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Exhibition

Robert Weins

Exhibition

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Exhibition

The OR Gallery is proud to present Michelle Normoyle’s latest work, Faithful Portraits, a comparative inquiry that examines the representation and reception of the film image.

Catalogue Published with text by Petra Rigby Watson.
Michelle Normoyle has repeatedly displayed in her work a fascination with the cultural formations of new communication technologies and their emergence within generic conditions. Normoyle’s photographic reproductions have articulated the role of the symbolic within the hegemony of mass produced and mass circulated images. By submitting the image to an analysis of the messages or codes it may contain, Normoyle constructs a textual analysis within which a critical mutation may occur. In Faithful Portraits, this mutation explores the relations and terms of cinematic vision and conditions of desire by positing a problematic of cinematic “seeing” and identification. Questioning the codes of cinematic identification must simultaneously recognize the role of both image and narrative; taken up self-reflexively as a re-reading of this engagement, representation in mainstream commercial films is revealed as structured a priori by both cinematic discourse and the film apparatus. Faithful Portraits both produce and break the conventions of this cinematic engagement, but positioned in contrast to many contemporary critiques of the image within representative codification of popular culture, Normoyle’s appropriations are without perversity. Instead, they suggest a moment of cultural accuracy and possible pleasure. As a critique of the closures of cinematic codification, Normoyle provides access to subjective identification within a nexus of representation that suggests the workings of the “popular” imagination. But as images are rendered more imprecise, as representative qualities are indeterminate, the spectator assumes other spaces of identification that engage a reading outside of the complicity of meaning within cinematic narrative form. This re-reading does not obliterate references, but renders them ambiguous or open, and enables them to “refer” more accurately.

As a result of this problematizing of pictorial codes, the interiority of subjective depth is no longer defined within the “perfectibility” of cinematic representation but acts as a rupture of the expressive rational of the cinematic image—the illusions which hold subject identification to determinate conditions of narrative form. The structures of cinematic vision are displaced, not within a transformation or a changing order, but as a transmutation or deconstruction of signification, that cuts across the symbolic inscriptions of desire structured by classical narrative cinema. Faithful Portraits incorporates into its form the conditions that demonstrate (as Barthes has shown) that film language or codification cannot be fully grasped in its naturalized vision, but only as an artifact, the still:

The still offers us the inside of the fragment. . . [the still] is not a specimen chemically extracted from the substance of film, but rather the trace of a superior distribution of traits which the film as experienced in its animated flow would give no more than one text among others. The still, then, is the fragment of a second text whose existence never exceeds the fragment; film and still find themselves in a palimpsest relationship without it being possible to say that one is on top of the other or that one is extracted from the other. 1

The still, by disrupting narrative sequence or cinematic time, allows for a reading which is both instantaneous and vertical as it disassociates the mode of cinematic vision which subordinates the signifier to its image.

Appropriating images as similiar artifacts of vision, Normoyle’s process of photographic displacement begins with culling images (utilizing 2V4 inch negatives) from the movie screen. The tendency to uphold narrative in perception is reduced to a textual trace as the image is photocopied and processed as a series of reversals by which the negative asserts its presence as a positive. This analogical (or continuous coding) impression of film reality neither annuls nor cancels the referentiality of the image, but preserves its position within it by retaining simultaneously the inscriptions which support the dominant positions of cinematic signification and a critique which deconstructs this representation at the moment of its elaboration. As a mutation of the “original”, Normoyle’s reproductions diffuse semiotic codification and the spatial and temporal structures of cinematic identification, but retain the imitative transparency of the screen to engage an open system of signifiers which deconstruct the symbolic order of film reality. As a deconstruction of cinematic conventions-the exploration of specific codes and their effects on the relations of subject production-a dialectic is formed between specific denotations, without which film discourse would not be possible, and connotations or analogical co dings which address the spectator, not as a codified subject of cinematic vision, but within a space allowing movement in signifying practices.

