A few years ago I watched Douglas Coupland’s Souveniers of Canada, a documentary where the author/artist turns a house into an art piece full of Canadiana. The house contained all sorts of references to Canadian things that occurred between about 1948-1968. I could recognize the aesthetic as Canadian, a Canada Goose is unmistakable, but the content was decidedly foreign to me. A large part of being what we call “Canadian” is a temporal definition. That ideas, events, and designs last for only so long before another generation of people take over what it means to be Canadian and the past melts through the ice of the collective consciousness. This begs the question, is there anything that carries over? after all not everything goes away entirely or fades in the same way. A cultural memory is as odd and selective as an individuals.
Last night at Le Gallery I encountered another definition of Canadiana that while making use of a certain temporality, provides an answer to this question. David Traitrimas’ One Empire Wide uses CnC cut, models of ice-fishing huts that have been designed using Canadian ventures that have failed or been discarded. The events that inspired the building designs range from about 1970-1999. These events are the ones mostly likely to effect Canadians of Trautrimas’ age (mine as well).
Some of the buildings You’ll find are based on events like, replacing the dollar bill for the Loonie, The loss of the Quebec Nordiques, The Closure of Sam the Record Man, The Avro Arrow, The ill designed Nortel phone, and the Robertson Screw. The Avro Arrow is the only event I could find that thwarts the the time frame I identified, but between 1970 and 1999 is when we got the Avro Arrow TV movie and heritage moment.
There is a strong temporal sense to the work, but the focus on failure or the discarded refuse of the Canadian identity if what makes the work move beyond the the temporaility that Coupland’s house was stuck in. Nothing forms a lasting memory like a failure and there is nothing more Canadian than looking at the past and continually evaluating what makes us who we are. Although much of the detritus may be unknown to the individual, the failure of modest efforts seems to form a large part of the subconscious of Canadians. The ice fishing hut construction seems to back this up. The distinct structures sit on top of a desolate,cold plain. Their design allows them to stay on top of the ice of consciousness while plumbing the depths of the waters below.
I just stumbled upon Daniel Arsham’s exhibition/performance dig at Snarkitecture.
I swooned. More Later
A THOUSAND TIMES THIS.
This op-ed is fucking rousing.
This weekend I went to TCAF to take in some of the love for ink on paper, and sequential art.
There I happen to meet artist V A Graham and her awesome maps. Graham’s work combines an obsession for mapping with the many ways we interact with “the grid” to make images that look like historic cartography run through an 8-bit filter. Although the resemblances to old video game maps comes more from the way that video games used to be designed on huge rolls of paper, rather than from an exploration of the digital space. This took me to an interesting place, remembering how early digital worlds used old image making techniques(in this case print making) to interact with the physical world.A forest in the original Legend of Zelda was after all, Just a small block of trees, repeated as necessary. This leads me to think that Graham is interested in how things are built and designed rather than any sense of nostalgia
Also of interest was Graham’s project, The Camoufleur. A costume of a street peddler full of masks to fit into various urban areas. The masks are of a distinctive angular make and seek to obscure any human features of the face. My favorite is the mask for the Market Street Side walk in which a red-brick grid is placed on the face, making the subject literally part of the grid.
I stumbled across this great project by Jesse England called Ebook Backup. Inspired by the 2009 incident where Amazon removed copies of 1984 off people Kindle’s remotely without any prior warning (The seller of the book didn’t have the rights to it. There really shouldn’t be copyrights for a sixty-four-year-old book, but that’s a post for another day). England has simply photocopied his Kindle and bound the pages creating a physical backup of 1984.
I like England’s gesture here, because it gets into the physical v. intangible conflict surrounding knowledge in the digital space. When you make something intangible it can become more. It can be mashed up, re-purposed, and remixed into all sorts of awesome forms. One book,image, or file can become thousands of books,images or files. However this causes a problem of legitimacy and history. Like the characters in 1984, it become easy change or remove history. Every act,image, or file on the net has been put into a new context and removed from its original history to some degree.Things happen like the Amazon incident, where it was as if (for a short while in this case) the customers had never bought the book.
