Tiny perceptions are as much he passage from one perception to the another as they are components of perception. They constitute the animal or animated state par excellence: disquiet. These are ‘pricklings,’ or little foldings that are no less present in pleasure than in pain.
- Gilles Deleuze
The first features three images, each a superimposition that abstracts images of bodies and exaggerates the grain of their source material. The second is a series of white painted boxes with walls torn out to reveal miniature rooms, all crudely made, their various staircases and bunkers suggesting both the exhibition space and the illusionism of Escher, only run into dead ends instead of infinities. And third, the largest of the spaces contains a video projection, several brass sculptures, medium-sized photographic works, and four sets of diced images immaculately folded into compact geometric shapes and set in frames.
The source material for much of this is gay pornography and an 8mm amateur film shot voyeuristically observing the bodies of men that the artist purchased off eBay and then worked over.
Grain, grit, and shininess are the overwhelming tones.
Perhaps the central part of the exhibition is the set of folded images. Body hair, flesh, and semi-abstracted heads reduced to curves rule. Genitalia has been entirely removed, leaving only the surfaces of skin and hair without orifices. As such, they are like iconicized bodies composed of mystery meat made to resemble flattened origami or paper model homes.
The accompanying text refers to Deleuze’s Pli, rather than his more apropos writing on faceless bodies, but the connection is rather loose. This appeal to "the fold" may be too literal, or perhaps it is literal to the point that it makes interpreting it pointless so you are just left with the image.
That would almost work except the fabric of the paper they are superimposed on contradicts this, its texture bringing it into dialogue with those of the video and the blow-ups and this circuitry further accentuating their monadic quality.
The general exhibition setting is taken advantage of in admirable ways. Indeed, it may be one of the best uses of the basement space in the gallery in recent memory. As thoughtful as this is, there are still some questionable uses of it. Most notable of these occurs upon entrance
There, you encounter three bleary superimposed images with slightly clunky circles superimposed on them. They are set on a floor to (almost ceiling) mirror. When I saw it, I had the added bonus of a fly shitting on it as I looked. The choice of the mirror seems a clunky metaphor, particularly when it might have been more effective and appropriate if they’d been placed in the bathrooms only feet away.
Unfortunately, one of the lingering senses of the show is its tepid smell of dehumidified basement conversion, more pronounced as a suppressed mustiness than a musk.
Smell is much more of a taboo than sexuality (which Beauséjour smears down to a residuum). The latter is protected and canonized by a series of increasingly byzantine laws while the former is genuinely marginalized and even refused entrance to many zones of public life under the hygienic banner of “scent-sensitivity” etc.
All of which is not to suggest that the exhibition could have appropriately smelled of horse, piss, sweat, or Kouros, but it would not have been amiss and would have added immeasurably to the density of the atmosphere. It also would have buoyed up what it was trying to do in a more persuasive way. As is, given the dozen or so people I watched pass through, it was rare that anyone spent more than a single minute walking through the space, assessing it, nodding, and wandering out again.
To my surprise after looking at installation shots, the most impressive things in situ are the sculptures, which have a naked and almost sardonic quality as inutile skeletons stripped of their potential reflective surfaces.