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A Light That Never Goes Out at Fonderie Darling features the work of Omar Castillo Alfaro, Camille Charbonneau, Jesús Hilario-Reyes, Simon Petepiece, Jeremy Shaw, and James Webb. It was curated by Renaud Gadoury. The exhibition fills both the large and small galleries and contains primarily sculptural and sound works. The large gallery is dimly lit and the small one brightly lit. There is a general expectation that the viewer will interact with the various works, an activity that ranges from holding a soundwork to one’s body to walking through structures or around them. Textual supplements are absent in the gallery spaces.
Upon entering, the attendant informed me that it was an exhibition about the status of religion when people no longer attend church or other religious institutions. While this is scarcely accurate, the gist is that it investigates the numerous places where the “sacred” can be witnessed, something that, for whatever reason, seems to involve architecture or its elements. Conceptualizing strictly within these architectural terms would have made it stronger, but one of the chief weaknesses of the exhibition is its looseness.
The curatorial statement defines the basic thematic in terms inherited from sociology: “This disintegration of the sacred as a result of a productivity-oriented mindset is consistent with the disenchantment of the world described by the philosopher and sociologist Max Weber, which also refers to the tragic loss of meaning and mystery resulting from an escalating rationalization of reality.” This also dovetails quite easily into the justification for the existence and “productivity” of the state’s culture industry, namely, the production of enchantment (or, if you prefer, de-rationalization and de-realization). Haphazardly, the exhibition operates primarily as an illustration of the attempt to produce the sacred through the discursive mystification of objects.
Already from the outset – and leaving aside the questionable reading of Weber – what is presented as being at stake is “religion” as imagined from the “disenchanted” position of post-Kantian sociology. From then on, the text will rely on the basic clichés of the anthropological construction of religion (symbolic, behavioural, phenomenal) in order to make sense of the problem it is inventing. All of this is translated into its norms of display. This is why most of it comes off like mistaking the design and party purpose of a Pocahontas costume from a Halloween shop for the cosmology of the seventeenth-century Iroquois.
Does not deliberately taking a cross-cultural abstraction of “religion” as the exhibition does sacrifice the sacred for the sake of its profane markings? As theologians point out when they are being serious, from the vantage of “religion,” there is no religion; there is Truth. Beliefs and customs belong to something else, but if they appeal to the transcendent, it is because they are subservient to it as that which cannot be reduced to profane markings. The problem is, effectively, that the presentation of art as such is this reduction.
The curatorial enframing is justified with appeals to the nourishing of “hope” and the sacralization of “margins” which offer “light” in “darkness.” It is the kind of religion invoked for political fundraisers. In many respects, the curatorial statement is more instructive than the works themselves, so it is worth examining it at length as a point of contrast to the objective reality of the art. Since we are dealing with “religion” and “sacred” spaces, it is important to look at the liturgy that justifies concocting the aesthetic illusion.
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I’ll start with the first work that you encounter when entering the larger exhibition space. The piece by Jeremy Shaw was also shown at Bradley|Ertaskiran two years ago, where its placement in the bunker at least benefited from the gloomy atmosphere, though this did not dissipate the work’s schlocky gimmickry. According to the description, Shaw’s work is
a constellation of votive candles that flicker hypnotically, creating a hallucinatory filter for dreams and meditative wanders. Although detached from their liturgical framework, the flames retain their symbolic density: they summon the invisible sedimentation of prayer, mourning, and vows taken by candlelight, over which their flickering glow keeps watch. This entry into the subject matter sets the tone of an encounter in which the sacred keeps fluctuating and reinventing new forms.
Leaving aside the question of what “invisible sedimentation” is and whether that has anything to do with vows, the work itself highlights a few things that the text ignores. It is not simply that the candles have been detached from liturgy; they are not actually candles. They have no flames. They are automated and more like Christmas tree lights or singing rubber fish (which may have been a more persuasive metaphor). There is nothing “hallucinatory” or “hypnotic” involved — precisely the opposite. Claiming that it is an “encounter in which the sacred keeps fluctuating” is like saying a doorbell that plays the opening bars of the Fifth Symphony is a way of resurrecting Beethoven. No doubt, some might argue that such is the case, while others would say it is a form of kitsch desecration.
A few steps away stands the architectural installation Trinity (North Walk) by Simon Petepiece, a monumental structure that acts as a threshold and turns movement A LIGHT THAT NEVER GOES OUT into a ceremonial experience. Inspired by the architecture of medieval cloisters, which ritualize the passage between worldly and spiritual life, the work uses the most ordinary materials: drywall panels, metal studs, and industrial screws. Reduced to the essentials, the installation converts the poverty of these materials into a form of meditative austerity. This sparseness resonates with a long theological tradition, which views asceticism as a way of reaching the divine.