In order to deconstruct the privileged realm within which a mastery of cinematic reception is assured by naturalized vision and illusionist aesthetic, Normoyle positions the problematic of subject identification within the reproduction of these same codes by sustaining the vision of the spectator as a surface quality or “situation”. This aesthetic of situation exposes the elements of cinematic form and expression to be unabashedly artificial in their metaphysics of cultural presence. As this “reading against the grain” becomes both methodology and form, generic film images are revealed as coded mechanisms which convey the functions of the unconscious processes of subjective identification. As portraits “faithfully reconstructed” from the spectacle of film, this situation aesthetic also suggests a disruption of the engagement of visual pleasure within narrative form and the reproductions of cinematic vision. The reception of visual pleasure in the narrative film raises questions about the process of objectification that structures positions of desire. This problematic of objectification within the process of cinematic identification can not be dismissed from the re-positioning of the feminine subject that is inherent in much of Normoyle’s work. The relationship of the spectator to the film image is, therefore, questioned as two processes. The subjectification of the film image is immersed within effects of objectification. The relation between the signifier and signification in the film image can not be considered arbitrary, but as firmly grounded in the social. As both processes are structured through narrative, the symbolic patterns of mainstream film are inseparable from the ability to recognize the “I or the not I” as the site where the subjective and the social are articulated.2 A feminist mediation, must therefore recognize the hegemony of cinematic identification as not only a unitary vision within image and narrative form, but as a verisimilitude of vision that fails to provide access to the feminine within the historical subjects of film practice. Using psychoanalytic theory, Laura Mulvey argued that the visual pleasures of Hollywood cinema are based on an active voyeuristic spectator intent on a “direct, scopophilia contact with the female form” displayed for masculine enjoyment, in contrast to the feminine position which remains objectified within the masculine gaze.3 This process of reception within the cinematic image exerts a pleasurable identification with the male protagonist, and through the mastery of this role as subjective position, the female character remains the object and support for the representation of male desires. Normoyle’s undercutting of symbolic order in Faithful Portraits has selected, more often than not, the masculine subject as the representative generic mode. In this reference, the masculine is deconstructed or deferred from exerting influences as the active subject of identification within the cinematic gaze.

These mutations are also implicit in suggesting the positions available to the woman spectator, within the mechanisms which support the mastery of cinematic vision. As Normoyle posits, as central, the process of cinematic vision, or a rupture of the terms of cinematic engagement, as guided by both image and narrative, consequently pleasure and subjective production, a re-reading of the symbolic order of cinematic codes may no longer be guided by the motivations of fetishistic and voyeuristic modes of subject identification, the mediations of presence, but remain in situation to establish as problematic the reality of cinematic vision.

Petra Rigby Watson

1. Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” in lmage-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 67. 2. Paul Willeman, “Cinematic Discourse-The Problem of Inner Speech,” Screen 22, #3 (1981), p. 74-75. Willeman’s inquiry into cinematic discourse explores the distinctions between language and the moving image within the articulation of textual systems, which are inseparable from social discourse and unconscious signification in terms of forms grounded in verbal language, but as cultural texts, this relationship is viewed as operating within a heterogenous signifying chain. 3. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, #3 (1975), p. 13.

THE MOVIEGOER

I am attracted to movie stars but not for the usual reasons. I have no desire to speak to Holden or get his autograph. It is their peculiar reality which astounds me. The Yankee boy is well aware of it, even though he pretends to ignore Holden. Clearly he would like nothing better than to take Holden over to his fraternity house in the most casual way. “Bill, I want you to meet Phil. Phil, Bill Holden,” he would say and go sauntering off in the best seafaring syle.

(wincing)Powerful being. In my eyes read that slumber which women love.

Panic in the Streets with Richard Widmark is playing on Tchoupitoulas Street. The movie was filmed in New Orleans. Richard Widmark is a public health inspector who learns that a culture of cholera bacilli has gotten loose in the city. Kate watches, lips parted and dry. She understands my moviegoing but in her own antic fashion. There is a scene which shows the very neighborhood of the theatre. Kate gives me a look – it is understood that we do not speak during the movie.

Afterwards in the street, she looks around the neighborhood.
“Yes, it is certified now.”

Both then were silent?

Silent, each contemplating the other in both mirrors of the reciprocal flesh of theirhisnothis fellowfaces.

She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighbourhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.

She sounds better but she is not. She is trapping herself, this time by being my buddy, best of all buddies and most privy to my little researches. In spite of everything she find herself, even now, playing out the role. In her long nightmare, this our old friendship now itself falls victim to the grisly transmogrification by which she unfailingly turns everything she touches to horror.

Laughing witch! The hand that rocks the cradle.

For her too the fabric is dissolving, but for her even the dissolving makes sense. She understands the chaos to come. It seems so plain when I see it through her eyes.

With indirect and direct verbal allusions or affirmations: with subdued affection and admiration: with description: with impediment: with suggestion.

THE FAN

(folded akimbo against her waist) Is me her was you dreamed before? Was then she him you us since knew? Am all them and the same now me?

