Exponential Future
Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Vancouver

Artworks by Tim Lee, Alex Morrison, Isabelle Pauwels, Kevin Schmidt, Mark Soo, Corin Sworn, Althea Thauberger, Elizabeth Zvonar

Curated by Juan Gaitan and Scott Watson

18 January - 27 April, 2008

Reviewed by Christopher Brayshaw

Exponential Future, the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery’s new survey of emerging Vancouver art, is a failure of artistic and institutional nerve. “Curators Juan Gaitan and Scott Watson chose artists working in different media whose work involved a wide range of issues to give an overview of the new artistic thinking of our time and place,” claims an unsigned gallery press release. “The curators were interested in works that engaged the complex reality of urban life at the beginning of the twenty-first century.” This thesis would make a first-rate show, but bears only passing resemblance to the exhibition Gaitan and Watson have assembled.

What’s remarkable about Exponential Future is how reluctant its participants are to directly engage “the complex reality of urban life” without the comfortable props of theory, or subjects and themes around which critical consensus has already formed like mould on cheese. Realism – the ostensibly transparent representation of the now -- has a long history on the West Coast. A mid-career retrospective of Roy Arden, on display this fall at the Vancouver Art Gallery, cogently summarized realism’s ongoing relevance to a region being razed and rebuilt just in time for the spectacle of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games.

Realism has been important to a younger generation of Vancouver artists, including Evan Lee, Mike Grill, Adam Harrison, Alison Yip, Scott McFarland, Jamie Tolagson, Sara Mameni, Chris Gergley, Owen Kydd, Brad Phillips, Sylvia Borda, and others. Exponential Future muscles realism off-stage. In its place it deploys works that are canny, learned, self-reflexive, and deeply ironized. Most of these pieces pair quotations from avant-gardist practices (modernism in all its guises; Pop, Minimal and Conceptual Art; “photoconceptualism”) with subject matter either lifted from popular culture, or rehearsing the by now well-trodden tropes of “the failed utopia” or “alternative culture.” The anything-goes spirit of the works on display recalls the free ranging-across-forms of another local, Rodney Graham. But Exponential Future’s works largely lack Graham’s idiosyncratic wit and playfulness. The art is learned, in the worst sense of the word.

This isn’t to say that the artists in Exponential Future haven’t previously made good work. Most of them have. But these pieces aren’t in the show. Take Tim Lee, whose videos and photographs are exemplary in their hybridization of art-historical and pop-cultural sources. Lee’s output was recently surveyed by a Presentation House retrospective that included some middling photographs and one good new piece: Goldberg Variations: Aria, BWV 988, Johann Sebastian Bach, 1741 (Glenn Gould, 1981), a two-channel video projection in which Lee, a non-musician, slowly and clumsily rehearsed the fingerings the virtuoso pianist Gould played to produce his ostensibly “seamless,” but actually patched-together-from-multiple-takes 1981 performance of the same Bach piece.

The inadequacy of Lee’s amateur performance in the face of Gould’s genius is, I think, its point: its deliberately flaunted belatedness and inadequacy is the candid response of an ambitious, historically savvy young artist who suspects, perhaps accurately, that larger talents have sucked most of the oxygen out of the arena.

Lee’s contributions to Exponential Future include two photographs, Untitled (The Pink Panther, 2092) which refer to Dan Graham’s photographs of himself reflected in his architectual pavilions, and Peter Sellers’ deadpan performances as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau. These highly detailed pictures, which linger almost fetishistically over the weave of Lee’s clothes, the huge gleaming barrel lens of the camera he squints into, and his chin-stubble and hair on the backs of his hands, feel brittle and contrived; they lack the productive neurosis animating Lee’s better works, like Goldberg Variations.

The air of contrivance that hovers over the Pink Panther photographs also clings to works by Elizabeth Zvonar and Mark Soo. Zvonar’s Sign of The Times is a large serpentine stone sculpture of a huge black hand flashing a “peace” sign: a Rodin remade in Berkeley or Oakland some time in the late 1960s. Zvonar has created some major works, including a shaped-glass window for Artspeak Gallery that effortlessly stood comparison with Dan Graham’s mirrored pavilions. Sign of The Times, in contrast, seems peculiarly inert and unsatisfying.