It seems that in the current moment, that asserting ones physicality or the physicality of an object is a bold act, surrounding ideas of ownership and preservation. Perhaps even more so as major Internet companies are all releasing cloud storage services where they’ll keep your content, rather than you keeping it on your hard drive.
I am not against digital books. I quite like them. When I think of reading I think digital books first, and physical books second. However I am acutely aware of the lost of information that happens when you don’t get to physically interact with an object. Turning the pages of something complex like a text books helps me remember content, and spatially orientate myself within the text. Perhaps I won’t get to do this often in the future. I’ll be interested to see what kind of mnemonics are developed to get around the lack of physical text mapping, or even some new ebook reader designs that incorporate more physical elements.
Speaking of becoming More. I was altered to the development of epub3. A new version of the common ebook reader file. Version 3 allows for sound, video or small app like programs to be embedded into the text of an ebook. Right now I’m thinking of this as html for ebooks (upon reading the overview it looks like epub3 is using html 5). As far as traditional reading goes, I don’t have a need for this, but I’m interested in the new experiences it could create, like an annotated How-To book, although that’s probably on the shallow end of imagining what could be done to the reading experience.
Clint Neufeld, Gasoline Alley and Other Sunday Dreams, combines historically gendered pursuits of car culture and ceramics in objects that call attention to the aesthetics of mechanical things, and the engineering involved in aesthetics.
When engaging with the work I was struck by the aspects of extravagance, involved in both practices. A car enthusiast will sup up their car with more power than is required or will ever be used. Their is the potential to use it of course, but the power serves as an aesthetic to allure and entice and prove oneself capable. Likewise the overwrought embellishments (usually floral) on ceramics is used to similar ends. the floral prints add to a form that is already attractive (this is the case with both shapely vases and Neufeld’s intricate motors), calling attention to parts of the ceramic or even wrapping the form in narrative separate from the form, but integral in attracting the viewer to the object. By narrative I mean of course a story that might be found on an ancient Greek vases or simply a pattern that makes the form distinctive from similar forms.
returning to the question of extravagance and potential energy. The Hot rod in the garage has more power than it will physically need to use, but that potential gets funnelled through aesthetics to serve a different function. Neufeld makes this clear that this happens in all forms of aesthetics and its easy to understand when parred with metaphors of gender and reproductive fitness. I am now left to consider how aesthetics compete with each other and gain prominence in a manner separate from that physical metaphor.
Torontonians I’m sorry your missing out on the work, but Americans can see Neufeld as part of the Oh Canada show at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. Opening May 27th
I decided to write a letter to Congress today in regards to CISPA.
(via lukesimcoe)
Today is the last day to see my show,Boomtown,at AWOL Gallery.
Or check it out online here.
Gallery is open 12-6pm
Rafael Ochoa’s lamps Weirdcan be seen as a response to visual culture since the rise of digital technology.
Artist making work in this space tend to focus on remix culture or on the recently titled “New Aesthetic,” the bleed of digital artifacts into real space. Ochoa forgoes these subjects and focus on the way we experience images in a digital culture. The jpg to small to properly see properly, looking at art through online documentation rather than in the gallery, and the lack of information about the history of an image are the experiences that form the fantastic imagery inLamps Weird.From these initial experiences Ochoa arranges his digitally created elements into compositions that recall historic art styles and movements. This reference is not meant to touch on the content of past movements, but to use the structure of “Art” to form new images, within the hyper-real context of a 3d graphic space. The image pictured above, Archer, resembles a sort of Neo-Classical, Greco-Roman painting. The elements in the composition might be a stone statue, or some sort of armour/weaponry, but of they are not. One can’t say what the objects are, they defy classification in terms of subject matter. The important identification is 3D rendered textures that are using structures of art to legitimate themselves. As digital technologies weave their way into the everyday they seek legitimization by connecting with the way we’ve always done things. At the same time the technology changes out notion of “the way things were always done.” The condition of all images migrating online has removed them from their original context, allowing for a reinvention of history or a quizzical re-imagining of the the images themselves. Ochoa leads us through this new space by silently narrating the thrilling, strange or uncomfortable, through the fantastic world of lamps weird.
Lamps Weird is up at Angell Gallery till April 28th