Reviews: Marie-Pier Vanchestein at Elektra and Diyar Mayil at Articule

The Rustlings of the Group Are Invented as They Slip Away is an exhibition by UQAM graduate student Marie-Pier Vanchestein at Elektra. According to the accompanying text:

This installation features robotic benches that move together in space, following rules inspired by swarm algorithms. Through their movements, both programmed and unpredictable, the benches seek, through a common movement, to escape the gallery. The hum of their motors accompanies this attempt at emancipation, creating a collective murmur. [p] By playing with diversion and the principle of emergence, the exhibition questions our relationship with the structures that surround us. Can these benches truly break free from the framework that defines them? Through this poetic staging, the artist invites us to rethink the connections that unite a collective and the spaces it inhabits.

As is my habit, I did not read the accompanying text until I had spent some time in the exhibition. I assumed it was some kind of joking illustration of an idea from Object Oriented Ontology or something comparable. The exhibition, attractive from the glass wall of the gallery space’s entrance, was unusually spare compared to the cluttered way the area is typically used.

I walked through it twice, but there was minimal animation on the part of the various benches. They certainly did not act either collectively or in anything that seemed like a swarm. Instead, they were quite limpid and sporadic, more like someone randomly ODing in the gutter on St Catherine than an “emancipation, creating a collective murmur.” So, I was surprised to read the text and assumed it must be satire, rather than another instance of prop art in search of a play to redeem its gimmick quality and brand it with significance.

Exhibitions at Elektra tend to be video-heavy, rich in texture, and require some durational attention as you move from one headphone set to another. But here, there is no lengthy set of micro-narratives and complicated techno-relationships that you have to pick apart. It is just a momentary event that is oddly satisfying. It feels as much like a non-event. Rather than the illustrative suggestion used to frame it, the more interesting aspect is that it places the viewer into a moment of anticipation. What is anticipated mostly involves unpredictability and the capacity to compare an immediate point of reference (the previous instance of surprise at a moving bit of furniture). This does not lend itself so much to narrative suggestiveness as a kind of game-playing, in a basic, strategic sense. In this sense, it sticks with Elektra’s tendency to concentrate on experiments, in the narrow meaning of the term as a test of set expectations. All of which is to say that the work falls somewhere between prop art and demonstrative art.

Prop up art tends to pop up everywhere in the city. Across the hallway at Centre Clark is another show of prop art, Concordia MFA Rebecca Ramsey’s A long black bough. Consisting primarily of ceramics, these are rendered in illusionistic form as pipes and sinks. Apparently rusting and calcified lines of pipe creep up and around walls or sit in corners as if they have been cut out of decaying buildings and displayed as readymades. Predictably, the accompanying text tries to unconvincingly spin it as having some loose social/ecological significance, but it is just a set of nicely made props with no real narrative content. To the extent it might have “theoretical” content, it is more of a joke about readymades. The work is nicely made and uses the space well, both playfully and in a showroom way. It looks like stuff I had to produce while working for a landscape installation company (artisinal bird baths, lawn sculpture and that sort of crap). What she is doing is in the vein of showroom/theatre set prop art. What Vanchestein’s show at Elektra does is different because it does not work simply as an object or as a setting that requires a relatively simple game of recognition. Instead, it sets up a play of anticipation and leaves room for testing.

If the Rebecca Ramsey show is a kind of visual gag based on simulated identity, Vanchestein’s game comes from undermining identity through enacting a dis-identification process that the viewer then has to patch back together (or not). It does this in a way that seems more like a prop comic routine than the kind of emancipatory fantasy that she packages it with. The real strength of demonstrative art, however, is not in its creation of illusion, but in the way it can make the mechanisms of illusion evident. The potential to exploit this seems only very tentatively explored by her. 

Less full of potential surprises and concerned with producing a very different type of illusion is Diyar Mayil’s exhibition Still Air at Articule. Spread over the entirety of the space, it is barely lit by anything save the light from the storefront glass wall. On this occasion, it was an overcast, grey day. The glass wall also integrates the exterior traffic into the show, if only as a flattened screen that muffles signs of life. By the window is the exhibition text by Ramzi Nimr—a vague and fragmentary recollection of a dialogue—in two long banner forms (one French, one English). At the doorway is also the decontamination station leftover from COVID, and still stocked with masks and disinfectants in a way that most exhibition spaces stopped years ago.

The exhibition space is taken up by a lengthy rectangular raised trench that appears to be made of wax. Some water puddles along the trench, and various brassy bits of bean shapes are turning blue or rusty. The “beans” are empty shells suggestive of garbage, baubles, or simple shapes. At the off-centre point is a sort of water feature. Another rectangle scattered with beans sits beneath a brass rectangle suspended from the ceiling, slowly dripping water into it. The pooled fluid below barely ripples or reflects. The trench has a little entrance gap and blank, simple wood benches, one by the window and one by a pool. The walls are blank, but a small dehumidifier is plugged into one. Given the minimalism of the show, it’s hard not to spend some time staring at the gridded acoustic tiles of the ceiling and the obvious black surveillance cameras.

Mayil’s work could have been shown in a basketball court or a garden, but it was shown here and is as much (or more) a frame and reflection of the exhibition space as anything else. Unlike her exhibition at Circa last year, where the works felt isolated enough that they both used the architecture and stood apart from it, in the installation at Articule, the work practically sinks into the space, the tone of which envelopes it. I am going to assume this was a deliberate and thoughtful installation choice.

