibited at such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, CA; and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden. She is currently a resident at the Fonderie Darling in Montreal.

NOAH KLERSFELD is an artist and architect living and working in New York City. His recent exhibitions and screenings include The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; The Islip Art Museum, East Islip, NY; and Freight + Volume Gallery, New York, NY. His video Payroll has received awards from The Center on Contemporary Arts, Seattle, WA and the ASU Film and Video Festival, Tempe, AZ. He has an upcoming solo exhibition at the Hunterdon Art Museum, Clinton, NJ.

This text by YAM LAU was published alongside JEAN-FRANÇOIS CÔTÉ‘S The Chorus exhibition.

Chorus: Rumination on the Nobility of Faces and Images
By Yam Lau

What is difficult to manage is the expression of his face
- Confucius

Snow in the summer
Jean-François Côté’s The Chorus stages the performance of a celebrated Chinese song. In an inner courtyard of a Taoist temple in Beijing, an amateur choir of retirees is juxtaposed with an individual child performer. The performers sing the celebrated Chinese song “Snow,” transcribed from the renowned poem of the same title, written in the nineteen thirties by the young revolutionary Mao Zedong. The older performers would know this song by heart from growing up in Mao’s era, while the young child, separated from it by generations, would be learning the song as she performs it.

“Snow” is by no means an exceptional literary work; nonetheless it underscores the young Mao’s ambition. The sentiment expressed therein must have also resonated with the revolutionary zeal of the time. The poem invoked the vastness of China, its renowned monuments and heroes within an aggrandized framework of epic imagination. But, Mao also broke rank within its composition. Instead of conferring customary praise on the ancients as most Chinese poets would, he denigrated his predecessors. Through this act of usurpation, Mao delivered his utopian vision: the future leader confidently declared that the achievement of his time will crown the unfolding chronicle that is China. Looking back in time, “Snow” may be the last era in Chinese history in which an ambition of dynastic magnitude can be stated with such unabashed conviction.

China in the making
Now that the rhetoric of Mao and the promise of revolution have ran its course, what remains to steer China’s mode of self-understanding and national imagination as it moves “forward” in the world stage? From a western perspective, it is difficult to imagine a culture as sedimented in the grandeur of its literary and historical past as China. Despite the various setbacks in China’s modernization, nothing has deterred China’s propensity to continually call upon an aggrandized historical/mythical matrix to formulate its current understanding of itself. Consider Mao’s bombast in “Snow.” It can be regarded as a modern attempt in the long tradition of mythological appropriation within China, one that is in fact well integrated within this culture. Today, even as the grand eras of dynastic rule and modern revolution are no longer, such mythological/historical appropriation remains a common exercise in the imagination of the general Chinese populace.

When Côté set out to make The Chorus, I understand he was looking for a way to gauge the enormous transformation that has taken place in China since the era of Mao. However, his intention was to not simply explore this transformation externally through the search of an appropriate and timely subject such as China’s massive urban and industrial development.  Côté was interested in China’s recent past as a living current and the way it motivates the lives of ordinary Chinese citizens. Few subjects would grant the access necessary to this approach. In choosing “Snow,” a popular song that traverses China’s rapid transitions from socialist to free market ideology, he wanted to access this social economic transformation internally, or affectively as a lived reality. In The Chorus, I believe it is through the performative faces of the choir that the entwined destinies of a transforming China and its citizens can be psychologically and spiritually intimated. Henceforth, I regard The Chorus as a work of portraiture. The following offers an analysis of its mechanism.

Faces and frontiers
The face speaks. It delivers worlds; it makes them visible as visages.

During the performance of “Snow,” the performers’ facial expression, where the vocal and other senses are concentrated and integrated, incarnates the enormous expanse of space, time and values described within its lyrics. As an expressive agent of sort, the face becomes an active, living frontier from which the epic imaginary that characterizes China is called into the present. The concerted power of the timbre and rhythm within the performance of the lyrics gives rise to states of being and personalities that are rooted and nourished by the grand matrix of China’s imaginary self-positioning. I cannot help to take note of the sense of elevation and openness registered on the faces. It is in the process of vocalization that the face (also the entire body) becomes (in)fused with the sentiment of “Snow” as one continuous living tissue.

