Review: Guillaume Lachapelle's Extrapolations at Art Mûr

Extrapolations at Art Mûr brings together some of the latest work of Guillaume Lachapelle. It is a mix of the general tendencies in his practice. There are miniatures on the wall -- often resembling humans attached to architectural and technological elements -- and there is the gadgetry of his diorama that play on ghostly optical illusions. There are also some “skeletal” remains of vague creatures hung up like trophies. 

Much of the sculptural work in this exhibition was created utilizing photogrammetry, a process with uses photos taken at different angles to their object to construct 3D print-outs. Distortion with the figures suggests digital glitching in the process with the occasional monstrous result. 

Over the more than fifteen years that he has been showing, critics have highlighted the supposedly “childlike nature” of works featuring “fantastic” creatures in unlikely scenarios. Or they have stressed a duality in his work between its apparent realism and evident fantasy. The other critical stress has tended to fall on his illusions, which draw critics to comment on their often vaguely threatening or disturbed suggestiveness. 

More important than such projected narrative possibilities, however, is what the pieces often do on a sheer visceral level. “This optical immersion undermines our visual bearings and, in a way, fosters an impression of disembodiment. The work is an invitation to immerse ourselves in it, to plunge and obliterate oneself in it. More than captivating our interest, it also fascinates our eye.” It is, the critic rightly observed, work about perceiving what is not there. It is work that, at its best, threatens depersonalization and forces you to question the possibilities of your “embodied” experience, to use the cringe-inducing term I encounter in every third curatorial statement. And it shows that the factors that constitute embodied experience lead as readily to illusion as anything else. 

As technologically contemporary as his methods may be, in practice they have an antiquarian positivism to them. In its concerns, Lachapelle’s work is reminiscent of things that are basically "Victorian":  proto-cinematic forms, dioramas, and other types of miniatures. It deals with proofs, skepticism, and the fantasy of alternative worlds, whether they are microscopic or those associated with doll houses and figurines. And when I write this, I am not suggesting that it offers these things but that they become what is dissected and displayed in the work, which is a kind of autopsy on fantasy.

Rather than what they may portend or suggest by a very loose resemblance, it is better to simply look at them and what they do, which is what seems to be the point. They’re more concerned with something, or better yet, fascinated by a variety of tasks and possibilities.

It is not enough to say that they defamiliarize or make weird, especially in terms of their striking use of scale. The colour and content would do that without the size. In many ways, they would likely be far more unsettling if it wasn’t for their size. It may be that the scale verges on cute that makes them more grotesque but that their “realism” makes them less grotesque than most toys you would encounter if you walked into a shop. They are more like hobbyist models than children’s toys, none of which is unfamiliar at all.

His previous installations have tended to stress their compact and modular quality, their function as autonomous units that house an ingenuously produced optical illusion. Distilled in this way, they stressed their functionality as objects which seemed to mock the entire museal notion of the object as a “way of seeing” into a culture or imagination. It was always mirrors reflecting mirrors around a model, something that only showed at the seams. They are, however, demonstrations that don’t really explain anything. They are not there to provide knowledge.

Notably, this time the gallery does not stow his work away in a dimly lit place where it can be far more efficient in terms of illusion. Instead, much of it is at the front of the first floor facing its giant window. This exhibition foregrounds the cogs of the various mechanisms more. One piece creating the illusion of galloping horses dwarfs the illusion itself with the tools of the theatre, its curtains and the malleable box it creates around the viewer stressing the peepshow aspect and integrating whoever enters into the box space.

These works include figures on fire escapes, hooked up to air conditioners or similar contraptions as though they were narcotics or IVs. They also include skulls and hybrid pipes-branches. Attached to the wall of the gallery, these sculptures are as concerned with this space of their display as they are about their typically indecipherable, if suggestive, figurative content. His most consistent interest has been the optical illusion of small spaces. It is illusion as paradoxical disillusionment, as a form of demonstration.