As with every other installation of her work I have seen, there is a beige, neutralized quality to everything. There is a stress on texture, but that usually amounts to the textures of a hairbrush. Here, it is starker than that. There is also a strong familiarity to its marginal “strangeness” that echoes a century of post-surrealist sculpture. The black humour that was common to such practice seems repressed here. The logic of most of what makes up the exhibition is essentially a string of jokes. She’s built a grieving space—the centre of which is effectively a deconstructed fountain—in a former commercial space in an outdoor mall that has been transformed into a state-supported ideological distribution centre. Whatever distance there is between mall design and public memorial is narrowed here. In this instance, she’s moved from the assorted props-in-space approach of her last few exhibitions and into full-on theatrical set.

The accompanying texts give no hint of the levels of irony or satire that seem blatant to the visual logic of the work itself and its theatricality, and provide a reductive, if vague, overcoding (my comments in brackets):

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Still Air evokes the feeling of anticipation, which is marked both by waiting for something to happen and waiting for something not to happen [The “mark” is the dripping of water, which, as far as I could tell, was a repetitive beat that was very predictable.] — hope and fear intertwined together. [Why is this given such a pathetic dimension? In the Vanchestein exhibition, anticipation was both clinical and comic.] Anchored in the reality of grievance [How? Are the drips supposed to symbolize tears? Is she anthropomorphizing the gallery space by making it weep?], this work is situated in the hauntedness of everyday life. [Haunted by what? “Hauntedness” is what seems to be conjured as safeguarded allusion by refusing to disclose or dissect the work's illusory value.] Physically starting from water infrastructure and spatially from architectural enclosures such as courtyards, this space offers a slowing of time and room for contemplation. The precariousness of everyday life is embedded into materials that can melt or seep away, evaporate into thin air. [The last three sentences are adequately descriptive.] In the calmness of Still Air nothing is shaken nor remedied, only provoked by a wordless knowing. [It is unclear what “knowing” has to do with the installation (which seems to be primarily concerned with the mystification of knowing) or how something can be provoked without being shaken.] How to wait while pain and grief continuously seep into normalcy? [If most of the animated activity in the show is the nearly invisible spectacle of the seeping away (of water), is this supposed to imply that “normalcy” is invisible and “pain and grief” are just ephemeral and leave no significant trace?] How to sit with an invisible weight on the most mundane, seemingly unrelated acts and objects of everyday life? [This question suggests that most of the work is designed to signify close to nothing sensible, just “sensed.”] In this moment when the overwhelming weight of information creates numbness, the ordinary becomes absurd. [Again, it seems to point to its emptiness, and not so much in the Zen sense of the term.] Through the interplay of dualities such as familiar and strange, public and private, real and unreal, Still Air engages with the intimacy of the political, an exploration of the personal consequences of public events as they unfold. [This garish deployment of vague contrasts seems particularly meaningless at this point and does not really reflect the overt neutrality of the work’s visual qualities.]

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Against the final framing statement, it seems more accurate to argue that the work lacks any dualities at all. The central water feature flows one way and barely ripples the pool below. As noted above, it is all very familiar aesthetically, lacking any strong contrast visually, and there is nothing really “private” about any of this. To the extent that the work is “haunted,” it is by this prosthetic appending of categories to it. While there is some suggestion of memorial or funereal architecture to the work, it also suggests pure decoration. If exhibitions previously discussed used the visual language of spas and self-care facilities as a type of joke or statement about monumentality, here, the immersive aspect of the spa seems sincere. The most intriguing aspect of the exhibition is how perverse this is. Rather than being a synthetic environment constructed to produce the effect of “wellness,” it is one designed to produce the effect of the “haunted” or the “numb.” That the exhibition is effectively a “feel bad” spa is conceptually hilarious, but seems to have been neither conscious nor played to the full. Playing it to the full would have made it demonstrative art and revealed the level of manipulation she's employing, but she seems content to retain basic (if fragile) allusion-baiting instead.

The second and lengthier supplementary text is a marginal note within the space of the installation, sitting in the window like a poster for a discount sale. The commercial real estate trappings of the exhibition space, which its various renovations have not really hidden, tend to come to the fore more in Mayil’s show than others.

I assume there is some symbolic significance to the bean shapes (historically, they often signify fertility), but what that may be here is not relayed through any aspect of the mediation, so it comes off more as strategic obscurantism. This would make sense since that is also the function the accompanying banner text (dominated by elliptical statements) seems designed to perform. Between these two aspects, there is a sort of performatively mystical minimalism.

All the pathos that is called for here is likely better articulated by almost any given bench that stretches out along the open-air mall of St Hubert Plaza where the gallery sits. Most of these benches, crusted with bird feces, vomit from late nights at cocktail bars, peeling paint, rust, graffiti, and trash from the restaurants more lucidly encapsulate what the exhibition’s supplements seem to be referencing.

The accompanying text only makes this more humorous because it performatively fails to evoke what it tries to evoke while pointing to how distant the art is from convincingly evoking it. What Mayil’s installation most forcefully seems to suggest is the distance between that referent and how she’s exploiting space to solicit potential response. One of the more striking things in her work is its shallow sense of tactility, but even that is overly muted here. The neutral colours, neutered discursive framing, flat light, weak symbolism, and overly funereal tone give the entire thing a pervasive dullness. This seems to be the affect central to it, despite some of the melodramatic gasping around the elliptical points. In this respect, Mayil has exploited the space remarkably well since going to Articule usually feels like visiting someone you barely know who is dying of cancer.

* 4th and 5th images are mine. The rest are from official social media.