It reminds me of a movie I saw last month out by Lake Pontchartrain. Linda and I went to a theatre in a new suburb. It was evident somebody had miscalculated, for the suburb had quit growing and here was the theatre, a pink stucco cube, sitting out in a field all by itself. A strong wind whipped the waves against the seawall; even inside you could hear the racket. The movie was about a man who lost his memory in an accident and as a result lost everything: his family, his friends, his money. He found himself a stranger in a strange city. Here he had to make a fresh start, find a new place to live, a new job, a new girl. It was supposed to be a tragedy, his losing all this, and he seemed to suffer a great deal. On the other hand, things were not so bad after all. In no time he found a very picturesque place to live, a houseboat on the river, and a very handsome girl, the local librarian.

Exhibition

Exhibition

Exhibition

Persimmom Blackridge, Kris Bergthorson, Carol Williams

Exhibition juried by Margot Butler, Sara Diamond and Elspeth Sage.

Special-Event

Exhibition

C Magazine No20, by Garry Neill Kenedy Palace coups, Profile of the OR Gallery, Artery Spring 88’ interview with Phillip McCrum and Robert Balllantyne

Exhibition

Travelled to the Powerhouse Gallery Montreal, Oct 29- Nov. 20
Review: Vanguard Summer ’88, by William Wood

Cheryl Sourkes Premiers New Works at the Or Gallery

A new exhibition by artist Cheryl Sourkes opens at the OR Gallery, 3rd Floor, 505 Hamilton Street, on Tuesday Mrach 22nd at 8pm. The Environmental Unconscious marks the artist’s first exploration of three-dimensional work and this show will be comprised of both wall-mounted photographically-based art and two sculptural elements.

The work has increased in size, to 30” X40”. Unlike her last series, From The Book of Gates (Coburg Gallery, 1987), the pieces show here are not Cibachrome, but Type C Prints; however, they continue to use colour. In addition, Sourkes has created two structures which each house prints. She has moved into the incorporation of sculpture in order to “break out has a practice of gradually adding, altering or deleting aspects of the work, this is a significant change.

The Environmental Unconscious also exhibits other prominent departures. Along with the increase in size, Sourkes has decreased the visual complexity of the images, without comprising the integrity of the overall work. While retaining such characteristic elements as regenerated images, text, marks and lines, she has provided a larger tableau in order to enhance the viewer’s relationship to the images. This is particularly appropriate to the content, as she has chosen to “evoke the externalization of self/internalization of exterior” (her words).

Sourkes is concerned with issues of existing ideologies, gender definition, representation, post modernism, surrealism and science. Just as the images themselves are layered, so too is the work couched within many arenas of thought. (As guest-curator Jill Pollack notes,) “Cheryl Sourkes is firmly situated within an art movement that blurs categories. She responds directly to and reflects the complexity of the current state of the world by including multiple and diverse references in her work.”

Cheryl Sourkes was born and educated in Montreal in 1945. she has recently returned there, after 18 years of living and working in Vancouver. She has been involved with photography since 1970 and has exhibited widely across the country, in a series of solo and group exhibitions. As well, she has shown at the 49th parallel Gallery, Her work is found in corporate, museological and private collections. The Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography has been collecting her photography in depth, and recently produced a slide-sound interview which they circulate.

The Environmental Unconscious runs until April 9th and is accompanies by a poster/catalogue. Gallery hours are: Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 1:30 to 5:30pm.

This exhibition has been financially assisted by the Canada Council and the City of Vancouver.

Exhibition

Exhibition

Review: Vanguard summer’ 88, by Dotti Lusk Tujillo

Exhibition

The images presented in Silence vs Voice: Speak no Evil emerged from varied experiences of extreme and sudden limitations.

Silence vs Voice evolved from the experience of living and working as a single, white female in a small isolated native community. The adjustment was both physical and cultural. The social conditions brought about personal adaptations that shifted my perspective of self. As a caucasian teacher working with native students, a reversal of the minority concept took place.

I became the minority. Maintaining my identity as a professional and as an individual became a struggle. A lack of understanding of the social mores of the village separated and isolated those of us who taught there. A sense of unreality pervaded and self-retreat was one recourse. The limitations resulting from these dynamics became a silencing force. Silence became a form of protection. This equated also to a female in silence; the repressed silence often associated with a relationship in which a male partner has a dominant voice.

The figures in Silence vs Voice are one figure, engaged in an inner dialogue, compensating for the lack of external interaction. The self is cut off and isolated, limited in perception and expression.

Speak No Evil resulted directly from the experience of a sudden loss of vision. When vision is removed from someone who was previously fully sighted, it is as if the individual themself is removed from the act of perception. A barrier between the internal and external results, limiting correspondence between the two. Perception is altered. The manner is which one is perceived also changes.