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particularly ritualistic or ceremonial at play, only props that could be employed and which, as props, become something very distinct from ceremony. There is not even the force of creating an illusion in the Petepiece work that there is a ritual at play. Besides that, there is certainly nothing “ascetic” about it. All of its exhibited meaning derives from its existence as a branded luxury experience manufactured for the state apparatus in one of the city's most bougie districts, which places it fairly far from asceticism or austerity.
The architectural elements that Petepiece employs are what you would more commonly find in neo-gothic colonial architecture than in churches. The shape of the structure likewise has far less in common with the intensely theologically and liturgically determined design of church or cloister footprints than it does with a traveling carny amusement. It is simultaneously demarcated by peripheral ornament and dominated by a stripped-down, performative puritanism that displays its materials as if they were being examined for the stains of sin. The only substantially religious aspect is the inclusion of blatant Christ references in a wall work, the one piece the curator excludes from his discussion.
Petepiece’s installation leads to the fragment of a dancefloor from a New York nightclub that the artist Jesús Hilario-Reyes has transposed into the context of the exhibition. Scattered and disordered traces cover the checkerboard pattern of the floor. Created by dancing feet, these marks translate the chaotic and unruly mass of bodies. The dancefloor becomes one of the rare contemporary spaces in which a shared transcendental experience is still possible: no longer before the altar but in the communal, pulsing beat, when the night temporarily renders us porous to one another.
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It is a fetish object with museum aesthetics. Its fetish is the fantasy of a communal experience that has left its mark, and that these marks are the unconscious language of a culture that can be read by the initiates of the cult of anthropology. The banal is reified and spiritualized not as “experience” so much as its institutionalization. This is what makes it “sacred.” Avoiding this implication is what most of the discursive framing seems designed to do. If the sacred is “everywhere” as the curator claims, why privilege this space? Is the sacred less present on the metro, at a sporting arena, in a shoe store? Is it because on a dancefloor you are likely to be wasted and have a generically “transcendent” experience? Why is this severely abstracted form of anti-asceticism directly superimposed on performative touristic asceticism if not to unwittingly suggest the emptiness of the transcendent experience of both? Otherwise, what you have is precisely the equalized, exchangeable, and rationalized treatment of the sacred that Weber regarded as one of the means and signs of disenchantment.
In response to this vestige is Salt Tolerance, a sculpture by Hilario-Reyes in two parts: a sound system and, facing it, an interweaving of metal trumpets and mangrove roots, a symbol of a rhizomatic and open identity. From the sound system emanates a techno composition created from the piercing song of the osprey, a bird whose high-pitched calls announce hurricanes, and geophonic data of the seismic activity generated by a rave. A celestial breath and an earthly beat, the storm and the party convey, each in their own way, the intensity of vibrations that pass through bodies and bring them together.
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Again, you have an appeal to the cliché of dance as spiritual, this time in the guise of nostalgia for raves. It is the idea of the sacred dear to the sort of person who takes Burning Man seriously. While the rhizomatic model is symbolic of open identity to approximately the same extent that Google is, there is also a conflation of a symbol with what the work of art actually does. In fact, the symbol closes the identity of the work, demarcating its function as a cosmological mystification.
Hanging above this soundscape, the installation Naab by Omar Castillo Alfaro features a series of stalactites composed of paraffin flowers. In the Mayan language and culture, naab refers to the white water lily, a symbol of the connection between the terrestrial and aquatic worlds. The organic form of the stalactite evokes the cenotes, natural, sacred sinkholes in which waterlilies thrive and that the Maya considered as thresholds to the underworld Xibalba. Suspended above the traces of dancing bodies, the installation superimposes two kinds of transcendence, one horizontal and collective, the other vertical and cosmological.
Given that the leading metaphor in the enframing is the cliché of “light in the darkness,” the most striking thing about this work is that it consists of campy and completely unusable candles. Far from stressing the transcendent, it stresses the sterilization of transcendent symbolism, again as nostalgia, performative sophistication, and the snobbish elevation of kitsch, marketed through appeals to cosmopolitanism.
In the adjacent Small Gallery, the work Al Madat by James Webb plays the recording of a dhikr, a Sufi chant recited by patients at the Sultan Bahu Rehab Centre, located in Cape Town, South Africa. Brought to the Cape by the enslaved Malay peoples during the colonial era, the dhikr (which means “remembrance” in Arabic) is a ritualistic practice of reciting divine names, the vocal and breathing techniques of which can induce a trance-like state. Converted into a therapeutic tool, this practice supports patients in their recovery from addiction. On the floor, Webb has placed a series of Karachi rugs, on which visitors are invited to sit or stand shoeless to experience the rhythmic voices and join, in quiet contemplation, a community of breath woven between absent and present bodies.
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This ties back to the Hilario-Reyes piece, which was the mythification of substance-fueled delirium as spiritual practice. Here, “religion” is simultaneously raped of substance to be exploited as part of a mytho-poetics of secular history and reduced to a therapeutic tool (sublimated to a tool of subjectification). While the conceptual depth of the work could have been better accomplished by simply placing a box of stale Dollarama cookies purchased for an AA meeting on a foldout table, it would not have possessed the signifers of exotic mysticism. The abjectness (and its adjacency to the sacred) would have seemed too crass, unlike this asinine but appropriately touristy version of the same thing.
