Reviews: Foreign in a Domestic Sense at Dazibao and Maison modèle at Centre Clark

For several years, Centre Clark has started spring with the latest edition of their Maison modèle show, which employs their space as if it were a model home. The curators of the year select what the model is and decorate and furnish it with sculptures and other artworks. This fundraising event is usually one of the most elaborate installations of the year for the centre. In this year’s iteration, curators Carolyne Scenna and Jean-Michel Leclerc claim that they wished to

reflect on the idea of ruin as a space charged with an equivocal temporality, straddling questions of impermanence and vestige, but also on the notion of work — of reconstruction, transformation, memory, repair — that partial or complete destruction, whether material or not, implies. [p] Maison modèle VI is thus interested in bringing together practices that address these themes in an open-ended way, and by extension, the exhibition evokes the sensation we feel when faced with objects that bear witness to the passing of time.

Although the curators go on to stress (very broadly) the milieu within which the works appear and the fluctuations of industry and populations that have passed through it, amid all the decay and birth, they cast the function of art as one of “preservation.” 

Maison modèle extends the theatrical aspect that was central to previous exhibition Emma-Kate Guimond’s The Plot. In that, the space was turned into a little theatre where the viewer took on the fairly traditional function of the audience member. Here, it actually works better by virtue of not relying on theatre as such an overtly “relational” phenomenon and instead presenting it as a kind of landscape for entrance (when it implodes as landscape and becomes setting, a fitting follow-up to last year’s edition). 

With its general brackish colour scheme, vacated fireplaces and steps to nowhere, the whole setting has a distinctly Beckettian quality. This is complemented by the style of much of the work, which tends toward a variety of "meta-modernist" stuff with its minimalism and fake archaeology. Alexia Laferté Coutu’s St-Bernard's Well, c. 1789 (II) and Florence Viau’s Élévation I clearly fulfil these aspects in a fairly austere but attractive way while Antoine Larocque’s Tempo no. 3 does it in a slightly more arte povera way.

If last year’s event was a weak curatorial framing and showed work that mostly worked against it, creating a degree of interesting tension and humour, that is largely absent here. It all feels pretty brown (in the noise sense of the term).

Marjolaine Bourdua’s Soft Skill and Sophie Jodoin’s (im)mortelle would be the best examples of this, containing hints of a degree of playfulness. That quality is better served by Mathieu Latulippe’s Marram Data City Resort, which perhaps more than any other piece in the show works best with its general structure superimposing a wetland postcard, some astroturf and a golf ball with a thistle sprouting from it, foregrounding the comical ambivalence of ruination.

The oxymoronic and the moronic

Concerned with the alien and domestic as well, the show across the hall at Dazibao ends up doing something more surprising. Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo’s Foreign in a Domestic Sense was previously shown at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico. 

The exhibition primarily consists of a 32-minute four-channel video installation with large pillows at the centre of the viewing room. Projected at a variety of sizes, these box in the viewing space. It is entered by proceeding through a makeshift corridor created from coloured light reflecting on emergency blankets that crinkle and cringe at the slightest human presence.

The content of the video includes footage from CNBC of space launches and images from space, passing into night footage of airport territory (without noticeable people), shots of manicured urban landscapes and architecture, cattle, karaoke bars and motorcycle clubs, and rides at Walt Disney World. Some footage is found, some created, some decaying or in different formats. But most of it is consistent, creating a lushly hyperbolic and largely successful work, even if that success mostly comes at the expense of much of how it is marketed.

Sofía Gallisá Muriente & Natalia Lassalle-Morillo — Foreign in a Domestic Sense from DAZIBAO on Vimeo.

According to one of the artists:

Their images evoke, accompany and connect the lived experiences of people who are part of the fastest-growing Puerto Rican population in the United States, as a result of political and environmental disasters in the archipelago. Just as displacement unsettles space and time, the four channel installation layers fictional and non-fictional narrative forms in video and Super8 film, speculating on how community is created through recreation and how cultural hybridity signals to the future. As the ubiquitous presence of water in times of rising tides suggests that Florida will soon become an island, the artists envision a dance floor emerging in the darkness of a swamp, where their subjects become dancers finding each other and learning to move freely.

A more accurate description of this would point out that what they become free of is both their bodies (which the video makes invisible) and of any clear relation between “lived experiences” and “culture.” While this does not appear to be the intended point of the show, it is what it accomplishes, stressing not “hybridity” so much as sterilization and a waterlogged future that reveals the extent to which “recreation” (which can be read here in the double sense of relaxation and an attempt to re-create) flattens the distinction between fiction and non-fiction that makes culture ontologically possible.

The text that is used to frame the show at Dazibao adds a slightly different spin on this:

Foreign in a Domestic Sense refers to the oxymoron used by the United States Supreme Court in 1901 as part of the ruling sanction to US colonization identifying Puerto Rico as an “unincorporated possession”. Speaking to this unique and strange relationship, the artists depict the fragmentary, non-linearity, and essentially foreign feeling of diaspora memory.

“Memory” is primarily relayed by the texts accorded to the different narrators. They use a lot of one-liners and clichés and tend to say things like “Everybody has a story,” but the work comes off mostly as the failure of storytelling and a testament to the poverty of narrative to live up to the muteness of images. Whatever the intent, the formal logic of the work possesses cruel irony with the beleaguered attempt to carve out some kind of narrative significance for the diaspora which has been both unincorporated into the new society and dispossessed of the old. The numerous “voices” or characters are rendered primarily by quad-lingual subtitles and so visually both flatly authoritarian and thoroughly enervated, consistently testifying to their flatness, muted as surface effects of the images. 

There is a strong contrast between the opening section concerned with travel (to space and otherwise) and the second of displacement to Florida where the “community” exists in a “simulacrum” (as one narrator puts it), a point only brought out that much more in the context of Walt Disney World. One of the narrators tells us that she gets a job there and caustically says that the happiest place on earth is one that entails a lot of suffering. This pathos is also undermined, however, by the observation that even fake happiness rubs off on people. “Disney” is presented as a place that exists to conserve “magic,” something that is treated with obvious irony through the displaying of decaying variations on “It’s a Small World.” But this in turn points to the equally shallow and corny pathos that is the fantasy of diasporic identity grasping. In the general context of the work, it is the Disney simulacrum and the depopulated spaces that are less fake than the diasporic community.

One of the intriguing suggestions that comes from this is precisely that place matters but people really do not. To be possessed by a place requires being in it; it is not something that is brought with you as some subjective shard. Or as one story loosely relates, “If you take me from here, I die.” In fact, “culture” is trivial, even if a place’s artefacts are more substantive than its subjects. It is all kitsch and badly sung karaoke where the human figure has less vitality than a Subway sign that looms above them as they scatter from the bar.

Toward the end, it cycles back to a different kind of strangeness with a series of shots of furniture stranded in water and architecture or its reflection spanning curated gardening and pools in a landscape that appears almost totally depopulated of people. This, combined with textual enframing, sets up an analogy between discarded furniture, decaying architecture and the diaspora, as it does with frequent shots of cattle. The bovine quality of persisting in the idea of “community” or “cultural identity” is something that the composition of the work stresses.