Reviews: Lynda Gaudreau at Centre Vox; Megan Wade-Darragh at Duran Contemporain; Wanda Koop at Blouin|Division; David Altmejd at Bradley|Ertaskiran
There are half a dozen basic elements to Gaudreau's show. At the entrance is a wall of staggered images in a dark, makeshift alley. Once you walk through that, there is a little table with coloured lights and some magazines covered in plastic you can flip through. In the anteroom is a prop version of the type of press kiosk that once existed in Montréal, filled with stacks of tabloids, or the “yellow press.” There are two trailers projected for a giallo film (one at a time): one from the perspective of the investigation and one from the victims'. And there is a sound installation, consisting of fragments of music, dialogue, gasps, etc.
According to the accompanying text:
The storyline, inspired by the aesthetics of Italian giallo cinema, proceeds through a series of crimes in which the victims’ eyes are mutilated. This motif references the drive and desire to see that is integral to cinema and visual culture. In both the giallo and photonovel genres, that impulse is often inscribed in a voyeuristic, gendered economics that transforms female bodies into a spectacle of violence and desire. The narrative thus exposes the impulse metaphorically, while prompting the audience to think about its role; the act of seeing becomes uncertain, fragmented, constantly questioned.
It is another in the centre’s series What Exhibition Does to Books, examining the possible translations and (a)synchronies between books and exhibition practices. Like the previous instance I reviewed, it doesn’t work that well, but it’s interesting. It feels underdone and generally sketchy.
“Sketchiness” could apply to the ostensibly shocking material, none of which is dealt with explicitly or salaciously; it is more implied or relegated to atmosphere. But I mean sketchy more in the sense that it feels like an underdeveloped drawing. The photo roman, borrowing heavily from comic book form, is marked by the real difference of not being drawn. And it is the relation to photography and graphicness (in the double sense of the graphic form and graphic content) that is central to the exhibition.
Most of the exhibition seems to be about occluding the graphic, not simply in the case of the extremely mild imagery (it is less translation than bowdlerization, a potentially interesting choice that is not explored much), but in its general display. It is all dark in a way that (as with everything else in it) is a doubling – the theatricalizing of film theatre space.
Beyond being defined by the relation between text bubbles and image, the photo roman, much like the comic, is essentially sequential. This creates both its particular temporal quality and its discretionary progressive flow (the reader/viewer can stop, move back and forth, scan non-linearly, etc.). While the visitor to the exhibition can also come and go, they are more at the mercy of the artist’s way of limiting and dictating duration.
While all the elements are interesting (maybe just because I am interested in them anyway), together, they don’t either gel into something cohesive or clash in a way that inspires much. It feels like a lacklustre theme park. A library that you can’t really use, so it just becomes scenography. The trailer format is an interesting choice, but it seems to imply far more about how a trailer operates than it suggests much about photo romans (film trailers consisting of still images, text, and jarring sound were hardly rare in the 1960s).
The sonic aspect feels like it was cobbled together from throwaway material from Mike Patton’s “Franco-Italian” phase (early Fantômas and Mondo Cane), but lacks most of that thick aggression and comes off like a cluster of punctuation marks stranded in shallow space. Perhaps that’s a deliberate nod to the comic book aspect, but the various aspects of the exhibition are not really integrated. They are a tasting menu rather than an actual meal. This goes well with the “trailer” format that she chooses to utilize.
One of the other traits of gialli was, like most Italian films of the time, they had non-synchronous sound and were flatly dubbed in any of the languages in which they would be circulated. This tended to clash with the extremely lush soundtracks they were wrapped in, rupturing any depth to the atmosphere, much as the spare, violent imagery and sensuous set décor clashed with the frequently terrible pacing. All of these common stylistic tendencies made the majority of gialli dysfunctional as the thrillers they were designed to be. Maybe more than anything else, this is what comes through in this exhibition. But, again, that suggests far more about gialli than it does the photo roman, which employed a great variety of genres in its form.
The framing text provided by Duran offers an appreciably slender and relatively convincing rationale for the exhibition.
Suspended between appearance and disappearance, the works evoke the unstable mechanics of recollection through luminous stains, blurred forms, and fractured surfaces. Influenced by Roland Barthes' concept of the "filmic" and theories of spectrality, Wade-Darragh's practice approaches memory not as a fixed archive, but as a mutable process shaped by repetition, decay, and reconstruction. The paintings exist within a temporal threshold where past and present continuously permeate one another, transforming the image into a spectral afterimage rather than a stable document.
The 10x8 wood panels of acrylic and oil paintings span the walls of the gallery space, all set at the same height. The imagery, not always legible, appears to be film stills. They are not presented singularly, but in pairs, vertically stacked, involving different shots at different angles or distances. The imagery leaps from one distinct set of objects/figures to another, rather than presenting shifts in action and their decomposition.
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Dominated by shades of blue, purple, pink, and green, some of the images seem to recur with variation, set at seemingly irregular distances, making it hard to tell without crossing back and forth. The viewer has to function like an editor. It is another instance of the kind of mix-and-matchism that pops up in galleries, casting the work as a puzzle that exploits or plays with its lack of resolution. It seems to be about rules testing (also one of the favoured concepts in cognitively oriented film theory).
