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| Jessica Houston, The Long Haul |
Jessica Houston’s exhibition Over the Edge of the World offers a set of alternative history narratives constructed around polar exploration. It relies upon a set of different material approaches (collage, video, objects, oil painting, and ink), each discretely investigating a different perspective on the space.
This includes a feminist alternative history of exploration, surrealist imagery of exploration that takes on a nearly mystical quality, maps, and collages fashioned largely from National Geographic magazine.
In this respect, the show makes many of the same rhetorical gestures, and probes some of the same issues as Patrick Bérubé’s more enigmatic and humorous Mother Rock! exhibition in the same space a few months ago (March-April).
Spanning two large rooms and broken into half a dozen distinct sections, Houston’s exhibition is sprawling, each aspect adding a different spin to her basic theme.
Presumably, the scale is intended to convey something of the scope of the Arctic, otherwise the show could be accused of being in excess of the limited points it seems to be conveying. These would likely have been more strongly conveyed (and succinctly) with half a dozen pieces in one of the smaller spaces of the gallery. Instead, there is a languid and diffuse quality to it.
So, one might assume the expanse is the thing, but this is undercut by the abridgement and interruption created by painting the walls in different colours to distinguish some of the sets.
Distinct separation into series determined by tactics is the order she imposes. Each method (figurative, symbolic, collage, re-appropriation) for probing the theme provides a non-communicating way of doing so. If none of them add up, this seems to be the point. And yet, in presentation, this enforced heterogeneity has the distinct feel of museological order, something that could also be said of its rather clunky attempt to introduce narrative.
The silvery wall texts dispensing Asian wisdom set beside pseudo-psychedelic miniature paintings, almost meditative video, and Ernst-like imagery are more decorative than anything. It is also here, where the thematic interpretation seems to span out to the cosmos, that it feels the most familiar and over-determined.
This is true because of the tactics, the theme itself, and the means of display. If all of these tactics had been attempts to defamiliarize a supposedly stable and recognizable narrative, as the accompanying texts seem to suggest, this is not what occurs.
In terms of thematics and rhetorical framing, it runs through a list of standardized Contemporary Art tropes. And in terms of execution, aside from the crispness of the map section and what verges on cuteness in some of the ink work, there is no strong link between the formal qualities selected and their rhetorical purpose.
There is a sense of overkill to it that is interesting, although if this was the intention, it feels too controlled (and if controlled overkill was the intention, it also is too sedate).