Once again Pangée is a uniquely good host for the two exhibitions that it currently has on. The creaking floors of the old mansion, perched on the mountain and seemingly detached while sitting aside the swelling roadways and pathways that cross its side tend to do far more for the works it displays than the bland rectangles of the rest of the city. Generally, Projet Casa still feels too homey but Pangée feels like an artificially maintained leftover from a dead society. It also tends to stress the works it puts on display as functions of décor.
The accompanying text by artist Michelle Bui tends to cast all of this in sentimental tones, invoking the centrality of online imagery to the production of the work.
Fully conscious of this contemporary condition, Kalyta integrates her browsing habit into her painting process as a means to question such ubiquitous experience, building an archive filled with second-hand, low-res images of clothing and goods that are often so broken down and anonymous that they become for the artist more compelling as an image in itself.
From this set of clichés (contemporary condition, ubiquitous experience, archive) that embroider the ambience around the work like costume jewellery, the text then goes all-in on fetishizing the art object, only not so much as a luxury good but as labour. In contrast to the immateriality of perfume, and mixing pathos with some mildly lurid description, we are asked to project the “smell of hustle and perspiration, and the spectral look of exhaustion induced by the bribe of capitalistic abundance” onto the work. What the text accidentally suggests is how much “fakeness” and pleather are exchangeable with the fantasy of “identities” and “impending collapse.”
The fake fur and carefully cropped and enlarged depictions of ruffs and curtains in muddled hues seem to be a deliberate fusing of later nineteenth century romanticism with catalogue imagery. The rendering comes off less as low-resolution than as thirdhand and smoothed-over impressionism. Even the decorations in the red hair that seems cut from a Pre-Raphaelite work suggests the whole thing more as sketches and swatches for the staging of a low-budget play than a rumination on consumer apocalypse. Even the employment of pleather suggests only the aggression of marketing for friendly and ethical sex toys. None of which is to suggest that the work is bad, because I do not think it is. But it is cute above all else.
It is less luxury than a particular kind of anti-septic luxury for which the apocalyptic narratives common to Contemporary Art function as luxury commodities. It is not excessiveness but moralized consumerism with the suggestion of “violence,” such as pleather itself or what I assume, given the Catherine the Great references, are allusions to her renowned bestiality, emblemized here in the use of fake fur.
The other show in the building provides a good complement to all this. Dumb Slate features work by Michael Thompson and Cristine Brache. They raid antiquated media images of glamorous celebrity and transfer them to other media, largely at medium to small scale that makes them seem like mementos and home décor more than gallery art.
It is a mixture of paintings and video works, their imagery taken from the loose sphere of now-dead pop culture. Cars, disco balls, bits of Elvis and sharks, get treated in closely cropped, darkened, mildly distorted ways while images of Playboy bunnies flash behind a keyhole and doomed Canadian playmate Dorothy Stratten in a slowed-down and glitching appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
The accompanying text by Olivia Whittick stresses the paths of all this:
The overall effect of Dumb Slate matches a strained attempt to recall from the montage-machine of the mind, peering through the darkness to discover just how much has been lost to time’s compression. Both Brache and Thompson seek the invisible realm that exists behind highly visible cultural artifacts, with the loving interest of someone looking through old family photos. Sharply aware of the link between memory and image, both artists confront these concepts as fallible and disintegrating, with the pained knowledge that they are the only tools we have to access what came before us.
If Thompson and Brache likewise take on the images of celebrity, it is all at a distance. Pop would alienate the familiar but they seem intent to familiarize with the alien, to sentimentally reintegrate it. Strategically, this is done in terms of scale, in terms of the colours which, even when dominated by blacks possess a certain warmth, in the distortions that are used as expressive signs, whether of the pathos that they project onto these figures or the patheticness with which they infuse their mediation. If Pop de-sentimentalized the world to show its icons as kitsch then what is happening here is the misapprehension of kitsch for soulfulness, albeit a misapprehension which is deprived of its naivety by a performed but not real irony. It is this desire for the naive that is really at stake; the rest is just prop.
What Walter Benjamin understood as surrealism’s attempts to create a “profane illumination” from the residual power of the recently outmoded, a move that both historicized and eternalized such banalized objects, returning to them a glamorous aura. This shares much with the superficially dissimilar glamourization of archival materials and their transformation into fetish fantasies in shows like Undoing Earthwriting at Optica.