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Review

Opening its doors this fall with enthusiastic aplomb, the new Polygon Gallery marks an important moment in the history of Presentation House, the name by which this photo-focused gallery has been known for the past 40 years. After establishing itself as an international participant in the presentation and discussion of the discipline, the gallery has grown out of its historic home up the hill and has stepped into a new spacious, purpose-built site down on the energetic Lonsdale Quay. Perched at the edge of the harbour, the building’s new metal-clad surface reflects the land, water and people around it. It’s a suitable effect for a gallery that has been committed to focusing on the mirror of mediums, photography.

_N. Vancouver_, the first exhibition here, has an appropriately conceptual sound to its name. It feels similar to the name of Lucy Lippard’s Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition, _955,000_, which drew its title from the population of the city in 1970\. The latter was the first survey of conceptualism here, and its impact was profound. As noted by local art critic Michael Turner, Lippard’s exhibition and ideas are “a big reason why Vancouver art looks and feels the way it does.”[^1]

North Vancouver is not technically Vancouver[^2] but it has nonetheless been home to many Vancouver artists, including Iain and Ingrid Baxter when they worked together as N.E. Thing Co. Participants in the _955,000_ exhibition, they are represented here in Polygon’s main gallery through vintage works in which they document the city’s car lot canopies, simulated tree structures, cement transfer walls and yard-front statuary shops. Their cool observation and dry articulation of the urbanized environment was an important precursor to much art that followed. This mode of historical materialism is a trenchant discourse in Vancouver art, and major works by Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham, as well as commissioned pieces by Stan Douglas, Steven Waddell and Greg Girard, are installed in the exhibition to create a literal horizon, circling the gallery. Their pictured places alternate back and forth between resource extraction and sites of leisure, a sweeping sky often framing their foregrounded locals in an expanse of natural sublime. This is the photography for which Vancouver is known, and which the gallery has helped champion. More than a literal picturing of this place, it is a background of ideas and an acknowledgment of the history of art in this area.

Since his arrival at the gallery over a decade ago, director Reid Shier has pushed the envelope of the galleries photo-based mandate, expanding ideas of lens-based practice. Shows like _Male_, from the collection of disco connoisseur Vince Aletti, with more drawing and painting than photography, and the resurrection of Glenn Lewis’ large ceramic wall work _Artifact_ (1970), installed in his 2010 retrospective for the first time since its censorship,[^3] present physical traces of the photographed image’s aura as it manifests in a wide variety of contemporary forms. _N. Vancouver_ pushes this expansion forward with the extensive inclusion of sculpture, with strong work by relatively emerging artists within the gallery and newly commissioned works sited throughout the building itself.

Lippard’s conceptual influence again reverberates here. Both Holly Ward’s _Raw Goods_, equal portions of locally sourced sulfur and coal (known to locals from waterside processing plants) are poured onto the concrete floor of a vacant ground-level window space and Tim Lee’s inverted video image of the sign over _Lonsdale Quay_, _North Vancouver_, _August 25, 2017_ appropriate Robert Smithson’s strategies of displacement and inversion, respectively, to realize aesthetic allegories from recognizable elements of the city’s landscapes. Also in the lobby, Myfanwy MacLeod’s newest Hogarthian caricature is a monumental scorched wooden boat, modelled after Captain George Vancouver’s ship, and draped with a Union Jack. The charcoal surface is pungent, a ship burnt with exploit. Also exploring the colonial past is a new, permanent work by Brian Jungen, another inverted readymade.

The stark white _Upside down flagpole_, 2017, has, at its base, a sculptural clump of dirt, uprooted, molded and hard-coated with polyurea. The work currently lives in cement supports, awaiting erection following the completion of the sidewalks outside, when this evidence of deracination will be heisted into the air, its flag end planted in the ground. Collectively, the scale and siting of these works established a phenomenological dimension to the exhibition, that made me aware of my own physicality in the space.

