Spectacle + Artifice

January 31 to April 20, 2008

Spectacle + Artifice engaged contemporary photo-based practice through the work of established and emerging Canadian artists Robyn Cumming (Toronto), Janieta Eyre (Toronto), Natascha Niederstrass (Montreal), Carlos & Jason Sanchez (Montreal), Reece Terris (Vancouver), and Elena Willis (Montreal). Once used for impartial documentation, today the camera is a tool of manipulation where truth and fiction mingle, where narrative structures are nuanced and reflected back through the aesthetics of performance. The exhibition featured works by artists who engage new technologies, traditional photographic practice, and elaborate staging to achieve imagery that is for some outrageous and for others extraordinarily subtle. 

Through the inclusion of multiple works by each artist, a dialogue was constructed within their individual practices and across the spectrum of their shared discipline. Although distinguished by content and aesthetics, these artists invoke spectacle (singularly impressive, unusual or disturbing events) and artifice (a clever trick or deception). Where their works intersect and diverge — what is literally depicted and what is perceived as real — is punctuated by what is explicitly captured by the artists’ lens. 

Robyn Cumming’s hyper-real compositions are a foil for the quiet performance of her subjects, who are posed as on a proscenium stage, their actions muted by the busyness of pattern and colour. Cumming uses the curtain as a motif to shorten the performance space, effectively upending the depth afforded by her camera, to reinforce the construction of each image. The viewer is seduced by the high definition of the scene, mesmerized by the odd actions of its players, and stopped short by the bold artifice of Cumming’s composition.

Equally intoxicating are Janieta Eyre’s seamlessly integrated double self-portraits, symbol-laden views of domesticity that examine the phenomenology of siblings, notably twins. Despite the ready acceptability of the manipulated photograph, Eyre’s silver prints are deceptively subtle. Her interiors are strewn with symbolic imagery inhabited by strange girls, immobile and often staring out of the frame at the viewer. The stillness of Eyre’s compositions, and even the styling of her scenes, recalls early nineteenth century portraiture when each exposure took minutes to capture on film. 

The still photograph is jolted to life in the work of Natascha Niederstrass. With a two-part installation of simultaneously looping videos, she conjures the double image as a metaphor for solitude and absence. Like Eyre, Niederstrass performs in her own work; however, her aesthetic is restrained (even elegant) and her actions broken, accompanied by a cacophonous soundtrack. Performance is also at the core of Reece Terris’ work. Terris challenges the perception and representation of space through video, photographic documentation, and architectural models. What takes place in the fabrication of each image implicitly informs the finished works, a process that reveals the fallibility the photographic image.  

In contrast to her contemporaries represented in the exhibition, Elena Willis completely immerses the viewer in a non-physical world and she doesn’t attempt to convince that the space beyond her lens is real. The unsettling events that she depicts are completely severed from reality, yet we know and understand this space of black dreams, caught in a dim spotlight. 

The meticulously constructed images of Carlos & Jason Sanchez so closely replicate a film noir aesthetic that the visual narrative compromises the (non) fictional thread. As viewers, we are afforded rare proximity to acute emotion: pain, elation, utter disquiet. The Sanchez brothers weave life with fiction in their portrait of John Mark Karr (2007). Karr confessed to the murder of six-year-old Jon Benét Ramsey who was found dead in the basement of her family’s home in Boulder, Colorado on December 26, 1996. However, DNA tests failed to place Karr at the scene of the crime. With their portrait of Karr, the Sanchez brothers are complicit in the story which has played out in the international press and consumed by the public as infotainment.

Spectacle + Artifice was curated by Dawn Owen.

Brown Bag Lunch: exhibition curator Dawn Owen
on curating and collecting photography
Tuesday, February 5 at noon 

Artist Talk with Robyn Cumming
on her series Little Legs
Friday, February 8 at 1:30 PM 

Exhibition Reception
Wednesday, February 13 at 7 PM

Images: from top

Reece Terris, Bridge (Wooden Arch), 2006 (colour photograph, 26" x 33" framed)
Courtesy of Jennifer Kostuik Gallery, Vancouver

Robyn Cumming, Many Shades of Pink, 2006 (chromogenic print)
Collection of the artist

Janieta Eyre, Twin Manicurists, 1996 (silver print photograph)
Purchased through the Florence G. Partridge Fund in consultation with the College of Family and Consumer Studies, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance Program, 1997, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre Collection

Natascha Niederstrass, Broken, Part 1, 2007 (video still)
Collection of the artist

Elena Willis, Sweet Dream II, 2006 (digital C-print, 60" x 48")
Collection of the artist

Carlos & Jason Sanchez, Crematorium, 2006 (inkjet print, 30" x 85")
Courtesy of Caren Golden Fine Art, New York