Reviews: Annie Charland Thibodeau at Galerie B312, Camille Jodoin-Eng at Patel|Brown, Louis-Charles Dionne at Circa

 

Monumentality is a theme that tends to crop up a bit in the city. In the past, we have noted the monument as history’s way of ironizing the present, the monument as the skeletal exhibition of genre clichés, and so on.

Two exhibitions currently on at the Belgo follow a comparable line, one explicitly linking this to the matter of monuments and the other not. They each share something in common with another tendency that we have discussed recently, namely a pseudo-religious tendency. This has taken various forms, although notably, it incorporated aspects of the architectural components of religious ritual either as concentrated devices for viewing spiritual ecstasy or as something verging more on a folkish re-enactment from a rural learning centre. 

Camille Jodoin-Eng’s Sun Shrine occupies the rear of Patel|Brown. Two walls are painted in shades of orange and yellow. In the foreground of the space is what amounts to a little gazebo, its walls coated in reliefs made of shredded paper and lint and coated in shiny metallic leaf. Open on two sides, it allows for views of the gallery. The interior is lined with mirrors and contains various glowing and glittering globes and crystals. When peering in, the mirrors allow for the multiplication and fragmenting of views, integrating the space around the object into it.

According to the accompanying text

With this third shrine, Jodoin-Eng aims to inspire visitors to contemplate the sun's boundless transformational force and reflect on their potential for change. As we long for sunlight during the coldest months of the year, the warm glow of Jodoin-Eng’s artificial sun temporarily soothes our yearning. Our minds are called to reflect on the burning star’s dual role in bearing and taking life. Sun Shrine reminds us of our inherent connection to the Earth and the solar system. As living beings, we share elements such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, magnesium, and iron. Some of the same elements, along with minerals found in our bodies, are part of the consumer waste we produce, demonstrating that we cannot separate ourselves from nature or our garbage.

Meanwhile, just a few doors away is Annie Charland Thibodeau’s Les multiples récits à contenir at Galerie B312. Its two exhibition rooms have their walls emptied. The bulk of their central spaces are taken up by large sculptural installations whose composition is largely inspired by the base of sculptural monuments. In the smaller room, there is a pit at the centre. The “base” consists of four boxes, which contain petrographic slides made from fragments taken from an Icelandic calcite quarry. In the larger room, there are triangular plates of polished black granite. This creates a very different effect. Basically, when you look at it, what you get is a reflection of the gallery space. The sculpture operates as a viewing device that takes the gallery as its object. This increases its sense of scale (doing so in a weirdly liquid way) in contrast to the flattened micro-scale employed and exaggerated by the smaller gallery.  

In a text for another exhibition, Thibodeau explained that her concern was not with monuments (typically commemorative or memorial) but with monumentality, which is not about an object per se but a relationship between the object, viewer, and space. She has claimed the purpose of this stress is at least partially an attempt to move away from the “prop” quality that tends to be given to objects, allowing them the potential to become the “humble” sites of contemplation.

At this point, there is a useful contrast one can make between these two shows. One uses a largely minimalist approach to channel concentration on the immediate surroundings of the work. Everything is stark, black and white. The other uses a more maximalist approach. Everything is warm colours and elaboration. In both cases, the object status of the work mostly dissipates in the process to become a device that has a basically primitive cinematic quality, almost like a camera obscura.

Stressed in monumentality is also the psychological, rather than material aspect. While root words for “monument” suggest “reminding”, monumentality unsubtly puts the stress on the mentality at play. If Jodoin-Eng sets out to remind the viewer of their “connection” to the universe through what are pretty overtly kitsch means, both in terms of the symbolic content and basic visual methodology, this is not less so with Thibodeau, who is mining a slightly different set of artistic clichés.

Do either of these strategies get us away from propism? Sort of. Typically, a prop makes evident the staging of the space and the extent to which the encounter with art is a quasi-theatrical event. Generally, the prop is stable and a part of the scenography. Here, the interaction is ramped up a bit to the point that the viewer and their space can be narcissistically reflected back to them. The viewer saturates the work rather than being de facto objectified by it. In this process, the viewer also becomes a prop for the visual device, an element of the viewed.

What any of this says about the mentality involved in either case is unclear. You could situate all of this within “wellness” discourse or even within notions of psychedelic experience. The only thing I kept thinking about was the magic crystal shop down the block from me that closed a couple of weeks ago. Its interior looked more than a little like Jodoin-Eng’s piece (only in silver and white rather than gold and orange) and its mirrors and elaborate bits of decor were left in snowbanks to be nearly hit by oncoming traffic.

In both cases, the gallery works, rather than the surreal “intervention” of the garbage, follow a set of strict conventions that bridge the space between generic installation practice and wellness or “awareness” chic that we saw satirized recently. The more interesting aspect is the one that is intentionally referenced in the institutional discourse around Thibodeau, which positions the work as suggesting a sort of archaeological site. 

If Thibodeau’s show was stark in its stress on an archaeological notion of art (monolithic, meditative, a mobile shrine not so different from that of Jodoin-Eng), the exhibition at Circa raises this to a comic pitch. Louis-Charles Dionne’s Fournitures de pierre pulls together work made over the last several years. The result is a highly effective joke on certain strains of Contemporary Art, at least as they have developed in Canada.

The supplemental text for the work provides it with a loose historical context, one which has been addressed on the site earlier:

Since the 1980s, the art world has become increasingly professionalized and bureaucratized. Artists and cultural workers are increasingly subject to an array of administrative requirements. Workshops and self-managed production and dissemination spaces are giving way to office spaces limited to paperwork and screen surfaces on which perpetual cycles of recommencement take place: receipt and feedback of e-mails, fund-raising, grant and report writing, updating of communicative devices, accumulation of documents, and so on. Empirical know-how, meanwhile, is being replaced by technical advances such as digitization, modeling and 3D printing. Do the professions of artist and art worker now boil down to an overload of overly concrete, immediate, repetitive, methodical and disembodied acts? Is creative power now influenced by administrative authority?

Taking the larger space in the gallery, the artist has dotted it with various filing cabinets which are used as bases or plinths for sculptures. All done to scale, there are the marble magazine holders which sit upon them as well as the impressive naturalistic delicacy of Boîte de Mouchoirs, carved from bianco ordinario marble. One wall is filled with a series of folders done in blue quartz set in a grid. Another wall contains a grid of repurposed old slates with duplicates of lined Cahiers Canada brand note paper etched into the surface.

It is a show of concise, elegant gags. It is not layered, complex, or polemical enough to be satire. In a way, that makes it more interesting precisely because there is so little to say about it. Not as immediate as minimalism, it has a moment of delay built in. If the other two shows demanded extended duration, this one shuns it. Dionne’s work is aggressively propish and fairly theatrical, relying on a miniature narrative that is essentially a punchline. The moment of delay is only a shift from one overly-familiar register to another. In this sense, it is also about “monumentality” since its function is one of reminding. Even the supplementary text does not amount to much more than a gag, one that might have been used better since gags are, as one film theorist put it, the simulated unreason that creates narrative dysfunction.

It would not be too facetious to argue that a major aspect of post-conceptual art in Canada amounts to state-supported prop comedy (the funding apparatus is part of the work). Pretty, and one note, Dionne’s work is not as conceptually nuanced as a sight gag on The Flintstones. And it should not be, since that is part of the gag, which employs the bureaucratic aesthetics central to conceptual art without going to the elaborate performative plays on the system basic to groups like N.E. Thing Co.