The Chorus frames and facilitates a dynamic continuity between the face and its invocation. One witnesses the performers enter into a mutually appropriating relation with China’s epic imagination. The face, a living frontier in the present, calls the past into being, while the past fulfills the living present with the certainty of grandiosity and character. Both elements constitute and give reality to the other. The effect of this calls the audience into attention.

The face and the picture plane
The way The Chorus manages to amplify the face and its ability to address the viewer, lies in its acute treatment of the picture plane. While the choir is arranged frontally within a compressed space that is paralleled to the picture plane, the camera is positioned to reinforce a resolute awareness of this setup. This condition gives rise to a number of logical parallels that can be drawn between the figure of the face and the picture plane. For example, I would characterize them as disclosive frontiers through which other “realities” may come to pass. None of them have volume, thickness, depth, perspective or a “reverse side” (in the sense that one cannot get “behind” them). They come into view most effective when approached frontally. The efficacy of The Chorus partly owes to its exploitation of the structural analogous between the face and the picture plane, perhaps.

Last thought
Of all the faces portrayed in The Chorus, I am especially fond of one — the young woman in an elegant Chinese style black dress. Rosée (her nickname) is stationed as an attendant of sort, we see her waiting by the side of the choir, gently coordinating the rank and occasionally making small adjustment to the performers’ attire. In this effort to maintain an overall sense of propriety, it would also seem that the entire scene is gathered under her care.  Servitude here is elevated to a measure of grace.

Later, close up shots of Rosée’s face deliver an innocence that is both refined and lucid. Her composure reveals a quiet joy that is almost entirely anachronistic with the pulse of contemporary time. She did not perform with the choir. But their powerful voice produces a poignant contrast that foregrounds the frail beauty of her face. Somewhere in this scenario, I intuit a premonition of classical China in all its restrain and mystery.

YAM LAU was born in Hong Kong. He received his MFA from the University of Alberta, and is now based in Toronto, where he is an associate professor of painting at York University. His most recent works combine video and computer-generated animation. Lau also publishes regularly on art and design and has exhibited his work widely in Canada, USA, Europe and China. He is a co-founder of the community based art project “Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art” in Beijing, China.

JEAN-FRANÇOIS CÔTÉ earned his Ph.D. in visual arts and art history at Université Laval with a grant from the Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture. Solo exhibitions include presentations at the Studio d’essai of Méduse; at VU; at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in the context of the 8th Bienal de Video Y Nuevos Medios de Santiago, Chile; in the context of the Mois Multi; and at the Yuanfen Gallery of Beijing, China. Côté was Professor in Time-Based Art and Photography at York University in Toronto. He is now Professor in Media Art at Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. He received support from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and from the Canada Council for the Arts.

This project is realized with the funding from de Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

With gratitude : Rosée, Yam Lau, the people of the The Chorus, Martin Bureau, Patrick Saint-Denis, Guo Yuejin, Kate Lu, Sun Xue Jun, Zhong Jao, Meng Xiang Cheng, Zhao Guo Hua, the people of the Dongyue temple, Mister Wang, Li Caiping, Red Gate Gallery, La Bande Vidéo, Les Productions Recto Verso.

SPRING FORWARD SERIES | WORKSHOPS FOR ARTISTS
Artists’ Health Alliance and YYZ Artists’ Outlet

Centre for Social Innovation, 215 Spadina Avenue

Workshops hosted by Hima Soni and Shibani Somani of Just IDEAS. Only $60 for the series, $25 for one, and $20 for students and seniors.

Register today at artistshealth.com or call 416.351.0239. Space is limited.

Mind Detox
April 29, 2013, 6:30pm

Recognize and understand the different toxins that we
encounter, and how to deal with them. By the end of
the workshop you will have your own toolkit of mind
detox techniques. These techniques are easy to use
and can be done anywhere!

Balancing Act
May 6, 2013, 6:30pm

Our busy life places many demands on our energy,
time and balance, making balance an unrealistic
dream. A harmonious integration of all aspects of life
is the only way to bring balance throughout one’s life.

Unlock Your Potential
May 13, 2013, 6:30pm

Are you ready to free yourself from limitations, open
infinite possibilities, make your goals a reality and
unlock your dormant potential. Then this is the
workshop for YOU!

