Courtesy of the artist and Joyce Yahouda Gallery, Montréal.
Art historians and theorists have often noted a divide between contemporary artists and their publics. This divide is particularly noticeable when certain media figures make provocative statements that sometimes lead to controversy, but it remains just as important even when undiscussed in the public sphere. Interactions is an exploratory and collaborative exhibition that deals with the reception and interpretation of contemporary art, and investigates the artist-public rift that persists, despite the institutionalization and professionalization of the art field.
The exhibition, including several pieces from the Gallery’s permanent collection, reveals the performative nature of art and underscores the interaction that takes place between artworks and the public. It aims to define the nature of this relationship by posing questions on the reception of the works: What is our relationship to works of contemporary art, and how do we interpret them? Are we able to grasp their meaning quickly and directly? What impact do they have on our way of understanding and reflecting on the world around us? What approaches, thought processes, and actions do these artworks lead us to? In order to raise these questions, the works are presented using curatorial strategies that deepen and stratify our examination of the reception and interpretation of contemporary art. With the goal of highlighting some of the parameters that define the gap between contemporary art and its publics, the exhibition also includes written and oral accounts by thirty collaborators as well as documentation on various controversies that have arisen in Québec and Canadian art milieus.
Interactions is a starting-point for a process of reflection that has until now remained relatively taboo and has mostly been made visible through controversies fueled by the media.
A FEW QUESTIONS
- There are numerous components in this exhibition. Can you identify what they are, how they are arranged, and what their functions are?
- What is the relationship between the artworks presented in Interactions and the interpretations of these works presented alongside them? Can you discern any differences between written and oral interpretations?
- What role does process play in this exhibition?
- What happens when individuals interpret these works of art? What happens as these interpretations accumulate?
- What kinds of audiences are being addressed by this exhibition?
- Why is this exhibition an appropriate one for a university art gallery?
The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery’s contemporary exhibition program is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Hong-Kai Wang acknowledges the support of the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan.
Produced with the support of the Frederick and Mary Kay Lowy Art Education Fund.
Curator: Mélanie Rainville
the Artists
Bertille Bak’s work focuses on contemporary communities, habitat, and how people participate and involve themselves in cultural and social issues pertaining to their immediate environment. Her works reveal aspects of infiltration; people play themselves in their current situations. They focus on injustice and employ the video camera as a means of negotiating reality. Bak takes us to Thailand, to the Din Daeng district of Bangkok, where inhabitants of a modernist apartment block condemned to demolition find themselves victims of forced relocation.
THE WORK
Safeguard emergency light system, 2010
Video installation, sound, 7 min.
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Xippas
EXPLORE
- social engagement and art and the rela¬tionship that exists between the two;
- how this relationship is communicated in this work.
Olivia Boudreau’s work is grounded in a reflection on the image, presence, intimacy, experience and perception. Using discreet installation devices, her video or film sequences present everyday scenes that evolve as entities with their own specific logic and temporality. Box is a long video work featuring a horse filmed in its stable for a period of 22 hours. Tension exists between what is visible and what is not. Box examines our relationship to time and our physical experience of its passing.
THE WORK
Box, 2009
Video installation, sound, 22 hours.
Collection of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University. Purchase, 2011
EXPLORE
- duration and its contribution to the meaning of this work;
- the animal as a subject and/or object.
Louis-Philippe Côté lives and works in Montreal. His ongoing series SCHIZO-SYSTÈME is a grim, hallucinatory look at non-localizable, hostile, inhospitable zones, in which avatars of power appear within a phantom reality. Each painting has a hallucinatory aspect, a ghostly timeframe emanating from another type of space and underlying a background of information. The function of SCHIZO-SYSTÈME is not to portray something real, but to construct what is visible beyond all locations.
THE WORKS
Égérie, 2008–2011
Transpolitique (L’abattoir virtuel comme machine de guerre), 2009
Ton rêve d’anarchie, 2011–2012
Oil on linen.
Courtesy of the artist
EXPLORE
- the subject of this artist’s paintings;
- space, location, and setting.
Rachel Echenberg works in performance and video. Her interest in possibilities for active empathy has lead to artworks that highlight vulnerable, intimate and uncontrollable relationships. Riez has been performed in several different versions, since 2008. It is an attempt to find an authentic reaction with a stranger by inviting this other to laugh with the artist for a timed minute. Although there is nothing being offered to laugh at or about within this controlled moment, there is the hope that each person will move, even briefly, from awkwardness towards a genuine shared interaction.
THE WORK
Riez III, 2012
Performance presented during the opening of Interactions on August 29.
Produced with the support of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery.
Courtesy of the artist
EXPLORE
- roles and responsibilities in participatory performance;
- the ephemeral artwork’s presence through its traces.
Erin Gee lives and works in Montreal. Her work, encompassing video, performance, robotics and audio art, examines digital culture through human voices in electronic bodies. It is characterized by a distinctive use of historical referencing that enfolds past narratives into possible futures. Formants is an interactive audio sculpture that presents infinite possibilities for duets between good and evil based on human interaction: a musing on desire, vanity, absent bodies, morality, intimacy and touch in human-computer interactions.
THE WORK
Formants, 2008
Fiberglass, plexiglas, hair, copper, wood, electronic components.
Vocalists: Lynn Channing and Christina Willatt.
Made with the support of Soil Digital Media Suite.