This feeling was enhanced by the integration of sculpture with photography upstairs. Cameron Kerr’s table of _Untitled_ abstract interpretations of North Vancouver overpasses lent a tangible physicality to Babak Golkar’s photographs documenting his artist friends’ works, on loan, in his North Shore home (including one by Kerr). Their projects seem to emphasize the role of artist as an autonomous transgressor – of ideas working themselves out, things being made here through artistic conversations. In these galleries, discoveries were made by the inclusion of weavings by Xwemilut, Katxinamet, Melvin Williams and Sesemiya in this dialogue. These works – by artists from the Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish nations, having reserved land in the area – added another material layer, presented not so much as a parallel language to conceptual art, but a moment to sound voices as critical inclusion. One feels a distance between the work of these artists and the conceptual projects nearby; I wondered if this is because their original purpose is in their potential communal (often ceremonial) use. Here, they are presented as representational artifact.

These divergent perspectives of traditional and contemporary approaches seemed to convene in the work of Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, which offers here a way of coming together. Hill is a sophisticated sculptor with a lot to say, which she manages to do with very little. In her _Four Effigies For the End of Property: Preempt, Improve, The Highest and Best Use, Be Long_ (2017), she gathers the discards of the urban environment and harnesses them in sculpture. The nearly usable _Preempt_, whose hose continuously flows back into itself through a series of gradated funnels, or the latent potential of _Improve_, a woven fence of found fences, hold onto an aspect of their use value. Assembled as linguistic systems of failure, there is a practicality to the reuse and re-evaluation of material; it is presented as myth and still somehow feels available to use, for daily life. Hill’s _Effigies_ succeed in realizing resonate visual models through which to consider our shared materiality.

[^1]: Michael Turner, “Lucy Lippard”, (March 7, 2016), [https://mtwebsit.blogspot.com/2016/03/lucy-lippard.html](“https://mtwebsit.blogspot.com/2016/03/lucy-lippard.html”)
[^2]: North Vancouver is a city on the north side of the Burrard Inlet, established in the 1880s; its primary economies today are shipping, chemical production and film.
[^3]: The work was commissioned for the Canada Pavilion at the 1970 Osaka World Fair.

Time

issue-137-p60-62.pdf

Lee Plested reviews “N. Vancouver”, the inaugural exhibition at the new Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver that was on view November 18, 2017-April 29, 2018\. 

N. Vancouver

Charmaine Li is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Berlin. Her work has appeared in _Newsweek, Maisonneuve, AnOther Magazine, Kinfolk Magazine_ and _CNN Travel_ among other publications.

> “Just then I found a strange refuge – ‘by chance,’ as they say – though I believe there is no such thing. If you need something desperately and find it, this is not an accident; your own craving and compulsion leads you to it.” — _Hermann Hesse_ \[1\]

If a coincidence is in the eye of the beholder, then reading such chance events involves being attentive enough to notice as the fragments of our lives collide. In Moyra Davey’s work, chance propels her artistic impulses. And through these chance encounters, she comes to engage myriad writers, photographers and filmmakers in telling her personal histories. In the exhibition _Portrait / Landscape_ at Galerie Buchholz in Berlin, the artist presented two of her films alongside a suite of photographic works, most of which are rooted in the minutiae of her everyday. 

Like several of Davey’s previous films, _Hemlock Forest_ (2016) is largely shot in her New York apartment and weaves together her reflections on literary and artistic figures with intimate revelations from her personal life. The 41-minute film, a sequel to her 2011 work _Les Goddesses_, has a simple camera setup – it depicts Davey with earphones on, pacing in front of incongruous shots of windows, corridors and shards of sunlight emblazoned on walls, while reciting an essay she has written. 

In a measured and dispassionate tone, she contemplates the value of art where little is at risk; a subway scene in Chantal Akerman’s film _News from Home_ (1977); anxieties about her son leaving for college; Karl Ove Knausgaard’s shame; her judgements of her sister’s drinking; Mary Wollstonecraft’s family history; her own addiction to her work. The array of references reveals Davey’s proclivity for following resonant bits of material and wayward events to uncover more of her truth – like a kind of salvation. In an age saturated with blogging and oversharing, confessions can easily teeter on the edge of self-indulgence and solipsism, but in _Hemlock Forest_ they seem necessary in confronting painful experiences and finding order in chaos. Although Davey’s revelations are often steeped in her own concerns, there’s a sense of detachment in her voice that establishes a distance from her material. She speaks candidly about her deep anxiety of shooting scenes in public, exposes intimate details about her opinions of family and friends, and recalls an instance when she urinated in front of an ATM machine due to her deteriorating health – all in a slow, nearly robotic, tone. This distancing brings to mind Vivian Gornick’s notion that a writer needs to fashion a persona out of one’s self in order to tell a personal narrative that’s of value to the disinterested reader.[^2] What’s left in is just as important as what’s ignored. 

