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Workman 1

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Mackenzie

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Plural

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Review

Kenneth Hayes is an architectural historian and a critic of contemporary art.

In the early 1970s, I lived in the Dominican Republic for a year while my father worked on the startup of a ferronickel plant in Bonao. The plant’s smelter was fuelled by Venezuelan oil, shipped in by tanker from ports less than a thousand kilometres south across the Caribbean Sea. This tidy arrangement fell apart on October 16, 1973, when opec raised the price of oil by 70%, which instantly made it uneconomical to process the energy-hungry ore. The newly established smelter and the mining operations – in fact, the entire town site, with its large white-and-pastel-painted courtyard houses, leisure centre and model school – were rendered obsolete virtually overnight; expatriate workers quickly returned to their homes around the world; newly built buildings were shuttered and left to moulder, and the hopes of local people to hold stable, lucrative jobs were dashed. Ana Alenso would undoubtedly recognize this profoundly destructive and wasteful event as a distant reflection of the catastrophes repeatedly rained upon her home country of Venezuela by its resource extraction economy. Her recent work is dedicated to understand- ing and exposing the paradoxical cultural condition of growing poverty in the nation with the world’s largest proven reserves of oil.

In a single-room gallery, opening directly from the sidewalk, the artist installed a system of scaffolding both functional (it offered the means to climb to a second level within the relatively tall space and thereby gain novel perspectives on the sculptural assemblage) and symbolic (inasmuch as it signified a chaotic, perpetually unfinished project). From the gallery’s entrance, ramps rose to a low platform that supported an empty, green oil barrel held at an angle of about 15 degrees off the vertical by a system of ropes and pulleys. Although raised above the floor, the barrel appeared something like the nadir of a spatial vortex, as if the last drops were being extracted from an all-but-drained source. The barrel functioned simultaneously as a unit of wealth, a signifier of resources and as a sculptural volume. The artist’s statement reveals that the installation’s overriding form alludes to the infamous El Helicoide building in Caracas, a huge, multi-tiered construction built around a natural mound known as Roca Tarpeya. Inaugurated in the late 1950s as a drive-in shopping mall, the exorbitant, ziggurat-like project was left unfinished due to political indecision and inertia, and, since its abandonment, it has been put to various nefarious uses, from squatter settlement to headquarters of the repressive Bolivarian Intelligence Service. While the form of the scaffolding may reference the spiral Helicoide, the barrel makes it possible to recognize the installation’s spatial schema as resembling a particular exemplar of modern sculpture, Umberto Boccioni’s Futurist _Development of a Bottle in Space_ (1913).

The artist festooned the crude scaffold spiral with several discrete interventions seemingly designed to exhaust the means by which a sculpture installation may be supplemented: video, in the form of a small monitor that rewards the viewer for climbing to the second level; audio, in a recording of the trading patter at a commodities exchange, emanating from the barrel; movement, in a lump of asphalt displayed on a rotating platform near the entrance; by reflection, in a mirror that provided the base of a found-object assembly of hand tools that resembles the iconic teeter-totter structure of a pumpjack; and through drawing, left on the plastic-clad walls after a public discussion. Each of these inclusions merits more analysis than is possible here, but it is the video that best exemplifies the artist’s discursive, even didactic, intentions. Composed of found footage and running for just 3 minutes and 15 seconds, it collages together phantasmagorical scenes of a television game show in which paper currency is blown into a transparent chamber containing a contestant, archival footage of an environmental disaster at an oil pumping station, and a plaza full of people looting a shipment of flat-screen televisions, seemingly only in order to wantonly smash them on the ground. These images are bluntly overlaid with graphs depicting oil consumption levels and prices. The artist has sampled the broad array of social and cultural ills that accompany the unearned wealth that flows from the ground, and in doing so, demonstrates the perpetually disrupted, unfinished modernity of a nation grown both corrupt and dependant on a volatile international commodities market.

