Yesterday I found myself at The Power Plant for the better part of the afternoon. For one, that building is way too hot for it to be good for the art. I thought I was having hot flashes.
First I was there with my curatorial class on a field trip to see the new exhibitions and speak with the Senior Curator, Helena Reckitt. I actually really enjoyed the Steven Shearer show, which I wasn’t expecting. I got sort of overloaded on Shearer a few years ago in Vancouver and figured I would feel bored by his exhibition, but there was something about the huge accumulation of work in this show from the past decade that worked really nicely and showed a different dimension to his work. Someone described it as showing how fragile these metal band fans are beneath their façade and I think that aptly named what it was that I hadn’t considered before.
Andrea Bowers’ The Weight of Relevance project was also more complex than the press photos had lead me to believe. The video brought a few people (including my instructor) to tears, but I was drawn more to her replicas of individual patches and her meticulous pencil and crayon drawings that replicate historical documents in dizzying clarity.
I read a lot about her other bodies of work in preparation for the class and am going to seek her out in future. The video piece where civil disobedience strategies were taught to and then practiced by a ballet class sounds incredible.
But the really exciting part of yesterday’s Power Plant marathon was seeing FILM/Drop the Camera: Appropriated Footage, Cultural Anxieties a program of video art organized by Jenn Matotek that framed appropriated video work in a new way where the emotional and visceral reactions of the viewer were more important than issues of originality, copyright and all those other standard legal/rational issues people seem to reach for first when dealing with re-appropriated cultural materials. Jenn wrote a great succinct curatorial essay for the program that wasn’t printed on time but will be on her website soon.
Aside from Dara Gellman and Leslie Peters’ (awe-inspiring) Impossible Landscapes piece that collages different landscape pans from movies and pairs them with appropriate (or sometimes totally inappropriate and therefore terrifying) soundtracks, all of the videos were new to me. My favourites were Steve Reinke’s The Mendi (but really, that man can do no wrong in my books) and a short piece by Heidi Phillips that was almost impenetrable but strangely evocative of all sorts of strange movie subgenres. It also played with the medium of film in a subtle way that I appreciated.
Cait also loved Nicolas Provost’s Gravity which spliced together infinitesimally short clips of scenes of pairs of classic Hollywood movies (mostly of kissing scenes) so that they blended together. It gave this strange effect of combining limbs and bodies from two people into four, but somehow your eye could also distinguish one narrative from another. It was technically brilliant and, although I thought it was just good at the time, the more I think about it now, the more I’m impressed by it.
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