In the same gallery, the work Infinite yearning met with a finite world vibrates to the rhythm of the heartbeats of a woman and her unborn child, the pulsations of which go in and out of sync. We are encouraged to take the speaker and place it against our chests in order to become part of this intimate fusion. The communion between mother and child shows birth—and with it the emergence of individuality—as a deeply relational process, blurring the boundaries between self and the other.
The thematic relationship between this work and the exhibition is tenuous at best. It is too broad and comes off more like a statement about the sentimentalizing of medical voyeurism than anything else.
The surrounding space is populated by thousands of bees that the artist Camille Charbonneau made by hand. According to Mormon tradition, from which they had to step away to live their queerness, the bee embodies unity in faith. Separated from the hive and freed from its moorings, the bee becomes open to new interpretations, hence the installation’s title of Unmoored. At the back of the space, a sculpture reproduces a fragment of a baptismal font, a central element of Mormon temples. Near and remote at the same time, these symbols draw their strangeness from a dual relationship: familiar enough to recognize, but too distant to reach, like an old acquaintance whom we think we recognize from afar without being sure.
Isn’t this the opposite of the transcendence that nearly every other work in this exhibit seems to be cast to reference? Everything about this narrativization is indicative of a flight from the sacred, but also the simultaneous mystification of an entrenched identity morally sanctified by the state.
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I will break down the conclusion one line at a time.
“An intuition underlies the entire exhibition: the sacred is always present, distributed in new and sometimes unexpected forms.” [Again, this brings up the curatorial problem of selection. Why these specific works when anything would do? In fact, the selection and rationalization of it both make the notion of this “always present” nonsense.] “It attests to the diverse rituals that bring us together and show us glimpses of the beyond.” [The reduction of the sacred to de-ritualized rituals in a tourist attraction does not so much give you a glimpse of the beyond as seem enframed to make you blind to what’s in front of you.] “The fireflies continue to glimmer for those who have learned how to see them. It is sometimes difficult to see the light in a world that seems to be getting darker under the cumulative effect of identity retrenchment, climate disruption, and an extractive economy bent on conquering all that still resist it.” [Doesn’t a reification of “identity retrenchment” form one of the guiding principles of the exhibition? Selection seems predicated on this and the “sacred” value accorded to works is largely filtered through it as part of its symbolic narrative. Is “climate disruption” something you can take seriously from a transcendent (apocalyptic) perspective? If so, is it not a positive? Is there not a history of religion going back millennia, and almost globally, that understood conquest as sacred?]
If you are religious, you could be offended by the exhibition because it is essentially Satanic in the extremely lame Church of Satan way. If you are an atheist, you could be offended because it is religious in the most asinine United Church of Canada way. If you are simply an aesthete, there is not enough substance to any of it to be offended by, and it does not even manage to be boring.
Discourse, even of the sociological variety, on the sacred has generally stressed that it is about the promotion and maintenance of taboos through organized and disciplined behaviours. The sacred tends to mark a “threshold” between realms or extremes of experience and (non)meaning, but the only threshold here is on the level of architectural ornament. The identification of the sacred with the transcendent, reduced to de-ritualized objects, raises another basic theological/thematic problem: namely, the profane, which is something the exhibition cannot really face because it is too totalizing in its definition.
It could easily have been re-conceptualized as an exhibition about profanation using the same works, and this might have said something provocative about what is at stake in display practices. While neither the works nor their curation say anything substantive about religion, they do suggest something about Contemporary Art framing devices. Everything is presented lazily in the rhetoric generic to museum displays. It treats art in the same manner that museums are often accused of when they are attacked for desecrating cultural objects and turning them into tourist displays. Rather than face what that means – which is something far closer to the issue of the “sacred” – what is presented is a sacralization of display for things that have already been decontaminated from the risk that the sacred tends to pose to order. While a great deal of Contemporary Art as a genre in Canada is deeply indebted, both symbolically and fiscally, to maintaining the political theology of the state, it typically is not this crude.
Petepiece, who has been showing fairly regularly at Nicholas Robert, is the more interesting of the half dozen artists. The bigger issue with him is the way that his works tend to be placed. In this instance, they are treated too literally, and the result feels like stultified theatre. In fact, all the work is imbued with this quality in a bad way (with a different thematic, it could be an interesting curatorial strategy). Part of the problem is that the curatorial choices are too obvious to be interesting in juxtaposition; another part is that Darling is so consistently badly lit that attempting to use the space in a dramatic way almost inevitably falls flat. If the works involved were more about the kinetic aspects of religiosity than about suggesting the future ruins of a long-vacant yoga studio, this might have been sidestepped.