These experiences and their images become metaphors for this process of limitation

- Susanna Ruebsaat

Exhibition

Curated by guest curator, Petra Rigby Watson, In the Vernacular is an exhibition of four window installations held in the windows of the Arts, Sciences and Technology centre located in the heart of the retail and business district of downtown Vancouver.

A.R.H., Nan Legate, Eric Fiss, Michelle Normoyle, Conelia Wyngaarden
Located at the Science Technology Centre.

Review: Artery Spring ’88 by Keith Higgins Vanguard Aprmay ’88 by Peter Culley

Catalogue Essay by Petra Rigby Watson.

Exhibition

Catalogue by Todd A Davis

Does the true artist in fact reveal mystic; truths and thereby undertake the difficult in his or her attempt to help illuminate the world? Is the problem not made more arduous when realization and reconstruction are in dialogue with questions of source, originality and singularity as they exist in the two artworks that comprise; this exhibition? It is this dialogue, containing theories on originality and reproduction, which allow these two paintings by Mark Grady and Julie Duscnerles to speak and reverberate. Illumination of the process of analysis via recognizable imagery also appears dialogistically and results in more strata of involvement for viewers, Faced by the task of rethinking representation, these two individuals are obliged by the needs of history and enabled by their capabilities to organize and conceptualize. To understand and act on this symbiotic relationship of historical conventions and proquction they, as visual artists, must have an effective representation or concept and they must give it form. This form is at once mental, visual and social. As this representation is developed reproducibility enters cognition undermining the heroic attempt to be original; enters the visual to question singularity; enters the social to create dialogue. This is the act of construction in the context of reproduction. An illustration of reproduction in its extreme form can be found in the writing of Jorge Luis Borges on the now deceased enigmatic novelist Pierre Menard. As Borges notes regarding Menard’s chef d’oeuvre, “He did not want to compose another Quixote-which is easy-but the Quixote itself”,1 And as it is with all art forms, it is the willful form of composition that Menard envisions reconstructing literally Miguel de Cervantes’ original uncontrived work, Borges delineates this for us: “It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote: “Truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future’s counselor.”2 Written in the seventeenth century, written by the ‘lay genius’ Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history, Menard, on the other hand, writes: “ “Truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future’s counselor.“2 This embodiment, by Menard, of reconstruction and creation is not sublimation as Cervantes but the experimental author writing the Quixote, thereby challenging the underlying conditions of the notion of originality. As it was, two chapters and part of another were n10re than sufficient for Menard’s discourse on anachronisms inherent in production and reproduction. It is his very choice of Cevante’s fiction that reveals the direct analogy of those anachronisms readily apparent in the viewer’s reading of the work. Don Quixote, a man of letters cum knighthood after the age of chivalry, chose a previous form of identity to challenge his creativity and empower his life. The resultant disruption of the zeit geist reveals the active role of all participants, including in this case writers, characters, readers and explicators, in the creation or interpretation of realities past and present: processes normally subsumed by tradition and data overload. Given these processes of construction, idea, event and object the quality of uniqueness necessary to originality is dispersed and the original becomes a diffused concept. Pertinent to this, Rosalind Krauss states, “…modernism and the avant-garde are functions of what we could call the discourse of originality, and that that discourse serves much wider interests-and is thus fueled by more diverse institutions-than the restricted circle of professional art-making. The theme of originality, encompassing as it does notions of authenticity, originals, and origins, is the shared discursive practice of the museum, the historian, and the maker of art.”3 The institutions of the nineteenth century which popularized the theme of originality gave rise to parallel principles of landscape as haven for the original through picturesque(ness) and singularity. Essentially, art-making of the landscape genre becomes original as a format through championing the singular and thus authenticates its claim to represent nature. This exhibit’s internal and external dialogue created by Julie Duschenes’ White Pile, Stripe Tarp and Tires and Mark Grady’s Museum Work overcomes these themes of originality, singularity and picturesque by reproducing landscape in opposition to its context as representative of nature. Absence of this context and subjugation of its interrelated themes in the two paintings, engenders the following: the use of text in an iconic and centralist manner, the concept of multiplicity through reproduction and stratigraphical construction of meaning. These strategies of production are intrinsic to the work of both these artists over the past several years. As a starting point for Museum Work, Grady utilizes a catalogue reproduction to introduce the experience of landscape as a formulaic construct. The theme of reproducibility, within this painting, is then presented as an important element of landscape