In their distortions and colouration, Wade-Darragh’s pieces resemble the results of photo transfers using things like glue and gesso, or the bleed to the back of a photo printed on paper if it becomes wet. It feels like a show about film theory books more than anything else. The way the images are presented resembles the grids that such texts rely upon when breaking down sequences. More accurately, it appears like the mimicking of a transfer of such imagery as much as dramatizing the testing of memory. This dramatizing aspect is supplemented by the use of a projector as a prop, which highlights how the experience of the exhibition is quite distant from that of watching a film projection. If each panel were a frame being projected, the entire exhibition would last about two seconds and be a blur.
Wade-Darragh’s exhibition (perhaps unintentionally) is working on some of the same issues raised by the Vox exhibition above. However, in this case, the issues of form and genre translations seem to have been worked out in a more rigorous and precise way.
It is an insipid show by Wanda Koop presented in a perfunctory way by the gallery. The acrylic paintings run through three basic themes/figures: moons against various curves and colour fields, eyes, and candles. A holdout is a set of “monolithic” tree figures. The gallery frames the show in the following terms:
This spring, amid global conflicts and growing uncertainty around A.I., the space expedition Artemis II circled the moon, drawing it back into the public consciousness. For a brief news cycle, the world’s attention shifted outward, away from divisive politics and technological anxiety towards a more enlightened perspective. The crew snapped images of Earthset and captivated us with portraits of what our planet really is: a glistening disc of beautiful, improbable life.
Although Koop has been one of the most rewarded artists in the country in recent decades, it is often unclear why. Her work is sometimes tied to the vague historiographic tag of “Prairie painting” and filled with always-popular landscape/cityscape motifs. These are presented with a graphic reductiveness verging on the abstract, making them appropriate for vague thematic editorializing. But her thinness is pushed a lot further in this instance at Blouin|Division. While she made her career doing decorative “translations” of TV imagery of war that were intriguingly subversive because whatever “moral” implication they possessed was unclear, that sort of ambiguity is not present here, and neither is her sometimes more deft handling of basic design elements.
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The paintings in this exhibition rely on object simplification that is usually so forced it becomes grating. The best thing that can be said for it is that, when first encountering the pieces, you can see one large painting of the moon at the far wall, almost obscured by the exit sign in the path of vision. It makes for a striking juxtaposition. However, the paintings do not generally fare this well, either on their own or set as a group. The sense of texture, design, and general paint handling all underwhelm. The worst of them are the “Untethered” and “Moon Walk” series, which look like bad undergrad paintings. If you wanted to be too imaginative, you could argue this has something to do with the very broadly defined tendency to “bad painting” that surfaced forty years ago, and these are bland throwbacks to that. But there really is no conceptual justification for that unless they are jokes about the sump of nostalgia in contemporary painting.
I have never enjoyed a David Altmejd show. They are usually interesting but don’t work. This one is better than his recent show at Galerie de l’UQAM. The works at Bradley|Ertaskiran are reminiscent of 1930s surrealism, from the handwriting at the base, which recalls Magritte, to the Man Ray-style rendering on some of the heads, to the employment of mythical beast figures layered in sexual suggestiveness that was rampant a hundred years ago.
Rather than the history of art (fine or popular) that his work clearly channels, it is framed by appeals to mythology and religion.
Though movement and repetition have long factored into the artist’s process, here multiplication as a technical and conceptual tool takes heightened prominence; sculpted beings are erected from accumulated, repeating rows of nipples, ears, and other armatures, both handmade and machine-made, growing outwards and upwards with uncontrollable and supernatural fortitude. Throughout, these chains of repeated body parts ripple and shift almost imperceptibly from one iteration to the next, until, at a certain threshold, they glitch. Order eventually erupts. This perfect matrix accumulates pressure until rupture, revealing a chaotic energy latent all along.
Like most of Altmejd’s work, there is a prop quality to it that stops his pieces from possessing the imposing weight of sculpture. They remain parts of a scene more than realized objects. Even though they are large, they seem shrunken. This peculiar effect is one of the more impressive things about them. The figures have a stuttered quality to their surface articulation, as though they are 3-D printouts of early 80s video effects applied to icons. This adds to their general quality of falling somewhere between industrial prototypes for toys that never made it to the mall and bad folk art. The latter aspect is stressed in his amateurish drawing on the surfaces of the pieces, whether in crayon, pencil, pencil crayon, or marker. It gives them the quality of rummage sale junk while making a display of performative childishness. This may be nowhere more obvious than in the set of “rabbit” busts that sit at the entrance to the bunker by the toilets.
In certain respects, Altmejd’s general approach works better at this scale than in his more elaborate installations. His sense of teen jerk-off fantasy in suspended animation is in full force here, and unencumbered by the excessive neo-baroqueness that often pushes his work into the realm of weak theatre.
* Images for the first and final exhibition are my own. The other two are from the official Instagram accounts of the galleries.