In effect, Alenso has invented a powerful sculptural idiom, one that might be described as a disenchanted version of the _Tropicália_ that has been referenced or represented in this space on other occasions. She makes work deliberately shorn of the ’60s movement’s exuberance and drained of its famed vibrant colour. Her sculpture reduces the informal vigour of naive art to a brutal aggression that nevertheless seems to gain in spatial interest. In doing so, she recalls the unlikely amalgam of Surrealism and Bauhaus formal- ism that strongly influenced post-war art throughout South America, but renders it with an acute awareness of contemporary macro-economic contradictions that verge on theatre of the absurd, and pursues a staggeringly direct material economy that shows up the high modern love of industry as just so much chrome fetishism. It is not by accident that this exhibition took place in Berlin, nor that the artist studied at the Bauhaus. Indeed, the industrial lamps incorporated into the installation cast harsh rays of light on and through the diaphanous scaffolding and various other perforated materials, producing shadows that vividly recall the \_Light-Space Modulator \_ that László Moholy-Nagy built at the Bauhaus between 1922 and 1930.

_Tropical Curse_ presents a deep cultural analysis of the precarity, social disorder, environmental damage and general profligacy that natural bounty seems to bring in its wake, especially for countries of the Global South. Alenso takes a gimlet-eyed look back on the Venezuelan experience of modernity and at the same time peers forward to the all-too-foreseeable consequences of her nation’s resource dependency. The artist has rendered a strange, tropical depression in a small room far removed from her home; she clearly expects it will develop into a hurricane.

Writer

Performance

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This article review’s Ana Alenso’s exhibition Tropical Curse at Kinderhook & Caracas in Berlin, presented from Nov. 7 – Dec.5, 2015.

Ana Alenso: Tropical Curse

Craig Francis Power is an artist and writer from St. John’s.

_Enter the fog_, co-curated by Josée Drouin-Brisebois and Mireille Eagan, brings together the work of four internationally celebrated artists – Maya Beaudry, Tiziana La Melia and collaborative duo Tamara Henderson and Julia Feyrer – all of whom foreground process over final product and invest heavily in a codified and extremely personal visual language that invites active viewer participation, as opposed to passive reception of the material and ideas manifested therein. At least, this is what we’re told the exhibition’s about. In truth, the works operate in much the same fashion as most exhibitions do – objects are offered up for us to con- sider, or not, as the case may be.

In an email conversation with Eagan, she talked about the exhibition as follows:

> For the visitor in particular, the show was an invitation – to understand that it is perfectly fine to draw like a child, to lie on the floor with a security guard in the room, to embrace the strange and uncomfortable, to make a mess and sit with it for a while. We wanted to promote a subjective experience, so we chose to keep the curatorial voice to a minimum and let the artists’ words act as clues in coded spaces. We asked the visitor to put aside expectations surrounding art – a positioning that may or may not have happened. This was the risk. Overall, it was a risk, but that was why it was important.

One cannot overstate the importance of explanatory wall text for the exhibition, given that the works presented are so very codified that your average viewer – maybe one of the parents here for the “Big Fun For Little People” weekly kids program, which includes finger-painting, drawing, singing and puppet- making (talk about active participation!) – would be hard-pressed to decipher the very good intentions of the artists whose work is on display. Enter the fog, indeed.

Maya Beaudry “creates physical and imagined mind spaces in which we are invited to take refuge or meditate and/or escape our reality and explore our thoughts.”[^1] Her _Prototype for Crisis Room (with Mind Home Mock-Up and Three Vision Boards)_ presents a corner of the gallery space marked off with shiny aluminum tape, three images on canvas of home interiors that look borrowed from an interior design magazine and a body pillow made in the shape of a stylized woman who seems to be jogging. This work “acts as a form of sanctuary where one can be mindful and exist in the present moment, free from distractions.” Beaudry’s ongoing _Jogging the Mindscape_ project, represented in the exhibition with her _Padded Lamp (with body pillow for Jogging the Mindscape)_ “reminds us that the goal of mindscape jogging, where we literally take our thoughts for a run, is to embrace and value excess energy by channelling it into a form of daily mental exercise.” Believe me, exhausted as I was from the daily grind of work and home life, if there’s one thing I wanted to embrace it was that body pillow, but the security guard in the gallery told me that I wasn’t allowed to touch the work. I’d have to sleep at home. 