As _Hemlock Forest_ unfolds, meditative sequences punctuate the film and inject the feeling of slowness – wavering treetops, Davey’s restaging of Akerman’s NYC subway scene, her son posing, flipping through a series of old photographs. Slip-ups and stutters remain in the final cut, amplifying the disquieting energy reverberating throughout. During the making of the film, the news breaks that Akerman has unexpectedly committed suicide. This drives Davey to revisit the Belgian filmmaker’s work and throws _Hemlock Forest_ into a new direction, which she discloses in the narration. 

_Hemlock Forest_ unveils the reading, writing, thinking and connecting involved in telling a story, even including a bibliography at the end. In this way, it’s concerned with filming the process of making as a means to an end. “I’m piecing together fragments because I don’t yet have a subject,” she says monotonously before referring to Roland Barthes. 

Choosing is easier than inventing and he wondered how he might pass from notes and fragments to the novel. He speculated that he was breaking the ultimate rule of writers, speaking about a nascent work, and that his work might in the end be the notes on its making. 

Nevertheless, as Davey speaks, the threads come together to form a non-linear storytelling that is singularly her own. 

In a similar vein to her films, Davey’s photography tends towards quotidian details and against the monumental. Two separate rooms at the back of the gallery are lined with clusters of her “mailers” – small chromogenic prints left unframed and pinned to the wall. She mails each of them, folding the poster-sized prints up, hand-writing the address of specific galleries on the image side and sealing them with squares of brightly coloured tape. What began as an efficient way to mail photographs to a friend in 2009 has developed into an ongoing component of her practice. These prints leave vestiges of their epistolary journeys, introducing new meaning to the photographs. _Hoardings_ (2016) is a series of 12 modestly sized images – close-ups of bare trees in winter, gnarled tree branches, converging tree trunks – arranged in a 3 × 4 grid. In some photos, Davey has saturated and manipulated the colours to the extent that they’re reminiscent of infrared photographs. This effect, alongside the geometric patterns of the tape on the surfaces of the images – which resemble a camera’s view finder – draws the visitor’s attention towards the details and textures of the natural phenomena that might be overlooked in a larger tableau. Accompanying these folded images in the exhibition are more traditional black-and-white photographs held in glass-clip picture frames, taken by Davey, her partner, Jason Simon and her son, Barney Simon-Davey. 

The exhibition takes its name from Davey’s photographic installation _Portrait / Landscape_ (2017). A constellation of 66 mailers features portraits of Davey’s son and his friends taken from different angles, detailed shots of various names written in cursive as well as photographs of negatives and old photos of her sisters. Here, the artist incorporates the practice of repurposing existing photographs by re-photographing them. It unveils yet another way to look at her subjects – subjects with which the viewer is familiar as Davey circles back to them again and again in her work. _Wedding Loop_ (2017), situated across from _Portrait/Landscape_ also illustrates the cyclical nature of Davey’s work. The film follows a formal strategy similar to _Hemlock Forest_ and _Les Goddesses_ but this time it is loosely centred on family tensions at a wedding and linked with corresponding events from the biography of 19th-century British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. 

Subways – which inspired her 2011 photo series _Subway Writers_ and became a large part of _Hemlock Forest_ – reappear, but are captured from a voyeuristic perspective. Other themes that interlace her previous works also return in _Wedding Loop,_ but here Davey presents them slightly altered: self-doubt; family drama; the investigation of artistic work; motherhood; the difference between documenting a life versus living it. The works in _Portrait / Landscape_ offer no resolution nor totality, but there is a sense of Davey’s becoming. The artist is concerned with bringing the process of making into focus through a labyrinthine artistic framework that unfurls across the personal and the historical in slow motion. What is tangible here are the ways in which voracious reading, writing, photographing and filming are Davey’s methods to grope her way through her inner life and excavate meaning from detected coincidences and connections. 

[^1]: Hermann Hesse, _Demian_ (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated, 1965).
[^2]: Vivian Gornick, _The Situation and the Story_ (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).

Writer

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Charmaine Li reviews Moyra Davey’s exhibition “Portrait/Landscape” which showed at Galerie Buchholz in Berlin from August 30-October 21, 2017.

Moyra Davey: Portrait / Landscape 

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