June Pak & Louise Noguchi: Somewhere

In conjunction with the Images Festival, generic Louise Noguchi and June Pak are presenting three works at YYZ that employ pre-existing film footage from films such as The Wizard of Oz, here 3-iron and Enter the Dragon. Through the use of video and installation, try their work pays particular attention to cinematic scenes that isolate social and psychological spaces. Intrigued by the intangible, the artists are drawn to the way film translates subconscious states of inner conflict and dislocation into a language of visual metaphors. These metaphors are external to the film’s characters and lie within the film’s location, props, sound effects and music to convey the internal mood of a character or to heighten the tension of a situation. In each of the works on exhibit, Pak and Noguchi are not so much interested in the characters of the film but instead are looking at how the background information acts as an element or character of its own.

In their collaborative work “somewhere”, the artists appropriated the falling house scene from The Wizard of Oz. The scene punctuates Dorothy’s transition from Kansas to the dream-world of the Emerald City and externalizes her emotional state through the use of heightened audio and visual cues. In 3-iron, the figure’s intrusions to empty houses metaphorically criticize the absence of human connection in Korean contemporary society. The mirrored rooms in Enter the Dragon, Lady From Shanghai and Man With the Golden Gun all have final scenes that take place in mirrored rooms where hero and villain fight to the death. The reflective mirrored locales fracture and multiply space to represent the deceptive mind of the villain while also conveying the epic task that the hero has to overcome.