Tiziana La Melia’s work “weaves together her paintings, sculptures and writings in layered installations that delve into personal narratives.” The works range from La Melia’s writing printed onto large-scale textile works, to spontaneous gesture drawings on sheets torn from the Yellow Pages, to a giant sculptural reproduction of Janis Joplin’s iconic sunglasses. La Melia is a poet as well as a visual artist and her installation _The Eyelash and the Monochrome_ addresses the act of writing itself. Confronted by the metronomic taunt of the blinking cursor in her Word program during a bout of writer’s block (the eyelash) and the unyielding white field of the page before her (the monochrome), La Melia created a sprawling installation where “each work is a piece of a greater puzzle, and together they form a series of symbols that have multiple meanings.” Writer’s block – now that’s some- thing I can relate to. It’s a symptom of an even greater anxiety, one no doubt La Melia has herself experienced: the suspicion that the creative life to which you’ve dedicated your energies is utterly meaningless. As a writer myself, I’m serious when I say there have been nights in bed where I was trying to sleep but all I could see behind my closed eyes was that intimidating blank page. For La Melia, the works in the installation “articulate an unusual and ambiguous language or code that we are invited to decipher and contribute to with our own interpretations.” But the question for the viewer remains: _Does the effort required to decipher this work pay off in terms of a greater, more revelatory meaning? Or is the unknowable quality of such personal explorations the whole point?_ I found myself remember- ing all those clichéd stories of artistic genius I’d learn- ed about in art school – Van Gogh cracking up in a solitary obsession, Baudelaire mad from syphilis, Pollock drinking himself to death, et cetera – a bunch of oracles totally losing their minds due to their deeply personal artistic visions. Is La Melia’s work an ironic critique of this well-worn history? Or does she embrace it? There is no answer – just ambiguity.

“Dreams, altered states and unconscious meanderings” proliferate the collaborative practice of Julia Feyrer and Tamara Henderson. Consisting of sculpture, drawing and painting, their installation, conceived specifically for this exhibition, takes its inspiration from the shape-shifting figure of the Old Hag, a nightmarish entity known outside of Newfoundland as sleep paralysis. Victims vividly hallucinate a witch-like being or other supernatural force present in the room, or sometimes sitting directly on their chests, which renders them immobile and suffocating. Feyrer and Henderson’s _Old Hag_, displayed in a room separate from the rest of the works in the exhibition and constructed using material scavenged from all over the Avalon Peninsula, is a towering figurative sculpture in a darkened room. It’s a collection of garbage– a busted basketball, kitschy miniature plastic trees, a lightning globe as her lone, bright eye – but the sculpture is the terrifying embodiment of our collective nightmares, junk and detritus reformed into a dark presence that dominates the room.

High up on one of the walls, two eyes constructed from neon lights open and close repeatedly, suggesting the doorway between dream and “reality” is in a constant state of flux. Four clocks, set at different times, covered in a melted, wax-like substance reminiscent of ectoplasm, hang underneath, while blown- glass bottles in the shape of the Old Hag, and filled with potions of some kind, rest on plinths nearby.

With its emphasis on open-endedness, play, the unconscious, personal narrative and process over product, _enter the fog_ presents a challenging exhibition of contemporary work. As the title of the exhibition suggests, viewers will be invited to lose themselves in the non-linear nature of the installation, relying not on a logical or rational interpretation, but rather an immersive experience where intuition and free association reign supreme.

[^1]: All non-italicized quotes come from the accompanying wall text for the exhibition.

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This article reviews enter the fog, an exhibition of the work of four artists; Maya Beaudry, Tiziana Le Melia, Tamara Henderson and Julia Feyer. enter the fog was presented at The Rooms in St. John’s from Feb. 6 – April 24, 2016.

enter the fog

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