Reviews: Angela Grauerholz at Blouin|Division and Soft Focus at Bradley Ertaskiran

This week we will look at two current exhibitions that overlap in framing and style, one stressing the elliptical and the other softness.

At Blouin|Division is Ellipses by Angela Grauerholz, featuring work that spans from the 1980s until a couple of years ago. The retrospective quality reinforces the retrospective content of the images, both of which tend to suggest an indifferent (or at least foggy) temporality. While there have been some distinct tangents in her career, there is not much indication of them here. What is on display is the kind of thing she has been best known for (and which has been central to her other more or less retrospective shows), namely photos of display spaces (galleries, museums, gardens) and the various windows to the world that they echo (door and window frames as stand-ins for the frames around art or their devices of capture and vice versa).

The gallery frames it this way:

Grauerholz’s images have the preternatural ability to be experienced as fragments of personal perception despite the understanding that they were framed by another. They feel immediately intimate, and yet remain vague as the fog of consciousness. They remind us of the experiences that find a way of lodging themselves in our deepest psychological recesses. Within this hazy state, a spell upon time itself seems to be cast, as the past and the future are absorbed into a single present moment: the moment of looking. Engaging with Grauerholz’s photographs awakens all of the senses as if one is reliving the memory of a past experience or a scene from a potential future. Standing before them, we construct a “reality” that feels tantalizingly close at hand while balancing the painful awareness that it never really was, or is.

I seem to have stumbled into a Grauerholz exhibition every year or so for as long as I can recall. Her work is always more interesting for the rhapsodies it seems to elicit in curator’s and critic's statements than for anything it seems to do when you stand in front of it. Maybe because I have no nostalgia or romanticism directed toward Europe, it always leaves me cold. That it tends to be slathered in mentions of Walter Benjamin like a dousing of discount cologne on dirty pants is perhaps why I tend not to dwell on it too much. It is too much of a din, too much “melancholy” and “elegy” in a rather gamey way (gamey in the sense that Graham Green once described Brideshead Revisited).

Paulette Gagnon, for instance (and picking up on one of the recurrent motifs of the artist’s reception), suggests, “The soft focus, characteristic of Grauerholz’[s] photographs, resists appropriation by the sublime. The fluid motion of image plays upon reverie, fascination and the vertiginous nature of time.” [Angela Grauerholz (Montréal: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 1995), 51] If it resists this appropriation, she goes on to gloss, it is because soft focus is a sign of mastery over the material, of the gaze’s control and decomposing of the world and of re-representing it through the artist’s eyes, prompting the viewer to take that perception into themselves. In terms of selection, it exploits banality for a heightened form of narcissistic reverie.

What gets displayed is images of images, images that stress the cliché of the image, either in the sense of the trite and commonplace or in the sense of its mode of reproduction. Chantal Pontbriand has also suggested all of this is a way of retaining a certain romanticism while subverting the sublime (which she questionably associates with the “impossible”) [Chantal Pontbriand, The Historical Ruse: Art in Montréal (Toronto: Power Plant, 1988), 14]

With her neurotic reverie and repetition, her reliance on blurs, soft focus and the re-depicting of the standard visual imagery of a specific period of European history, Grauerholz’s work has always reminded me more of her fellow photographer David Hamilton than anyone else. With his soft and lush images of flowers, grainy Venice, and naked teenage girls in the “transitional” phase to adulthood, he both stylistically and thematically shares more than a little in common with her. One could easily imagine an illuminating duo show of the two artists. There is a different rhetoric to their “mastery,” which suggests two rather different kinds of dissipation (one an eroticization of youth and the other of the aged), different kinds of mournfulness (the ephemeral and the stodgy), however superficial they may be. In a way, these are the not-too-distant cousins to the neon-tinted nostalgia that tends to crop up now with the consistent reproductions of tourist imagery or softcore pornography (predictably politically “reclaimed”), only in the case of these two photographers, pushed further back in time, more “stylistically” highbrow.

However, Grauerholz’s works always seem far less about photography than display. The various doubles of photography that she figures in her work — the windows, doors, paintings, screens — all serve to neutralize the specificity of the medium and stress its function as an image producer. As much as the various tics of the surface through which the world is viewed are pointedly highlighted (the blurs, fog, streaks of water, etc.) it is the frame that always becomes the dominant thing. And it is the framing that tends to dominate the exhibition, giving it all a fairly beige quality. If her show at Occurrence seemed to stress the ephemeral and dated quality of her notions of display and push this to the forefront, here it is muted.