Brian Groombridge by EC Woodley

The three small rooms of Brian Groombridge’s retrospective at YYZ were unique and spacious precincts populated by words and numbers, signals and signs. Printed onto objects or positioned as titles, words in themselves seemed to take on the qualities of things, giving the term “printed matter” a new turn. Paradoxically, Groombridge’s few objects without texts or titles possessed something of the transitory or provisional qualities of words. The forms of two untitled painted aluminum sculptures from 2008 suggest “chair” and “radio” respectively, as if thought has retained its status as thought while having become precisely haptic, something you want to hold in your hand. The “radio” is composed of two small rectangles screwed together at a right angle.

A circle is cut into the vertical. Its geometry and palette link it to De Stijl but it cannot be said to represent any precisely historical style. The “chair” is flat, about one inch thick. It looks like a criss-crossed, possibly modernist, diagrammatic cut-out. Projecting out from its blueness are three small square and rectangular plates: white, yellow and grey complications of flatness and chair-ness. Neither mobile nor stabile (to use Calder’s terms) it hangs still from the ceiling, by a wire. Its suspension is a matter of fact, and also a condition.

Produced between 1989 and 2012, the works at YYZ evoke familiar forms and formats. A list of these might include the diagram, the measuring device, the museum alcove, the commercial sign, the trade show display device, the child’s game, the poem and the notebook. Here, the provisional and the quotidian, the props of something like daily life, open up into the more vast (though often no less quotidian) spaces of mind, memory and history. The “between” is important in Groombridge. It is a length of interior space that must be travelled before arriving at the totality of the works themselves (a totality, however, that is prone to flux).

One of the works Groombridge produced in 2005 is a three-quarter-metre-high white box on a stand. The box sits about chest height to above head height. You approach it from a distance and are led around it until finding that the box is open on one side. On two interior sides is a list in white type against a wide blue band:

A CARTON OF BT CIGARETTES + A CIGARETTE-MAKING DEVICE + PAPERS + A HARD CASE FOR MY GLASSES + A 1980 POCKET CALENDAR + 5 LINED NOTEBOOKS + A BALL-POINT PEN + REFILLS + A BIBLE + A SMALL CZECH-GERMAN AND GERMAN-CZECH DICTIONARY + A GERMAN LAN-GAUGE TEXTBOOK + A LOT OF VITAMINS + TEA + A POCKETKNIFE + A CHEAP RAZOR + A LARGE QUANTITY OF GOOD RAZOR BLADES + 3 TUBES OF ORDINARY SHAVING CREAM + 3 TUBES OF TOOTHPASTE + A NEW (HARD- BRISTLED) TOOTHBRUSH + A SMALL BRUSH FOR WASHING + BROWN SUNTAN LOTION + 3 TUBES OF ALPA + NAIL SCISSORS + A POCKET MIRROR + A NAIL FILE + 2 PAIRS OF WARM SOCKS

This work is named 50° 06″ 0′ N, 14° 15″ 0′ E. These are the geographic coordinates of the Czech Republic prison where Vaclav Havel was imprisoned. The list is his, made so that these items, corresponding to his own dignity and survival, could be brought to him by his beloved wife Olga Havlova. Groombridge lifted the exact list and its typeface from Havel’s Letters to Olga, 1988 (Faber &Faber).

Groombridge’s is a third-generation approach to the idea of “escaping the frame,” an idea that so obsessed early conceptual art. Not only has the frame been physically returned to (as it was, along with the object, in Groombridge’s teacher, lan Carr-Harris’s work of the 1970s), but often it has become so integrated into the work that it ceases to call attention to itself. The largest room at YYZ was the most visually delicate of the retrospective, housing six works, including 50° 06″ 0′ N, 14° 15″ 0′ E, yet seeming close to holding nothing at all (Groombridge is, perhaps, the Richard Tuttle of conceptual art). Scattered at intervals and covering the long wall in this room was Tati, 2000, a work named after and mimicking the “animated gaze” of the French filmmaker Jacques Tati; a series of eight white, enamel-on-board, right-angled shapes framed in white—geometrical units as if representing rooms, where each unit is marked with a pale, yellow triangle, an arrow-like sign indicating the direction of the represented gaze. Seemingly puzzle-like, the units are of different dimensions but take up playfully, precisely the same area. In Groombridge’s work, as in Tati’s, perception, in both of its primary senses, is key. Here, the white frames are borders between the known and the unknown, the empty space within the units, and emptier space between each unit. As in much of Groombridge’s work, one escapes the frame in the space of one’s perception and knowledge. These frames also have an anecdotal life. Tati’s family were frame makers, and Tati, it might be said, as a composer of film frames, followed in their footsteps. His camera rarely seemed to move, so as to admit the viewer into his busy set pieces, an effect of internal movement and external stillness that Groombridge’s work also encourages.

