LIKE A GLACIER,
CONSTANTLY
IN MOTION YET
APPEARING STILL.
VISUAL ART PROJECTS
September 16 +17 2016. London, ON
GABRIELLA SOLTI, JENNIFER MARTIN
QUINTIN TESZERI, NEIL KLASSEN
DANIELLE BRIDEAU, RIMA SATER
BRYNN HIGGINS-STIRRUP
LIKE A GLACIER, CONSTANTLY IN MOTION YET APPEARING STILL
BY TEGAN MOORE
How are traces of time attached to an object or image? What might it
look like if the density of a memory, recalled by materials and
atmospheres, moved and morphed under its own weight. Like a
glacier, constantly in motion yet appearing still is a public
presentation and pop-up exhibition in public and private space in
conjunction with the Dundas Street Festival. Each artwork explores
how memory is attached to objects, surfaces, and actions: be it
collective, material, sensory, or cosmological. Through acts of
drawing, performance, video, photography, and sculpture, the group
of work calls upon material histories of the city fabric.
Gabriella Solti compresses shooting star activity over the city of
London into an overhead light show in a pedestrian corridor
accompanied by ambient and electronic sounds of the festival acts.
Like a celestial core sample, a selection of meteor showers,
fireballs, and comets have been traced and compacted. The result is
a rapid irregular data visualization that slices through air and time.
Neil Klassen recovered pieces of London’s electromotive history and
transported them from a scrap yard to a display in a prior jeweler’s
shop. Like erratic boulders carried and dropped by glaciers in
ancient ice ages, these are artifacts of a manufacturing boom that
still remain present in local memory, yet appear again for
reconsideration of their value in an unexpected public landscape.
Jennifer Martin presents a meditation on body language and the
erosion of perception in the age of technological way-finders. Her
rear projected digital video mastered from Super8 film, depicts a
hand gesturing in a landscaped setting. The fixation of the camera
lens and Martin’s manipulation of speed and cuts in the footage,
evoke an intense focus as if multiple attempts are being made to
decipher the meaning of the gestures.
Quintin Teszeri presents an installation where the melting of ice is in
a direct relationship with the weight of his body. Stacked and
scattered in a narrow alleyway, his installation reflects on his own
resonant feelings of significance and insignificance, and questions
of the ephemeral, the body, and the environment.
Brynn Higgins-Stirrup’s drawing installation in a uses the wall as a
surface and anchor, whereupon the architectural features of its
location (a step, an electrical panel, a window) are compositional
references. The vertically oriented space of a stairwell asks the
viewer to ascend and descend to experience the work from differing
perspectives. The labour put into the process of drawing and erasing
is not unlike the accumulation and ablation of a glacier’s surface as
layers are added and taken away in a cycle over time.
Rima Sater’s photographs feature the pastel glass facades of
office buildings on Talbot Street. Although there is a “sameness”
and familiarity to these buildings as fixtures of everyday commutes,
they project a reflectiveness that can coat the street, bathing it in a
refreshingly momentary colour.
Danielle Brideau’s sculptures are temporarily wedged in a basement
stairwell. The simulated surfaces play with our expectations of what
is real and what is a mere lamination. With each new generation of
faux surfaces and composite materials, a shifting memory of the real
stretches further and further away from the source. Her questioning
of the simulated veneer parallels the synthetic glacial “blankets”
which prevent melting and preserve the “realness” of a natural ski
slope.
The ability of a surface, object, or experience to live on over time is
how collective memory can flourish. Each artwork in the festival tests
the effects time, and presents a renewal and relook at past events
or stagnent entities. A glacier’s change of state from solid to liquid
fails to generate such effects. The artifacts of melting ice caps are
evident as earth shifting phenomena which change the world as we
know it. Only a change in our in awareness and actions can prevent a
glacier from becoming a memory.
JENNIFER MARTIN (OTTAWA), REVERBERATIONS, REAR
PROJECTION, DIGITAL VIDEO RENDERED FROM FILM,
190 DUNDAS STREET, SEPTEMBER 17 7PM - 11PM
GABRIELLA SOLTI (LONDON), SHOOTING STARS AND
FIREFLIES, MARKET SQUARE ALLEY, SAT. SEPT. 17
WORKSHOP: 6:00 - 7:00, LIGHT SHOW, 7:00 - 10:00
PARTICIPATORY PERFORMANCE AT NIGHTFALL
In Shooting Stars and Fireflies, Gabriella Solti invites the public to
create a participatory, performative artwork that simulates two summer light phenomena. Using simple creative construction techniques,
clear food wrap and tiny multicolour flashing LED lights, she and
willing participants will make small, soft light balls that rhythmically
flicker in a multitude of colours. Fireflies light up in the air in relationship to their environment and each other, thus participants act out the
flickers of fireflies by throwing the balls to each other, keeping them
constantly in the air. In addition, Solti programmed Market Square
Alley’s light canopy (together with the expertise of Liam Wallner) into
a light show that compresses all shooting star activity over London
over the last 30 years into a 90 minute light performance (15 sec =
one month, 3 min = one year). Through collaboration and playfulness
Solti’s project promotes community connections and explores social
and spatial perception.
In the technological saturation of contemporary life, how does body
language still function as a central mode of human communication?
