Reviews: Group Show Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre and Stanley Wany's Espaces imprévisibles at galerie de l'UQAM
This week we look at the two exhibitions running at galerie de l’UQAM: the group show Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre and Stanley Wany’s Espaces imprévisibles. Both are mostly interesting as genre exercises. They are pleasant there is not that much else at play. Each exhibition consists of running through a gambit of genre clichés, one by way of a group curated by a gender category and one by an individual assuming a symbolic role as the derivation of a genealogy.
Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre was curated by Elise Anne LaPlante and involves the work of artists Caroline Boileau, Mimi Haddam, the collective Ikumagialiit (Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Cris Derksen, Jamie Griffiths, Christine Tootoo), Daze Jefferies, Helena Martin Franco, Dominique Rey, and Winnie Truong. This is the third stop for the group exhibition. The works are in a variety of media (video, sculpture, watercolour, performance records, stenciled poetry, etc.) which are spread around the spaces of the gallery.
In its curatorial language, it is part showroom and part kindergarten, with the different elements clustered like activity areas, fake plants and affirmative texts running up the walls, and different spaces delineated by neutral institutional colours. (Judging by installation photos for the other venues, it seems to do the latter in all its iterations, but the UQAM gallery tends to resort to this to cope with its awkward display space.)
It is rationalized in this manner:
To perceive the different textures of the body is to open oneself to perspectives and experiences untainted by the mechanisms of domination and the primacy of reason, be it in an elephant-woman, or in the affect of body hair. This type of perception privileges somatic and sensory forms of knowledge. It stems, at least sometimes, from simply trusting oneself. Other times, it poses a challenge to our usual ways of thinking and of understanding reality. It is in this spirit that curator Elise Anne LaPlante invites us to partake in the works and words that come together in Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre. [p] How does normativity and its many forms control our bodies? How might an exploration of the body’s imaginary uncover the potential contained in the tension between different transitional and circulatory states? Faced with these questions, we thus cannot deny ourselves women’s poetry, the fertile meanderings and connections of monstrous imaginaries far too long muffled. For they are essential to the free movement of breath between the skin and the organs, without and within, essential to the resolution of those tensions lodged deep in the archive of our bodies.
Meanwhile, Stanley Wany’s show displays just as much eclecticism in its much smaller space. It also is structured as a kind of tour through different types of affectivity, exciting the sense of smell and eliciting a strong tactile aspect. Working almost entirely through a reduced chromatic scheme of beige/off-white, brown, and black, the pieces are often heavily reliant on text, which functions as a kind of voiceover to symbolically subjugate the imagery. Using a primarily “abstract” visual vocabulary, this is married to generic-looking fetish objects and some historical imagery.
Integrating archival images and found objects to an installation which includes drawing, sculpture and materials grown in former colonial plantations (coffee, sugar cane, indigo and cotton), the exhibition reflects on the concept of creolization which well describes how the artist’s family history has been built. In this way, Wany brings forward the experience of Black communities in the Americas, who are undoubtedly resilient beyond subjugation and actively engaged in various forms of cultural hybridization.The sort of advertising discourse used for both shows is slightly less challenging than that of a Benjamin Moore paint commercial. Neither show has much sense of irony or critical historical reflection, relying on a too-naive sense of reference in their framing, even if it is less evident in the works themselves. Overall, in both instances, it feels like nostalgia with all the charm that involves.
These tendencies may have far more to do with the general nostalgia for the time in which these tropes and themes became aesthetic norms as much as for their questionable theoretical import. There is a line between the use of these stylistic tics and strategies and something like vaporwave. The latter at least affects a melancholy irony as opposed to the former’s naive and kitsch faith in its authentic expressionism.
There is not much, beyond certain technological innovations, that would separate any of this work from feminist or Women’s Art fifty years ago. It exists here in this already mummified form. (Even by the 1970s it was cliché-addled and hyper-derivative, something that was extensively complained about at the time but which has been more self-servingly presented as a living tradition as those artists became tenured.) There is a reason that shadows are painted on the walls: there is not enough material substance for the objects to cast them.
It is all innocuous, overly familiar, platitudinous to the point of corny. Presumably, on some level this is deliberate, and it is about retaining a kind of easy comfort. But it is about as aesthetically challenging as a snack pack of room-temperature rice pudding. Many of the strategies and rhetoric at the origin of this vein of work relied on a kind of enchantment of banality, its redemption and moralization. This could take the form of an aggressively performative anti-aesthetic, or of something closer to a sort of magical realism (the starkly Lacanian vs. the genito-floral). It is the latter that occurs here. If you are a devout believer it can all function as a conservative affirmation. If you are not, it all seems pretty twee.
If there is a “normativity” at issue, it is here, both in the stereotypical reproduction of postcolonial and feminist art (two of the primary normative ideologies that became institutionally dominant in the 1980s as the de facto replacement grand narratives). No doubt it is boring to point out, but when this sort of framing is curatorially employed it is a mystification of the material reality of the work and its actual political (rhetorical and institutional) function.
There is a thoughtfulness about materials that is perversely and blackly comic, even if little of it would come across without reading what amounts to the accompanying ingredients list located outside of the exhibition space. Whether that was deliberate or not, it gives added stress to the boxed quality of the work. The materiality of the work itself could be seen less as complementing than questioning the symbolic exploitation of their purported content, precisely because the “experience” it alludes to resembles nothing so much as the catchphrase on a cereal box.
In a sense, this can all be related back to the opening gambit for Le septième pétale that rationalized a puritanical/romantic appeal to escape from reason, one best summed up in the double-meaning of “affect.” On one hand, as in affect theory, it applies to a loose kind of sensuality of the immanent that draws on everything from psychoanalysis, neurology, and Spinoza to chisel out a space even vaguer (and more amenable to rhetorical sophistry) than that between the aesthetic and the sublime. In the other sense, it is a kind of mask or fakery, an artificial put-on. Together, the aspiring infotainment of these two shows is beige noise and Provigo cake frosting.
*1st and 3rd photos are mine and the rest are from IG.