“Brian Groombridge: small telescopes” was exhibited at YYZ, Toronto, from September 8 to
December 1, 2012.

E C Woodley is an artist, curator, composer and critic.

bordercrossingsmag.com

Publishing error: Groombridge joined the YYZ Board six months into its inception.

OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY 11 JANUARY 2013 – 8:00PM TO 10:00PM

Scott Waters: Contrails, 48″x72″, oil on canvas, 2012.

Throughout 2011 Scott Waters followed The Third Battalion of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry as they trained for and were deployed to Kabul, Afghanistan, for the start of Canada’s post-combat training mission in that country. ROTOZERO is a project created through the auspices of The Canadian Forces Artist Program, but whose central characteristic is one of contemplation.

ROTOZERO is less a document of a mission and more a consideration of how we recall and construct stories. Incorporating painting, photography, text panels, and found objects, it is an assemblage of tangible objects which act as proxy for the narrative drive — a narrative drive which, in this case, is based on the anticipation, boredom, frustration, terror, and sense of expectation that are markers of the training mission to Afghanistan.

SCOTT WATERS received his BFA from The University of Victoria, his MFA from York University, and served as an Infantry soldier in the Canadian Forces. Recent solo exhibitions include Rodman Hall, The Art Gallery of South Western Manitoba, and The Alternator Gallery. Publications include the illustrated memoir, The Hero Book (Conundrum Press), the anthology, Embedded on the Homefront (Heritage House), with features in Border Crossings, Public, and Legion Magazine. A two-time participant in the Canadian Forces Artist Program, Waters has received funding from The Ontario Arts Council and The Canada Council for the Arts. He was recently awarded The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal. Waters is represented by LE Gallery, Toronto.

Scott Waters would like to offer a heartfelt thank you to The Third Battalion of The Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, especially Maj. Kevin Barry, Maj. Quentin Innis, CSM Rich Davey and Lt. Coady Summerfield. Without the battalion ROTOZERO would not exist. Without the help of these individuals, it would have been immeasurably inferior.

Read DAVID BALZER‘S Circles and Zeroes, an essay about SCOTT WATERS‘ exhibition.

Scott Waters: ROTOZERO, 2013. Photo credit: Allan Kosmajac

OPENING RECEPTION | FRIDAY 11 JANUARY 2013, 8:00PM-10:00PM

Photo credit: Walter Willems

High Acceptance is the newest installation in Faith La Rocque’s ongoing body of work investigating themes of belief, ritual, and consumption in relation to the pursuit of health and “wellness.” The title originates as a term used to describe the efficacy of a given alternative health therapy. La Rocque continues her work with materials such as Himalayan salt, copper, and scent to establish an active environment that allows for critical awareness, sensory experience, and physiological engagement.

FAITH LA ROCQUE received an M.F.A. in Tapestry from Edinburgh College of Art
(2006), and a B.F.A. in Art History and Studio Art from Concordia University, Montréal (2004). Recent group exhibitions include Star Project, Minokamo Woodland Gallery, Minokamo, Japan (2011), Ineffable Plasticity: the experience of being human, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2011) and Echo Dell, Narwhal Art Projects, Toronto (2012). La Rocque has received several grants and awards, including the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts (2010). La Rocque is a multidisciplinary artist living in Toronto and exhibiting internationally.

Read CAMILLA SINGH‘S Sneaky Coexistence: the alchemy of the real by Camilla Singh, an essay about FAITH LA ROCQUE‘S exhibition.

 

 

 

 

 

Faith La Rocque: High Acceptance, 2013. Photo credit: Allan Kosmajac