definition. A German government sanctioned exposition of ‘contemporary’ art sent to the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence during 1943 was accompanied by the catalogue from which Grady borrowed his seminal image. The image, E Kohler’s Quarry, was a landscape solidly entrenched in the theme of picturesque. This theme “inherent in the development of originality which was crucial to the rise of a new class of audience for art focused on the practice of taste as an exercise in the recognition of singularity”.4 With stratigraphical additions to the image and Grady’s employment of ‘original’ reproduction, the picturesque is exposed. The additional elements which combine to form layers of significant dialogue in this work were discovered in another literary source. Upon reading historical documents describing the battle at Cherkassy between the Russian army and a retreating German force, and instructed by the history of the picturesque, Grady ‘recognized’ in Kohler’s landscape similar visual elements as were prompted by that writing. In the dialogue between artist and viewer this act of ‘recognition’ has been metamorphosed from battle ground description to text. Executed in Time Roman typeface and centered prominently within the image, Cherkassy illustrates and exists as another level of landscape-reproduced addressing originality once again. The very idea of seeing Grady’s piece with its layered landscapes avers that reality is agreed upon description, continuously reinforced conventions, maintaining the importance of reproducibility as an embodiment of construction. Other issues delineated by the two side panels of Museum Work containing documentation of the artist’s concepts and sources, illuminates inherent paradox in our cultural and social institution’s daily handling of the two polarities: original and reproduction. As in past works Grady leaves positive or negative opinions on the validity of the subject (as opposed to content) to viewer’s discretion reserving for himself, as artist, subjective neutrality; but as viewer, the right to interpret the entire work. While Grady’s Museum Work illuminates denotative aspects of landscape. Originality and reproduction, Duschenes’ White Pile, Stripe Tarp and Tires address the connotative. If the connotative is the sum of all attributes essential to meaning then it is logical to describe the attributes of this painting White Pile, Stripe Tarp and Tires also employs the representational format inducing the viewer to dialogue through conventions associated with landscape and assess other’, implications of reproduction. Scaled accordingly to subject matter, but not to conventions of landscape history, the painting distances itself further from the genre through size, while distinguishing itself as landscape through reproduction. Duschcnes’ development of figure/ground confrontations heighten themselves through a bizarre sense of brashness, sheer size (as aforementioned) and overbearing hues combined with text relevant to the dialogue. This contributes towards a relationship between viewer and painting that exists in the artist’s reality unimpeded by civility. Her use of ambivalent perspective; insistent line work and repetitive gesture within this identifiable genre (landscape) confounds the assumed or expected aesthetic. Duschenes’ denial of this convention brings us to the following recognition of painting en plein air, Rosalin Krauss writes: “For it is perfectly obvious that through the action of the picturesque the very notion of landscape is constructed as a second term of which the first is a representation, Landscape becomes a reduplication of a picture which preceeded it.“5 Included with these effects but(more prominent is Duschenes’ use of text in her work, Becoming iconographic, the text in White Pile, Stripe Tarp and Tires consists of one word only: realistic. The word realistic in relation to this landscape painting questions possibilities of reproduction and attaches value judgments to the theme of ‘likeness’. Any repetition of or within an identifiable genre, in this case landscape, delineates the habits of seeing within conventionis. For this exhibition, both artists have utilized the landscape genre for analysis of interpolated information and for instigating dialogue. These are two individuals interested in extrapolating the conventions of landscape reproduction without a dependence on the singularity or, within the language of romanticism, its originality, Grady reproduces landscape, as does Duschenes, for specific purposes and although the tools and conceptual foundations are similar their methods or directions and results differ, Museum Work exists to reproduce a landscape for revealing history through structure; White Pile, Stripe Tarp and Tires manifests a landscape for disclosing the constraints and effects of repetitiveness on the historical genre. Here are two paintings, produced by artists with specific intents, that dispel the notions of ‘the heroic’ and invite the viewer to analyse the conventions of the past in dialogue with the works,

Todd A Davis 1987

Notes
1.Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, trans, Donald A. Yates and James E, lrby (New York,: New Directions Publishing Corp” 1964), pp, 36,44 I
2. ibid.
3. Rosalind Krauss, October, no, 18 (Fall 1981), pp, 47,66 ‘
4. ibid.
5. ibid.

Acknowledgements and Credits The following individuals and organizations provided support, financial and other, wise, materials and information, We thank them for their generosity, The Canada Council (Exhibition Assistance), Philip McCrum, Ellen Ramsay, Or Gallery, Donna Hagerman, Cole’s Lithoprep, Hemlock Printers, Petra Robinson.