David Hoffos: Scenes from the House Dream, Phase Three

Dunlop Art Gallery
12 August 2006 – 29 September 2006

If you have ever walked down a residential street after dark, able to glance into lit rooms through open curtains, you have likely experienced that strange sensation of being a lone, unseen observer, a voyeur. Similar feelings of isolation and omnipotence are evoked by Scenes from the House Dream, Phase Three, David Hoffos’ immersive video installation that presents viewers with the opportunity to glimpse into the artist’s dreams.

Upon entering the installation space, which is completely dark except for light from the projections, the viewer first encounters a young boy and toy boat. Both are projected onto separate black cut-outs so that they occupy a space somewhere between two and three dimensions. The boy is cut-off at the ankles to suggest that he is standing in shallow water; he holds a string attached to the boat (the idea of water is further suggested by the gentle, meditative soundtrack, which features a flute, loon calls, twittering birds and the roar of the
ocean). His expression is sullen and his movements restless, as though he is the one tethered, not the toy.

Opposite the boy are three nocturnal scenes. Projected into a recess between two walls is the central image of the installation, a window in a wood cabin through which a man is visible. He is either writing or drawing, and also seems restless, even agitated. Inside the walls to either side of this image are two miniature models, each visible through a square hole at eye-level. Through the use of mirrors and televisions—both conspicuously placed so that the means of illusion are obvious to the viewer and he or she does not waste time trying to figure it out—the artist has cast small, moving projections into the models (à la Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride, for those readers as familiar with video techniques as I am). One model recreates a roman palace, suggested by circular formations of colossal columns. Five roman figures are projected in a group amid the columns, leisurely interacting with one another. Behind them, a circular pit of red light is just visible to the viewer. The other model presents a man, pacing impatiently next to his car at the edge of a cliff overlooking a lighthouse and the ocean. Both the man and the ripples of water at the shoreline are created through video and mirrors.

With the exception of the Romans, the figures are all trapped. The boy is attached to his boat; the writer/drawer is, formally speaking, constrained within the frame of the window, and also by difficulty expressing himself (hence the frustrated movements); the man by his car is restricted by the cliff and the small fence at its edge—he can go no further. The result is a strong sense of longing. The figures long for release, but it is not necessarily from an external force; in each case, the figure seems as trapped by his own actions as by his circumstances. The boy could let go of the rope, the writer/drawer might walk away from his desk, and nothing is stopping the man from getting back in his car and driving off. The conflict is, therefore, internal.

The viewer witnesses these conflicts from the comfortable obscurity of darkness. No light is cast in his or her direction. This omnipresence is intensified by the above-the-maze perspective afforded by the miniature scale of the two models. I wondered, as I peered into the little worlds, if the characters were representations of the artist, if he had in fact experienced this objective, all-encompassing clarity with regards to his own life. I was immediately reminded of the previous night, when I had wandered through the artists’ stalls at the Regina Folk Festival alone, taking a break from the crowds in front of the stage. I was struck by feelings of unfamiliarity. My surroundings had become vaguely foreign, as though I had just momentarily stepped just outside my own life. So perhaps Hoffos had also become an objective viewer in his own life, glancing into his own home from the street at dusk. And perhaps that objectivity disappears when not alone, which could explain the uniqueness of the multi-figured roman scene, devoid of the longing in the other images. As soon as I returned to my blanket of friends at the festival, my feelings of detachment faded and were, for the moment, forgotten.

Alternatively, the roman scene might require the context of the complete installation to be fully appreciated. The fourth phase will be completed in 2007 and an exhibition of all four phases will follow. For now, however, phase three successfully stands on its own, and is not to be missed.

Angela Beck

Ron Mueck

National Galleries of Scotland @ Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh
August 5 to October 1, 2006


The first thing one notices about Ron Mueck’s work is how incredibly life-like the sculptures are. Mueck’s technical skill is indeed extensive and nearly without rival, but because this is such an automatic association and because to approach his work as a technical oeuvre has become so standard, it seems even more crucial to situate the content of the work and to pull out threads of meaning that may get lost under his skillful manipulation of materials.

