The exposed cords winding their ways around the floor suggest symbolic umbilical cords or some sort of vine. They are also there as a way of being performatively transparent in the mode of display. The armatures of display tend to overshadow their “objects.” Intentional or not, given that the exhibition is packaged as an “installation,” the blank wall employed the way it is makes it an integral aspect of the show and gives it as much weight as the objects that appear before it, stressing both the space of the gallery and its suggested function for projection.
The theatrical aspect of the work is more in the use of scenery and the presentation of the artworks as scenery. There is a somewhat tenuous relation between the numerous floor props and the bits of scenery that she sticks on the walls. The former easily suggest boutique objects and flirt with the very long history of surrealist objects, found objects, etc., but offer so little of visual or conceptual interest that it is the armatures that cradle them that dominate. The lightboxes, relying on the type or reference to advertising supports that was common in the 1980s (and earlier), is less interesting for that easy point of reference than for a slightly more convoluted and even more traditional one present in the images themselves (primavera figures and the woman in landscape or woman as landscape variations).
In its supplemental aspect, the exhibition is advertised this way:
This exhibition stems from a year of continued study on the complex materialities of plastics, as well as non-toxic material alternatives and the worldviews that can sustain them. A recurring theme in this research was the problematics of dominant social and economic structures that center on hierarchy, power and extractivism, and thus act as an impediment to the meaningful development of environmental sustainment. What other alternatives might exist? For example, instead of domination, more matriarchal structures could be characterized by reciprocity, reparation, cyclical regeneration and generosity. [p] Le désir et le matriarcat is a new installation of remixed plastic advertisements recuperated from the streets of SOHO, New York, and sandwiched amongst non-toxic material alternatives. Found plastic images of models prone on beds are re-collaged, abstracted, and reoriented. Amongst them are sculptures and found objects that signal feminine agency, sustenance, gathering, collectivity and reciprocity within contaminated, fetish-focused futures.
Additionally, we are provided with a textual portrait of Jazvac that follows the basic stereotypes of the “engaged” artist that are current in local discourse, as someone concerned with opposing “apathy” and advancing “care”: “Kelly Jazvac makes art that explores relationships between the material of plastic and consumerism, eco-systems, empathy and apathy.”
Returning to the basic framing statement, I will just highlight a few things. The artist is indexed to the stereotypical role of “researcher,” giving the work a pseudo-scientific sheen. The “materiality” of the work is explicitly indexed to New York, giving it an “artworld” normalcy and pedigree. At the same time, it is utopian while exploiting vague moral panics (the paranoid exploitation of spectral “toxicity” across multiple categories) and the language of redemption to package it. Finally, and most importantly, it ends with a certain degree of ambiguity since the “fetish-focused futur[ism]” that it suggests (and which is a vague recycling of similar utopian clichés generic to feminist discourse from 60 years ago) seems to encapsulate the critical or “reparative” aims of the work itself.
It is work ostensibly about the “environment” or “ecology” or “economics” but the environment of the work is only the skeletal aspects of the most reductive type of white cube aesthetic on the one hand, and an almost comical reduction to support dynamics otherwise. More often, work shown in the city lately translates this into a kind of dynamic propism that theatricalizes the art gesture. This tends to be accomplished by dissecting the implied narrative and laying it out in the space like a series of archaeological relics. For instance, one of the more successful recent iterations of this is on at Occurrence. Sébastien Cliche’s Fluctuation du semblable is overt in framing this in the way I described, providing a series of constellated prop tables combined with concept work and what amount to drafts of possible objects that can be constructed from their combinations. Anyone who goes to galleries in the city regularly sees this kind of thing. Arprim exhibitions almost all amount to this (as do many at Circa, etc.).
In these instances just mentioned, there tends to be an explicitly “instrumental” stress in the propism at play. Propism could also take on the quality of theatricalizing the translation of literature to the visual or it might serve as the stage ground for notions of the monument (although this gets quite complicated) or as something that is employed as a counterweight to other modes of mediating theatricality (such as video).
[It should be noted that propism and theatricality rarely, if ever, use duration in the sense that it is commonly employed in theatre proper, something which is probably significant but beyond the scope of this review. It is better to regard these tendencies as analogous to a game hunter’s relation to their prey and the trophies they construct from them than to some other mode of intermedial “engagement.”]
These sorts of prop-theatrical relations are distinct from other types of staginess. For instance, a show that closed recently at Bradley|Ertaskiran, Bony Ramirez’s Le grand corail, used the space of the gallery to stage the collages and paintings that it presented. The walls were covered in “blood stains” that could have been the set dressing for a high school production of a horror play. At the centre of the space was a leaden ball and the walls were dotted with paintings that rehearsed so many clichés of decolonial painting — overtly “appropriated imagery,” collage-based painting, emo/anime eyes to campily convey “pathos” while retaining a rhetorical “out” for how emotionally manipulative it is, the clash between patterns and flat figuration, squishy Botero-type figures, “folkisms” filtered through post-Cubism, etc. — that they felt as though they could have been a programmatic joke. The supplementary text only drove this to the point of unintentionally hilarious redundancy. Finally, it was a show about the “pornography” of colonialism that was really a pornographic fantasy about colonialism that was, objectively, just porn for the luxury market.
Jazvac’s exhibition lacks the camp (and corniness) that was both the endearingly stupid feature of the Bradley|Ertaskiran show and what made it impossible to take seriously. Ramirez’s work was clearly less about the role of desire in colonialism’s history than the libidinal fantasy of being colonized, a desire which performatively saturated the space. As with a great deal of pornography, the use of aspects of parody and exaggeration also brought it rhetorically close to satire (even if this was ultimately unintentional self-satire). A comparison could be made to Oli Sorenson’s Après moi le déluge at Art Mûr last year, which overlaps thematically with Jazvac’s show. With that exhibition, there was an explicit historicization and appropriation of styles and tropes from 1980s painting and other sources as ways of staging a painterly performance that was then “remixed” (or rebranded) through a slightly less ambitious or complex exploitation of a set of political/environmental tropes.
As with the Bony Ramirez exhibition, Sorenson’s show was rhetorically convoluted enough to be messy in a way that was entertaining, but Jazcac’s show is a lot more simple-minded and puritanical. In its appropriation of the language and materials of advertising as well as activism, Jazvac’s show is equally close to (in her case, apparently unintentional) satire, but it uses this to advance some vaguely utopian claim. However, the skeletal reality of the exhibition undermines this. Not simply does the visual content and logic in no way support the claims or references that she is overcoding the work with, the reality of the work is that it has decomposed and reconfigured the waste of capital into hyper-capital, or, if you like, she has exploited “pop culture” to produce the luxury commodity of “elite culture” in a sanctimonious form. It appropriates not only imagery from advertising but the rhetoric of its critique and aspects of luxury display. This does not mean that the exhibition is not the simple display of a series of luxury goods (which it objectively is), but as with most decolonial art, what is more important is that it is the production of hyper-moralized luxury items.
As a functionary of the ideological state apparatus (she’s an associate professor at Concordia), the work is clearly designed along lines that are market-friendly, either in terms of the commercial exploitation or the various grants she has received from governmental agencies throughout her career. I do not bring this up to be snide. To the extent that there is anything “political” about the work, that is it, not the “kitsch bullshit” of its framing.
This is not to suggest that there is any contradiction between the framing of the work and its content. There is a stronger relation between these two aspects than is common in the city’s art displays, something that is remarkable given how apparently haphazard the use of visual space is. The clunky, bare competence of it only carries through on the same traits possessed by her objects.
* 1st photo is from the gallery website. 2nd and 3rd are my own.