Chloe Wise, In Loveliness of Perfect Deeds at Blouin|Division
Subjecting whatever Wise’s work supposedly means to criticism is on the same level as making jokes about Boris Johnson. It’s taking the bait of the media image that has been constructed around her (as well as presumably by her) and which allows her to sit comfortably in air-headed profiles for Elle Canada and Interview. However, there is something tantalizing about that, even if it makes you a fool for engaging at all.Instead, it is better to simply look at the work in situ, an object to be stumbled into at the end of the long corridor in the unfortunately designed space of Blouin|Division.
If there could be such a thing as twee nostalgia for a past generation of hipster cliche, it would exist here, less in the overt sense of its content, than in the manner in which it is arranged.
It’s the arrangement that lingers because the rest is fairly forgettable, presumably a deliberate effect as one scrolls through the programming. Central to it is a kind of inverted pyramid.
According to the press release, it is a “conversation pit composed of doormats that evade any explicit evidence of welcoming, Wise’s immersive installation undermines its purported physical use.”
Accompanying this is an artist’s statement that stresses the theatrical concerns of the show:
This very burden of maintaining a sound and steady character obliges us to be well-versed in the way of the stage (that is, if we know what’s good for us). This theatre is vital, this ignorance bliss, this unquestioned life certainly worth living. To be suspicious of the script is to lose trust in the production; to hear, somewhere, the words ‘and scene!’ is to break character. To recognize the limits of the stage, to storm off of it, would be a lonely walk since the show, of course, must– and will– go on.
There is nothing in either of these texts, or the central installation itself, that connects it in any meaningful way with the paintings that accompany them. Presumably, the various faces are the cast of this severely underdeveloped pilot for an art thot remake of Desperate Housewives.
The show consists of this “set” with its “pit,” an array of relatively small, smooth paintings in warm colours that look like a fourth-year undergrad had been copying badly cropped figurative paintings from Instagram posts. These span across both levels of the primary room and an anteroom, their titles relayed on a card suggesting emo song titles from the 90s.
The most remarkable thing about the show is its peculiar scaling and the shoddy craftsmanship of it. Set somewhat askew, you climb up the large steps to the majority of the paintings which are set well below eye level for any person of average height. I’m fairly short and they are still below mine.
This gives the entire experience a cramped quality and one’s proximity to the ceiling and the creaking floor only calls attention to the dingy carpet and the looseness with which the mats are connected. Judging from the young women I observed stooping to the paintings, looking over the pit or taking selfies with it, it seems designed to engage a reflex for bending over.
Leaping from the antiseptic anteroom to this museified jungle gym for e-girls feels like visiting a skeevy budget spa. I’m exaggerating; it doesn’t reach this height. Instead, it successfully theatricalizes this with all of its affective or visceral quality excised.
The most accidentally interesting thing about the exhibition is that it was, appropriately enough, taking place directly on top of two mega-shows being displayed by Arsenal, one on the patron saint of women artists, Frida Kahlo, and the other on the Regency romance fantasy series Bridgerton.
These immersive tourist-friendly exhibitions ostensibly fuse the art gallery to the Disney ride in ways that performance art and installation have failed to do for decades and which, however critical one could be of them, only pinpoint the extreme lack of ingenuity in the little theatre above them.