In what way is it crucial to orienting us in new spatial and temporal
realities? This Super8 footage was shot during a geographic walking
tour of Toronto Island which highlighted the island as a constantly
shifting landform. Captured on the ephemeral substance of
celluloid film, the tour guide’s physical movements were converted
into a digital loop, making his intuitive, descriptive gestures into a
repeating sequence, thus malleable and subject to a broad range of
interpretations. The piece highlights the eloquence of body language
amidst emerging forms of mediated “way finding” applications. It
calls into question the subconscious dismissal of body language
amidst technological advancement. When we are told where to go
at every turn we loose the ability to navigate terrain, and perhaps our
sense of perception loses us.
QUINTIN TESZERI, THE WEIGHT OF MY BODY IN ICE
SCULPTURE, SEPTEMBER 17TH 11AM UNTIL IT MELTS
ALLEY ADJACENT TO DUNDAS NEAR 199 DUNDAS
The Weight of My Body in Ice is an installation of 20 blocks of ice
equal to Teszeri’s weight, acting as a temporary surrogate body. The
piece reflects on the body as material in constant relationship to
its surroundings. It expands and contracts, its fluids condense and
evaporate, it pressures and is pressured, it appears and eventually
disappears. Here, bricks arranged in a graffiti-coated alley melt in
relation to the weather conditions. The effects trickle along the
edges of a building, grooves in the pavement and the eroding
expression of a mural, before eventually turning into air.
NEIL KLASSEN (LONDON), CAT’S CRADLE
SCRAP STEEL PARTS, GOLD LEAF, ROLEX VITRINES
182 DUNDAS STREET (FORMERLY NASH JEWELERS)
Cat’s Cradle makes part of an ongoing interest in how we make
sense of the world through the politics of the object, material value,
and the site of the ruin. Like rapid forming corrosion over retired
industrial machinery there is a ruinous mingling between past,
present and the future that serves as a reminder of the complicated
function of the local industrial complex. What if we could
permanently stop the effects of time? How could we use this time to
point towards the future rather than the past? Or as in Walter
Benjamin’s logic from ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, can we
use the ruined resources of the past to imagine or reimagine the
future? Based on these ideas Cat’s Cradle questions the effects
and promise of global and local industry while staying hopeful that by
preservation the ruin stands as a reminder, a trace, a treasure: our
link to what came before.
RIMA SATER (LONDON) SQUARED UP
HASSAN LAW COMMUNITY GALLERY, 142 DUNDAS
SEPTEMBER 16TH AND 17TH
LAUNCH PARTY + AFTER PARTY
109 DUNDAS STREET, OUTSIDE OF RENDEVOUS
1SEPTEMBER 16TH AND 17TH (WEATHER PENDING)
BRYNN HIGGINS-STIRRIP (ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN)
WHERE IS HERE? STAIRWELL, 121 DUNDAS STREET
SEPTEMBER 17TH 2016 - SEPTEMBER, 1ST 2017.
RECEPTION: SEPTEMBER 17TH FROM 7 -11 PM
Where is Here? stems from the history of Shaker aesthetics. A
religious group known for both their attention to the rational,
diagrammatic and order, and their belief in the intuitive, unknown and
untraceable. Using the vocabulary of grids, contained units, and linear
arrangements, the installed drawings fluctuate between responsive
and regulatory. Citing the Shakers’ use of copper nails and wooden
dowels to create paths for walking and dancing in their meeting halls,
different colours and combinations act as markers of direction and
pace.
The production and placement of the pieces work in relationship to
the space - the length of a hand rail, the number of dots on a step. In
doing so, they act as traces and transgressors of the space. Mapping
meaning onto what came before them but also inhabiting a specific
set of lines, angles and textures, they live within trace and presence.
Rima Sater’s billboard sized tiled print reflects the perceptual
experience of looking up at the neighbouring facade. Hung on a
chain under a security lamp, the gesture tests the effects of scale
and reflection of the building’s rose glass and the emptiness of the
city skyline.
DANIELLE BRIDEAU (MONTREAL)
SIGNS OF DECEPTIVE RESEMBLANCE II, BASEMENT
121 DUNDAS STREET, SEPT. 17, 2016 7-11 PM
Brideau’s sculpture and installation breaks down the real and its
essential ties to mechanisms of simulation. Fake laminations
often cover entire structures, and with proper application of such
things as paintable brick wallpaper or faux wood vinyl veneer, our
suspension of disbelief can easily remain suspended. Conversely,
Brideau’s work operates to undermine these material fantasies and
ground them in a realism by constructing simulations that resist a
1:1 reproduction and use raw applications of synthetic veneers.
Signs of Deceptive Resemblance is installed at the bottom of a
stairwell and in an opening to a historic underground steam
chamber. The chamber exposes the calcifying brick foundation
wall acting in a direct relationship to white brick-textured wallpaper.
Other aspects of the sculptures enact simulated relationships with
hand crafted elements resembling construction equipment.
SPECIAL THANKS TO SUPPORTERS:
DOWNTOWN LONDON, CITY OF LONDON, LONDON
MUSIC HALL, DNA ARTSPACE, HASSAN LAW, AND
FANSHAWE COLLEGE THEATER PROGRAM.
COVER IMAGE: THEA YABUT DESIGN: TEGAN MOORE