Mueck is, after all, if his background is any indication, primarily a technician (Mueck oversaw the special effects in Jim Henson’s film Labyrinth, in addition to other, similar projects). It is then to be expected, I suppose, that this is where criticism around his work is focussed. But Mueck’s sculptures--of full figures or only faces, sometimes made specific in a skewed portraiture and sometimes as indicators of generality--are uncanny not only because of their resemblance to his subjects, nor exclusively because of the shifted scale of the pieces. They are uncanny because both haunting familiarity and palpable discomfort are present in the subjects themselves, rather than just in their execution as sculptural objects.

Ghost, for instance, is a prime example. A sculpture of an awkward, adolescent girl in a navy bathing suit, it stands approximately 9 feet in height. The girl reclines against the gallery wall, shrugging slightly and tensed. She is plain, gangly, and has dirty-blond hair, some of which is falling in front of her face and which sways slightly from the gallery’s ventilation and the movement of the bodies around her. Her skin has a yellowed tone, simultaneously flushed with irregular traces of red. Her visual expression looks as though she has just said something non-committal, such as "I don't know" or "kind of", and then trailed off. She looks downward and to the side, averting her eyes.


Ron Mueck, Ghost, 1998



Curiously enough, in fact, I found it impossible to exactly meet her gaze, no matter where I put my head. As the girl shrinks away from all direct contact, physical or visual, one realizes also that she belongs to the most hypersexualized demographic on the planet. Her clumsy sexuality--coyness is a trait of the best Hollywood sex kittens--is as emphasized by her increased size as her physical liminality is.

This awkward liminality is present in Mueck’s other works as well, the more successful of which are Wild Man, a depiction at roughly triple life-size of a terrified Celt in retreat from the gallery’s visitors, and Spooning Couple, a small (one foot long) and perfectly detailed form of a rather sweaty proletarian couple connected physically but staring out into space, away from each other. Ghost, however, is perhaps the most successful and uncomfortable of these, due to the nature of Mueck’s subject. That is, Mueck’s Ghost is in a state of becoming, but is still for the time being (and subsequently forevermore, as this is a static, sculptural work) caught between girlishness and womanhood. The girl in Ghost has both a social presence and a kind of dismissed, non-presence; she is flawed and vulnerable but not entirely innocent and more than a little suspicious, all qualities suggested by her hesitant posture. After all, innocence and ambition are both characterized by a world-readiness, but the girl shuns both her audience and the vast spaces of the gallery. One also realizes that this work represents not only her regard for society but society’s view of the girl; as a semi-sexual entity to be controlled and capitalized upon, but not entirely trusted.

This understanding, then, allows one to see the work as metaphor for even further societal relationships (I am reminded of Nabokov’s portrayal of America--the nation itself an adolescent--as the hybrid manipulator/victim/teenager in Lolita). These works, be they the ostracized but fetishized girl in Ghost or the historical monster as opposed to the real victim as in the case of Wild Man, serve as an exploration of the nature of the uncanny itself. And the uncanny, simultaneously represented and embodied--explored here not only through physical accuracy but also through Mueck’s subjects and their treatment--in this exhibition makes for a disquieting experience in which a viewer may not be entirely certain of his or her role. The viewer, in other words, is also caught between possessing a privileged gaze and being challenged by what that gaze encounters.

--Lee Henderson


Ron Mueck, Spooning Couple, 2005


Ron Mueck at the National Galleries (exhibition site)

Michael Waterman: Antiphon
Neutral Ground
August 5-25, 2006

The recorder, as a musical instrument, seems to have been relegated to the 3rd-grade classrooms of the world--its inclusion in "Stairway to Heaven" notwithstanding. Everyone in our culture, then, can likely play the recorder, but probably not very well. So it may be with little surprise that one can experience a playful naïveté when encountering Michael Waterman's work at Neutral Ground.

This work seems to have been tailored to the architecture of the space, as the hallway itself is the location of the first component of the exhibition. The short hallway leading into Neutral Ground's main space is lined on either side with recorders, which in turn are connected to and "blown" by small fan-like mechanisms. These mechanisms themselves are triggered through somewhat awkward motion detectors, so that when a body moves down the hallway--or back and forth within it--the recorders are "played," and each emits a single, clumsy note. The combined sound is an ambient dissonance.

