Reviews: Annihilation at Galerie Laroche/Joncas | Alain Paiement's Cosmic Blues at Galerie Hughes Charbonneau

They are more interesting for making explicit something that has been implicit in a number of shows over the last while, namely a general ambivalence about the destruction of the world. This is not the sort of thing that seems to be curatorially admitted, even if it is logically implied in many of the works included in such shows.

Dante Guthrie, Lindsay Lion Lord, William Mora, Andrew Rutherdale, and Cléo Sjölander are the artists showing under the banner of Annihilation at Galerie Laroche/Joncas. Sparely placed around the room, the show is dominated by the work of Rutherdale, who presents various insect reliquaries and some Chapmanesque gag about the Enlightenment. There is a hodgepodge of over-ornamentation that suggests the Spanish Baroque recast in more decorative than religious form. These are nicely complemented by the sculptures in stoneware and clay by Mora, which have the quality of dilapidated outsider art rescued from an abandoned farmhouse.

Framed in explicitly theatrical terms with appeals to Walter Benjamin and Greek tragedy, one of the more interesting things about the general text overview is that it is bereft of any direct relationship to anything in the show beyond its broad conclusion that sets art in comfortingly therapeutic terms rather than in more potentially malevolent ones that are at least implied.

Maybe the condition of our era is that we are sensing our finitude as a world-forming and world-destroying species. This finitude is exacerbated by mutating and evolving systems of power and domination that have begun to exceed our control. Among the anthropogenic scars we leave behind will be the symbols, objects and sanctuaries we have built to protect ourselves in the present and future: apotropaic charms, grotesques and reliquaries, or dreams cast in bronze. Perhaps the division of life and death needs to be set aside. At the moment of our own loss, the interconnectedness that binds us to our milieu makes itself known.

The works themselves exploit a range of mythological archetypes (or at least suggest something akin to them) and this is coupled with a mixture of folkloric textiles and faux finishing on standard casting to suggest something closer to mass-produced goods. In general, the show is unified by dark colours and a certain moodiness.

It feels a little too cuddly and corny in material terms to back up a pathetic reading, which gives it a tone that is more comic than menacing. Like a lot of current sculptural work, it has a distinct prop feel with a flat tactile quality and an image over object functionality. This does not detract from the theatricality but makes it more spectacular than participatory. If something like Anne-Marie Proulx's recent show at Vox attempted to theatricalize the image in a participatory way, this moves in the opposite direction.

There is no real narrative to this and no substantial impression of meaning, just a vague gloom. But there is a general sense of fabulation and with that an insistence on the sensual dimension of this potentiality. That said, it expresses a decidedly safe kind of annihilatory fantasy far closer to that of Hollywood blockbusters (or cheap rip-offs of them) than it is to Greek tragedy. It is this B-movie prop quality that is kind of charming, but it is not eccentric or materially abject enough to be more than that. The works are too rhetorically tempered for either of those things.

The works do not seem thrown together. For a group show, it has some impressive coherency. Yet, it might have been stronger as a two-person show for Rutherdale and Mora since the inclusion of the other works tends to soften things a bit.

Much of it feels like Warhammer miniatures if they could be inflated like waterwings. There is something technically impressive about how cheap it makes brass look; this again sacrifices the pathos of tragedy for something closer to black comedy.

If you were of a Freudian bent, you could talk about it as an infantilization of the death drive, complete with attachment issues and games of repetition. However, it registers more as desiderata from some very post-Tumblr online-death cult only with the general psychosis of Tumblr removed. 

 

This is decidedly different from Alain Paiement’s Cosmic Blues at nearby Galerie Hughes Charbonneau. Here the whole relation between art and annihilation is more explicitly spelled out conceptually and visually. With a series of large inkjet prints on canvas, he blurs any distinction between environmental waste, the blossoming of plant life, and the image of the cosmos. Plant spores, coral, and oceans of plastic waste are equivocated, photographed, and collaged so that they are seen to answer one another and become exchangeable, operating as near-perfect echoes of an overriding cosmic process.

With its imagery set in visual terms that are reminiscent of abstractions, the show deftly suggests environmental destruction as a natural process, using the logic of juxtaposition to undermine the pretenses of documentary and transform the photograph into a kind of occult tool. If this destruction is a natural process, it is also an artistic one, and the technological aspects of the production become more evident as you close in on them.

The only thing that really suggests the typical moralization of this process found in exhibitions is Paiement’s use of the notion of “eco spleen” to describe it in his accompanying text. Spleen, recalling Baudelaire and his sense of boredom amid the “artificial eternity” of the Modern, gives this durational aspect of the world a certain pathos.

It is far from evident, however, that this is really what is presented in Paiement’s images themselves which are as equally banally decorative as they are a charming, only slightly eerie presence. This has something to do with their scale and its invitation to ponder them, whether in thematic wonder or simple technical curiosity. Curiously, I find them far more effective when reproduced in the installation shots than they are in person. Miniaturized as such seems to bring their general logic to its conclusion.

In the case of both shows, annihilation does not really come into play, or only in a very relative way. They stay on the comforting pseudo-pagan ground of material transformation, the blurring of destruction and creation, which are fairly acceptable tropes when applied vaguely, usually with appeals to some kind of vitalistic force (as opposed to historical specifics). Paiement inches closer to specificity, but still keeps it distant.

It is a bit hilarious that this fascination with annihilation is one of the most “vital” things at play in the work being shown in the province. But what does vitality mean in the most artificially structured and maintained market possible (Contemporary Art in Canada)?