Cait has been teasing me that I’m unemployed now that classes are over and my contract job is done and I only go to an internship two days a week, but I think today I finally got the swing of things and realized I could spend all this free time riding my bike around to different shows in the city instead of staying home and (usually unsuccessfully) trying to get work done.
So today I went to the “Stutter and Twitch” group exhibition at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at U of T, curated by Chen Tamir as part of her Master’s program at the Centre for Curatorial Studies at Bard.
Nancy Davenport, Weekend Campus [still], 2004
The exhibition brings together seven artists from Canada, the US and Europe that use strategies of stillness, stasis and the manipulation of linear filmic time to create suspense and discomfort in otherwise familiar scenes. Some of the work I’ve seen before: Nancy Davenport’s Weekend Campus series and Kristan Horton’s Repeating Half-Frame are especially fresh in my mind, both having been exhibited in Canadian group shows earlier this year. I wasn’t sure that either of them were really shown to their best advantage in the Barnicke show, however. Davenport’s piece, which was shown on a set of huge flat screens at DHC/Art Foundation in the “Reenactments” show in Montreal (making the figures almost life-size), is relegated to a single small flat screen in “Stutter and Twitch,” which I don’t think totally does it justice. And, while I love Horton’s comic book homage to entropy, I couldn’t figure out how it fit into the theme, exactly. How is it stopped or stilled in any way? And wouldn’t his Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove series have made a bit more sense given the theme of stillness and stasis?
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Scary Things #2, 2006
Other works were completely new to me, however and seemed more clearly linked to the idea of suspense and filmic stuttering. The McCoys’ Scary Things #2 installation, for instance, had me totally entranced. Built as a tiny model of animals, texts, and plastic human figures in a miniature landscape, the installation then has cameras and lights positioned throughout that transmit still images to an accompanying TV nearby. The order in which the cameras capture and relay images and words seems slightly erratic, creating strange and surreal (and often ominous) sentences that turn the seemingly cute models into sinister nightmare scapes. Almost like the opening scenes of The Friendly Giant, as envisioned by Tim Burton.
Johanna Billing, Project for a Revolution [still], 2000
Johanna Billing’s video of students waiting for…well, no one knows what, is also excellent. The continuous sense of banality and suspense calls up so many hours we’ve all spent waiting in line ups for passports, driver’s licenses and other bureaucratic applications, surrounded by people we could talk to but instead sit with awkwardly and passively, waiting in a kind of limbo or stasis apart from the “real time” continuing outside of that room in the world around us.
Related
Nancy Davenport, Weekend Campus [still], 2004
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Scary Things #2, 2006
Johanna Billing, Project for a Revolution [still], 2000
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