At the end of this sonic gauntlet is a black curtain, blocking an exit to the right and into the gallery's main space. Pulling back the curtain triggers the first of several instruments inside the space; some description of these primitive and yet elaborate samplers is in order. Each of the several structures consists primarily of a speaker not unlike what one might find in a garage sale, as they seem to have been made circa 1970. Viewers familiar with similar contemporary art will no doubt draw a parallel with the work of Christian Marclay, although Marclay seems more interested in maintaining the sheer "speaker-ness" of his sculptural objects. In Waterman's case, the fabric front to each speaker has been replaced with coloured plastic (red, yellow, etc.). On top of each of these is a plastic tube, vertically encasing wires and leading to a bare motherboard and a stripped CD player. On the front of this is a tiny motion detector; when the motion detector is tripped, the CD begins to play, the speaker is lit from within, and a portion of a soundscape is heard (each disc plays something different, and most seemed to last between 30 and 60 seconds). When the sample ends, the light goes out and the CD stops, ready to be triggered again. The speakers do not function, nor sound, nor look quite the way they are "supposed" to.

My own first reaction was to dash about the room, finding out what sounds I could trigger in each of the machines; I then became selective, trying to remix the sound by triggering those I thought would sound "good" together. I was aware of how arbitrary this was on the one hand, and yet also understanding that my choices were built upon the history of Western music, as I combined low, rythmic thuds with higher-pitched tones. I was, of course, unable to completely orchestrate the machines, thanks to the unspecific gaze of each motion detector.

While Waterman's technology seems clumsy at first (picture a combination of Disco-era hi-fi and a Gibsonesque, Cyberpunk aesthetic), one realizes that this is an elaborate attempt to disrupt control of machine and instrument. One moves about the space, trying to negotiate the parameters set up by the range of each motion detector and the limitations of one's own bodily movement. This reconnection to the bodily pulls sound out of a cranial space and into a playful, physical exploration. The sounds are fairly stock ambient elements, not at all unlike what one might hear in work by Brian Eno or Steve Reich; but Waterman, like Eno, realizes the failure of a purely aural soundscape and insists that his sound be spacial.

Soundscape is, it turns out, what Waterman has created, allowing a viewer to lay his sound over the landscape of the gallery (I question here whether "soundscape" is actually appropriate, and therefore coin a new term: tonbauten, or built sound structures. You heard it here first. Use it at dinner parties). Antiphon--"contrast sound"--manages true user-unfriendliness; instead of being like a program that doesn't work, it ends up being like a program that writes poetry while failing to check your spelling.

--Lee Henderson




Antiphon at Neutral Ground

Christian Marclay

Hello all, and welcome to booster!

This blog was founded by Angela Beck and I as a starting-point for critical discourse and review of the visual arts locally (in Regina, Saskatchewan) and elsewhere. Primarily, we'll be posting reviews of art exhibitions and performances, although we will also be covering work we come across in other disciplines and you may find the odd article on wider issues in the visual arts.

Feel free to post your comments in response to the reviews, though for this we hope that respondents will refrain from posting anonymously--we’re posting with an assumption of professionalism and openness, and we hope you will, too. If you’re interested, please also look below for our code of ethics and the reasons we've decided to build this site.

Enjoy,
Lee Henderson





Code of Ethics:

- We will not accept any remuneration for any review posted here.

- We will not review the work of close friends or of each other. While we believe that we can be entirely professional, there is always the potential that extensive, intimate knowledge of an artist could colour our reading of the work in question, or that such a colouration could be perceived. In the case of group shows, we will use our discretion.

- All reviews will be cleared by both Angela and Lee prior to publication on the site. Note that this does not mean we have to agree with the views expressed in each other’s reviews...

- Lee will not review the work of his students while they are his students. Other student work may be reviewed at our discretion, although this will likely require the work to be shown in a professional/off-campus venue.


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Mandate:

- To provide and foster local criticality in the visual arts.

- To encourage “collegial competition” that is honest, open, and helpful.

- To provide context and cohesion for art production in the city.

- To create an online presence for and increase the coverage of local work.

- To provide positive feedback where warranted and alternate readings of work where helpful.