Reviews: Betty Goodwin at Galeries Roger Bellemare et Christian Lambert; Livia Daza-Paris at SBC; Brittany Shepherd at Pangée
Although there are a few colour works, almost everything in the two shows tends to black and white. This is not stark, but highly textured. Everything becomes about gradients and minute details. The James photos concentrate on all the objects of her practice, either seemingly carefully or haphazardly arranged on various surfaces, and given structure by the architecture that seems to hem them in.
Aside from the rather underwhelming colour mylar pieces, most of the work was created when Goodwin was moving away from typical Pop style imagery to something more “personal.” The vest works that she did allowed her to channel memories of her deceased father, who had been a maker of vests. At the beginning of the 1970s, she made variations on vests, as well as using shirts and other elements of clothing. This had also come after a period in which she seemed fascinated with parcels. The mail (and its suggestiveness of her connection to people at a distance) and clothing were symbolic means that gave banal objects a totemic quality (she even named one of the prints from this time, Totem).
Although they call attention to the object-quality of their various sources, the works also stress their anthropomorphic value. They were never just off-the-rack or posed as one might see in a fashion ad. Instead, they tended to have the sense of being shells that had been lived in, retaining a pathos in the way they are rendered and the specificity of the gesture in their posing. This gesturality is accentuated by her well-known use of soft ground techniques combined with etching to further refine the resulting image, stressing the lines and crevices of objects. Even in images created from parcels, the embossing and attention to the curves of staples provide the results with a visceral, lived-in appearance.
The two shows together relate an extraordinary amount of detail through singular moments over an extended period of time. They have no real narrative quality, either taken together or singly, something that separates them from typical retrospective strategies and allows them to retain an object quality that is not compromised by any hint of their significance. There is an overriding empiricity to it.
Several aspects of these exhibitions, in particular the last of them, are carried on across the hall in Livia Daza-Paris’ The Wounded Tree (curated by Nuria Carton de Grammont) at SBC. Consisting of videos and various archival materials, the exhibition follows the artist investigating the disappearance of her father in Venezuela. The videos are split between the documentation of ritual actions and seemingly more straightforward investigative documentaries where she visits archives and sites, and interviews people.
.jpg)
The curatorial statement fleshes this out:
The exhibition proposes a criminological narrative woven under the notion of attunement (3) understood as an investigative poetics guided by the capacity for deep listening and synchronization of human and more-than-human entities (trees, rocks, sea currents, etc.). These elements are endowed with emancipatory potential and political agency, enabling them to participate in non-legal investigations of state violence. Daza-Paris’s practice is the result of extensive research based on family archives, declassified documents from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in the USA, and fieldwork with campesinos (4) in the village of Cocorote in the state of Lara, where on January 23, 1966, her father and other communist militants belonging to the Armed Forces for National Liberation (FALN) were ambushed. Using these sources, Daza-Paris develops a counter-narrative that proposes a new interpretive framework for the official history of US interventionist policy in Venezuela and Latin America more broadly.
The ritual videos are doubled, with the action occurring at different angles. One includes an “offering” made to the ocean and the other a burned offering as she sets a photo alight amid some moss. Being rendered in this exhibitionistic form, and being shown as discrete “acts” that can be readily deprived of any momentum or consistent signification based on how a viewer interacts with the space, they become neutralized moments. Presumably, given their phenomenological framing, this exhibitionary formal limitation must have been deliberate (or should have been).
This links up to the central “documentary” element of the exhibition, a video that tracks her finding different bits of evidence from an archive, conducting an interview, and revisiting her site of concern. During the interview, the camera largely moves in and out of focus in an automated way, the interviewee’s face is scarcely shown, and the camera dwells on his crocs, hands, bits of face, etc. Archive footage is shown as projection and archivists appear like shadow puppets. Footage of a dog rolling on the ground is shown as they discuss the bones of human remains. None of the supplementary texts hint at how saturated in black comedy (intentional or not) most of the exhibition actually is.
Like some of the work in the Goodwin show, which is to some degree also about making apparent the disappearance of a family member, what is presented are grades of preserved decay masquerading as memory. This is particularly the case with the very striking set of flat, backlit pieces of bagged decaying bureaucratic paperwork with dirt, the plastic value of which far exceeds anything they supposedly express. Likewise, the dumb literalness of the black and white photo of the “wounded tree” set on the wall, notably with no textual supplement, suggests that its function as a silent witness is more to severely curtail any depth to the anthropomorphic fantasy of violence than anything else. This is something in line with the implosion of narrative significance that occurred in Maya Watanabe’s comparable attempt at “attuned” visualizations of the history of disappearances.
However dimly lit it may be to cultivate an atmosphere that would suggest a sort of vibrant material history that is being exhumed, the sense of “synchronicity” that is being striven for is not there. This is in part because the attempt to spiritualize (or fetishize) the contents is so extreme when confronted with the reality of the exhibition itself.
Although substantially better than other “neoliberal” fantasy works I have seen in the city over the past year, this has little to nothing to do with its theoretical framing and everything to do with it managing to be aesthetically interesting. It is the aesthetics and their peculiar empirical qualities that tend to triumph over any attempt at statement, consistently dis-articulating and undermining her bid to construct a narrative. Everything seems to visually conspire against this narrative intervention that is launched and tends to fall flat.
Both of these exhibitions can be interestingly juxtaposed with one that is on at Pangée, which can be interpreted as pushing aspects of the logic of both of them in a rather different direction than either would have entertained. If the Daza-Paris deals in the poetic value of forensics techniques, and the Goodwin works showcase the tactile values of reproducing evidence, the Shepherd show offers the glamour of the crime scene.
Brittany Shepherd’s Phantasmata involves oil on panel paintings and sculptures. The former tend to be of feet with shoes of faces covered in plastic sheets that stress a ribbed, rubbery quality. Although not as overtly pornographic as some of her other work, the imagery is generally taken from fetish photos, softened up when rendered in paint. Dotting the elaborate stained wooden interior of the building and sitting by its windows, they are given an even greater sense of glamour. The sculptures, which take the form of bars of soap with human hair wrapped across their surfaces, suggest numerous grisly possibilities (prison rape, shower killings, the mythical Nazi soap made of human fat).
Although the exhibition essay takes some pains to attempt to move beyond such vague suggestiveness and link the show to its surroundings and the more macabre aspects of the history of McGill, affecting a similar “attuned” or haunted quality to that of Daza-Paris’ show, everything in it fits entirely within the artist’s general body of work and these imaginary links do not do much for the images on display. She has been doing the hair on soap thing for years. (I recall attending a lecture in which a professor attempted to argue that Goodwin’s works were rooted in horror inspired by the October Crisis, although that seems like a bit of a stretch.)
As in the previous exhibition, narrative tends to stand as a way of controlling and distracting from the attunement to detail that undermines it. In the case of Shepherd, this is explicitly fetishistic and the rituals that accompany this, which here take on the suggestiveness of sex killings, undermine the narrative structure that is necessary for violence to actually occur. Instead, you get a crystallized moment that goes beyond the duration essential to attunement toward a de-anthropologizing of detail. It accomplishes what Daza-Paris’ work both performatively and pathologically seems structured to avoid.
Shepherd’s work here gets closer to a kind of vintage pulp/BDSM/Guy Bourdin aesthetic than her earlier work in other media. Always a little larger than life but not to the point that it becomes impressive on the level of scale, the over-familiarity of the imagery combined with its flat, congealed makeup tones stops it short from becoming unsettling.