Courtesy of the artist
EXPLORE
- visitor engagement with an artwork;
- how you either respond to or retreat from this work and why.
Nelson Henricks is a video artist, a writer, a musician and a curator. His work The Sirens is a sound and video installation incorporating 16mm, super 8 and video, as well as guitar amps and a “slide show”. In this work, Henricks explores themes that are ever-present in his practice: sound and music, textual elements, repetition and the body. He makes sound visible, revealing and looking at its effects and interactions; speakers pulse at low frequencies and guitars tremble under knives making sounds and sensations that linger in and outside of the physical.
THE WORK
The Sirens, 2008
Video installation, sound, 16 min.
Collection of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University. Purchase, 2011
EXPLORE
- the artist’s use of sound and image;
- the way in which text is present in this work.
John Massey might be described as a sculptor, an installation artist, or a film-maker. The position of observer and subject as one in a unified field is taken up by the artist in Three Eyes, a photographic work in three parts which moves from exterior gaze to interior gaze to the sensory allies of touch and vision. These photographs underline the relationship between the public and artworks echoing the way in which art can capture our gaze, one of the most powerful tools of consciousness. Beyond vision, this artwork evokes the role of sight, and how art can encourage the viewer’s cognitive potential through vision.
THE WORK
Three Eyes, 1992
Silver prints, cardboard.
Collection of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University. Purchase, 1994
EXPLORE
- the gaze;
- the position of the observer in relation to the elements of this work.
Thérèse Mastroiacovo’s art practice has embraced a variety of mediums including video, sound, installation, photography, sculpture, drawing, and performance. Her work is about art as an idea and the artistic process as methodology. It is about the precarious relationship art has to its own definition. Each drawing in the series Art Now uses the cover of an existing book or catalogue published within the last sixty years that contains in its title the words art and now.
THE WORK
Art Now (L’Art en Flandre, Aujourd’hui/Art in Flanders, Now, 1992), 2006
Art Now (The Arts under Socialism, Being a Lecture Given to the Fabian Society with a Postscript on What the Government Should Do for the Arts Here and Now, 1947), 2006
Art Now (L’art d’aujourd’hui et son public, 1967), 2007
Art Now (Montréal Painting Now = Peinture montréalaise actuelle, 1982), 2007
Art Now (Spanish Art Now, 1966), 2007
Art Now (To Be Continued: An Exhibition of the Museum Collection, Now and in Prospect, 1960), 2007
Art Now (Art Now, 2005), 2008
Art Now (Art Futures: Student Art Now, 1983), 2009
Art Now (Art Now: An Introduction to the Theory of Modern Painting and Sculpture, 1933), 2010
Art Now (Avant-Garde and After: Rethinking Art Now, 1995), 2010
Graphite on paper.
Collection of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University. Purchase, 2011
EXPLORE
- drawing as a means of copying a mechanically reproduced image;
- the idea of “now” that is put forward by this work.
Alana Riley is a photo/video-based artist and freelance photographer living in Montreal. In making this work, she created online postings seeking participants for a video project; explained that the willing participants would form an audience and that they would be videotaped while watching a video by the artist John Baldessari. Participants could respond or interact however they wished. She offered a 30-min. studio portrait session in exchange for their time.
THE WORK
You Are The Work (Asking Strangers to Sit Through John Baldessari’s “Six Colorful Inside Jobs”), 2011
Video, 32 min.
Courtesy of the artist and Joyce Yahouda Gallery
EXPLORE
- what constitutes watching;
- the way in which this artist makes reference to another artist’s work.
Much of Jana Sterbak’s artistic production centres around themes of power, control, seduction, sexuality, and transcending physicality via technology. In Artist as Combustible, the artist’s head appears to have been set on fire in a flash combustion. Her body appears and disappears against a dark background with the glare of a flame shining from her head. Sterbak’s body is engaged in an incendiary, luminous act.
THE WORK
Artist as Combustible, 1986
Colour photograph
Collection of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University. Purchase – Special Purchase Assistance Grant, Canada Council for the Arts, 2002
EXPLORE
- time, chance, and reality;
- the body and the self.
Sharif Waked creates films, installations, and paintings that explore the complicated landscape of contemporary politics and current events. Waked employs the now familiar media image of a suicide bomber’s last broadcast. His protagonist reads extended excerpts from One Thousand and One Nights, thus avoiding a horrific denouement. The carefully staged reading in To Be Continued…mirrors the origin of the tales themselves, in which Scheherazade narrates one gripping tale after another to King Shahrayar in order to save herself and her tribe from execution.
THE WORK
To Be Continued, 2009
Video installation, sound, 41 min. 33 sec
Courtesy of the artist
EXPLORE
- the types of imagery that are present in this work and its meanings;
- the artist’s use of narrative.
Born in Yunlin, Taiwan, Hong-Kai Wang received a BA in Political Science from National Taiwan University,Taipei, and an MA in Media Studies from The New School, New York. Her work encompasses interventions, performance, performative workshops, and sound and video installations. It presents a networked excavation of social memory embedded in listening and an exploration of sound as a form of perceptual, cognitive organization and addresses the political questions of relationship and harmony.
THE WORKS
Music While We Work, 2011
Double channel video installation, sound
39 min. 15 sec.
Courtesy of the artist
Music While We Work (Making Of), 2011
Video, sound
31 min. 57 sec.
Courtesy of the artist
EXPLORE
- personal history and aural culture;
- the relationships revealed in this work between what is shown and what is heard.