Gunilla Josephson: E.V.E. Absolute Matrix
January 22 to April 4, 2010
The Macdonald Stewart Art Centre presented E.V.E. Absolute Matrix by Gunilla Josephson, its first installation in a public art gallery. The exhibition was co-curated by Dawn Owen, MSAC assistant curator and Scott McGovern, programming director of Ed Video Media Arts Centre. E.V.E. Absolute Matrix is a 48-minute HD-video constructed from 86,400 frames selected and manipulated by Josephson from footage of a studio performance by Toronto musician Eve Egoyan playing Inner Cities, a contemporary 5-hour epic for solo piano by composer Alvin Curran. Josephson focuses on Egoyan’s face for the duration of the video, as an examination of the unbridled emotion of the musician’s performance.
A Swedish–born, Toronto–based artist, Gunilla Josephson holds a BA (Social Sciences) from Stockholm University and a MFA from Konstfackskolan (College of Art and Design), Stockholm. She has exhibited her work extensively in exhibitions, screenings, and festivals in Canada and around the world. She is a founding member and director of the artist collective Triennal(e) based in Caen, France, and a founding member of the artist collective Vox Orange based in Stockholm, Sweden. Josephson has been on the board of directors at Charles Street Video (Toronto) since 2005.
The exhibition brochure, designed by Linda Lundin (Park Studio, UK), features texts by Gary Michael Dault and Sewil Otosed.
Who or what is E.V.E Absolute Matrix?
“It is She who hovers between monumentum and documentum, suspended in constant mutation, while in the undulating helix of the cerebellum the charred coil insists. Like Kafka’s cockroach1, the Madonna dreams her gargoyle dreams, in claustrophobic ecstasy, at locomotive speed. She, who is also Janus2 and the sonic hedgehog homolog3 is compressed by the white rectangle in her search for the celestial art4. Like Aniara5, a spaceship off-course and doomed to eternity, the E.V.E Matrix drifts, to the memory of music, black ink on white paper, like a brain in love, in the convolvulus cerebellum. It’s a portrait of Melpomene6, ‘the one that is melodious’.”
(1) Metamorphosis, a novella by Franz Kafka, 1915; (2) Greek God, usually depicted with two heads looking in opposite directions; (3) The SHH protein and its corresponding gene have been found to play an important role in signaling craniofacial patterning; (4) An die Musik (to Music), Franz Schubert. A hymn to the art of music, 1817; (5) Aniara, a tonal poem/opera of science fiction, by Harry Martinson; (6) Greek Muse of Singing.
Exhibition Opening
Friday, January 22 at 7 pm
Image:
Gunilla Josephson, E.V.E. Absolute Matrix, 2008 (video stills, detail), Collection of the Artist