The opening image of the Blouin|Division show is a vertical shot of a woman covering her eyes, but most of the work on show is horizontal, of basically uniform size, framing, and positioning. Given the method and subject, curation and display should have been more crucial issues than they seem to be here, which ends up enforcing a very limited suggestiveness to the work, certainly one far more restricted than the texts would suggest. I wonder if this would not have been better if it was a series of photos of her other exhibitions. To an extent, the oddly cropped, rather visually impoverished, and obvious captures of the scantily attended vernissage posted on the gallery’s Instagram (included here) were a more serious use of her work than the way it was displayed.

If the Grauerholz show often exploits a soft focus quality played against the hard lines of display, this is also basic to the group show of works created over the past two years.

The gallery statement reads:

Bradley Ertaskiran is pleased to present Soft Focus, an exhibition featuring the work of twelve international artists. Inspired by questioning what a portrait can be, the exhibition probes how figures come in and out of view, treating the genre as a source of possibility, subversion, and power. […] In photography, soft focus originated from a technical flaw—a lens imperfection that hindered the photographer from capturing a clear picture of their subject. Here, this lack of clarity (or inability to capture) serves as the impetus for the selection of work in this exhibition. Whether it be through evoking an actual sense of movement, absence, nostalgia, empowerment or concealment, these artworks evoke the elusive qualities that hover just beyond the frame.

There are a few dominant tendencies: cropping is the basic spectacle provided by several of the pieces, the displacement of the face and its masking is another, the softening and blowing up of it is present, and its congealing into a gelatinous vertical heap (Athena Papadopoulos) another. If there had been half as many artists, it would have been a far more coherent show. Admittedly, there is something interesting about the way it oozes over the brim of an attempt to create some kind of resonance among the works. I will concentrate on the pieces that give the exhibition what unity it has. 

Aside from one work, soft focus does not really describe the works in the exhibition well. Cropping, which does not soften an image but at least momentarily creates a sense of dislocation which may be a lack of semantic clarity (it is actually elliptical in a far more potent way than the work in the Grauerholz show is), but it tends to be one accomplished through a hardening of focus. Maybe the question to pose between the two shows is which is more neurotic, which is more an attempt to ward off the sublime?

Lyne Lapointe’s pieces involve shrunken mask-like faces hovering over bodies that seem as much imaginary maps as anything else. With their wasp’s nest bodies, they suggest a weird variant on the Anne Geddes genre of children’s portraits that portrayed them as hybrid vegetables. Sonya Derviz’s pieces close-crop on the head and inflate its face, not so much as the depiction of a personality as a mood. Manuel Axel Strain’s works obscure the face, covering it with fragments of more “primitive” sorts, like cartoonish fig leaves appended to kitsch academic style in a way that has become rote in a lot of post-colonial art.

The cropping takes on a few different suggestions. None of the works (with the possible exception of that of Adelisa Selimbasic) have the Gérard Schlosser sense of cropping, wherein an intense suggestion of eroticism and elliptical narrativity is created through a hard reduction of necessary detail and stress on pattern. Instead, it tends to work out along two rather different lines. In Rachel Lancaster’s Threading, it possesses an almost clinical quality, mildly dehumanizing in a tranquilizing way that retains enough of a sense of documentation to feel unremarkable. It is not banal but has the sticking presence of something about which there is little to be said.

By contrast, Lancaster’s Only Days In Between, a small oil painting at the entrance to the exhibition, has a soft, crumbling sensuality to it where details blur and shapes seem on the verge of becoming abstractions. It has the kind of tactility people tend to project on Grauerholz but which is not really there.

Finally, Karice Mitchell’s four pieces crop and inflate images from softcore pornography. Usually, the body registers mostly as the texture of the source imagery which has been intensified by being blown-up. While it is easy enough to discern what is depicted and any push to full abstraction or estrangement is clearly resisted, there is only a residual sense of what their power as images could have been. In Adorned III, in particular, there is a suggestion that this cropping technique is a means to highlight the details of jewels and so on and it feels like a kind of comment piece.

In her artist’s statement, Mitchell’s work is said to use

found imagery and digital manipulation to engage with issues relating to the representation of the Black female body in pornography and popular culture. Her work seeks to re-contextualize pre-existing images to reimagine the possibilities for Black womanhood and sexuality detached from the white gaze and patriarchy

The result, however, is too visually illiterate to do any of these things and just comes off as the half-baked recycling of trite platitudes, both in terms of strategy and thematization. It is like the eroticism of Lifetime erotic thrillers where they crop out all the sex and any sense of intimacy (or tension) and merely intimate what might have been there with vague therapy speak and poor editing choices. (For example, these two lousy movies [1, 2].)