Mark Soo’s That’s That’s Alright Alright Mama Mama, a huge two-part 3D photograph of Memphis’ Sun Recording Studios, is similarly unmoving. The two part image and the layers of color might reference sound reproduction and multi-track recording. Or not. Soo’s decisions governing his piece’s form are disappointingly un-intuitable from the physical facts of the work.

What is most disappointing about these works is their air of calculation, their reduction of the complexity of lived experience to an ironized half-nod at modernist or utopian failings. Lee, Zvonar and Soo have all made stronger works than these, and Watson and Gaitan are remiss for either not caring sufficiently about the difference between Goldberg Variations and The Pink Panther, or between Zvonar’s mirror pieces and Sign of the Times, or for not recognizing that these aesthetic differences exist in the first place.

Althea Thauberger’s projects, like Alex Morrison’s, are less overtly “learned” and more conscious of a larger social world. Thauberger’s Zivildienst ≠ Kunstprojekt is a twenty minute long black and white video projection developed in collaboration with a group of young German men. Her performers find themselves trapped on a scaffold in a Berlin gallery and improvise short actions as a distraction from their confinement. Thauberger is attentive to the performers’ micro-gestures, and her work is enriched and sharpened by the endless complexity of human bodies moving through space.

Another Thauberger piece, The Art of Seeing Without Being Seen, is a huge staged color photograph of a group of young Canadian Forces troops conducting a surveillance exercise on a CF base in British Columbia’s Chilliwack Valley. The picture is installed in the foyer of UBC’s Koerner Library, a reminder, as local critic Clint Burnham suggested to me, that not everyone in their twenties is studying at university. The Art of Seeing is a window opening onto a larger, harsher, and more ambiguous world, one that, given the evidence of a comment book alongside the piece in the library, many UBC students, staff and faculty would prefer not to confront.

Alex Morrison’s Giving the Story a Treatment (Battle in Seattle), consists of three black and white photographic panels depicting riot police lounging about on the streets of downtown Vancouver surrounded by cameras, reflectors, and other filmmaking apparatus. A movie about the Seattle WTO protests is being shot in Vancouver. Vancouver’s specificity is elided; Vancouver stands in for Seattle, or, by extension, for any place at all.

Morrison’s photographs are not “good pictures” by any stretch of the imagination. They are documents, which call attention to the film’s mechanisms of production, which are typically hidden from viewers. This isn’t a particularly novel insight, but it demonstrates Morrison’s awareness of art’s usefulness as a critical tool, a scalpel that can cut through ideological boundaries.

Corin Sworn contributes a suite of drawings of Summerhill, A.S. Neill’s visionary “free school.” Sworn draws well, blending high-focus representation with passages of biomorphic abstraction that recall the 1930s experiments of English draughtsmen like Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash.

Isabelle Pauwels’ The Embellishers is a video shot in two slightly different takes of approximately fifteen minutes each. Like all of Pauwels’ work, it resists easy summation. The artist and her twin sister, an aspiring actress, argue and make up in the actress’ apartment. Some times they wear plastic monkey masks. Other times they appear as themselves. Long self-revelatory monologues are intercut with winking digressions on urban development, desire (the subject of a number of recent Pauwels videos), Vancouver’s booming film industry, and the sisters’ poor employment prospects. The Embellishers is dry-witted, politically engaged, and eminently watchable. It resembles a Lenny Bruce take on the history of western art video. Pauwels’ is a realism totally unlike most other realist practices, and her simple, low-budget work towers over everything else in the show.

Finally, Kevin Schmidt contributes two works, made during a recent residency in the Yukon. Aurora With Roman Candle is a time-lapse photograph of a firework’s plume and sparkle in the midst of a frozen northern landscape. Schmidt’s other contribution, Wild Signals, is a video loop depicting gear that could easily belong to a local hair-metal band – smoke machine; speakers; colored lights – parked in the middle of a frozen winter lake at twilight. As the lights blink wildly and fake fog rolls across the snow, the speakers pump out a low-tech version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind’s famous five-note theme. In Steven Spielberg's film, a group of scientists use a sequence of notes and lights to lure an alien mother ship down to earth. Sound and light build a bridge between two vastly different worlds. In Schmidt’s video the mother ship does not appear, and the lights and music eventually die down into darkness. It’s a strangely moving experience, whose palpable sense of loss is mirrored by the many expectations Exponential Futures raises, then fails to deliver.
- posted by cjb @ 8:37 PM