I feel that my eyes have been cleaned, my soul lightened and my mind illuminated after experiencing Noel Bégin's A Panoptique Diapositive Diorama Making Diaphanous of the Diabolical. A cross-fading event of an installation, this highly orchestrated arrangement of slide projections and photo viewers, which was conceived, built, used, and dismantled in two days, seems comparable in complexity to the construction sites, circuit boards and nature cross-sections represented in the piece, except that it developed much faster, as if a time-lapsed version of the real. Noel's total involvement with this on-the-fly project meant that he hardly had time to inform us all of this replete work, housed at the individually welcoming yet professional alternative space of the Carpet N Toast Gallery which also hosted a performance by Los Greasy Bombers the next night. But those of us who know Noel or his ephemeral and technically immaculate works, can imagine the enthrallment of walking through an entire room exhibiting his Newtonian exploration of light and colour refraction and finely tuned consideration of all aspects of his media- conceptual, literal, imaginative, technical, and relational.

What seemed to strike most visitors initially was the play of light and colour patterns clinging to their bodies like clothing as they walked amongst the floor-mounted vintage projectors, set up so that it took time to determine where the source of the image originated and how it was that your self seemed to become enmeshed with- or dissolved into the air, itself rendered lush and active with photons. A visitor commented that he felt every part of the environment to be dynamic and interactive, although only our bodies were in motion. Such is the magic inherent in the outdated, abandoned medium of the slide projector, which this artist is willing to discover and re-invent.

The projections were manipulated in several ways to create the feeling of the viewer's immediate world becoming that of a virtual world. The projected images did not appear distinct from one another, nor did they hit a surface in typical rectangular form. Instead, the borders of the images were blurred, one image was keyed-out by another, others refracted off a surface or freestanding screen, or were connected visually to the surrounding space and objects through continuous lines and textures. A beautiful example of this was a small cylinder made of white paper sitting in the back of the room, upon which three different slides- a red pylon, a woman walking, and a weather balloon- all bled together in a single cyclical image around the screen.

This de-centered or multi-centered view mobilized the viewer to experience an unfolding and composite reality. A small picture viewer, altered so that its light switch stayed on, was placed on top of each projector, and so a shared or outward facing image was structurally paired with a small, almost secret, personal view of another image. If part of the intention was to open up subjective awareness to our being in and of the world (and to work against the usual feeling of subject/object separation) then the images of nature, patterns, and people adorned in the clothing of far-off, non-Western places, took us further from ourselves, presenting what Claire Bishop calls the dream scene in her categorization of the four distinct bodily experiences offered by installation art. Installations operating as dream spaces provide a context for rethinking the world according to personal affects and associations. As there were many real-world images to piece together in this installation, our being touched by and integrated into the light or material of the images meant that they absolutely were felt in a new and personal way. A further connection to a dream space is made by the fact that the installation took place in a sealed off room in the basement, accessed by a narrow staircase, as if one had to descend into a subconscious realm, where nothing was illuminated by natural light, but by an inner source, akin to dreams.

Noel was present to guide visitors through the space, to shed light on some technological mysteries, and to tell stories relating to his experiences with obsolete or obscure machines and processes. With numerous bulbs lit and fans buzzing in the room, it was as if we sat around an electrical campfire, impelled to reflect on the nature of technology and our world. One story Noel related was based on a found slide of a man in Vietnam who had built a resourceful shade structure out of bamboo and mud under which to work. The artist's enthusiasm about efficient uses of energy and a relationship with nature, about graceful design and creative engineering, is exemplified in his anecdote and courses through his own work.

Much of the imagery in Noel's recent work has examined either man-made structures and technologies such as geological surveying, or the technology of nature found in the microcosms of insect worlds. In A Panoptique Diapositive, slides of construction sites, houses, roadways, machines, fences, and other inventions symbolize an infiltrated world of productivity and the transformation of natural resources into infrastructure. The photographic process of turning the solid matter of buildings into the weightless material of light, echoes many contemporary artists' concerns to work more immaterially, therefore not adding matter to the already cluttered world. A Panoptique Diapositive Diorama offers an immersive and saturated, yet immaterial and non-commodifiable experience, in which to feel space more fluidly, subtly proposing that through an immersion of self in world, we may rethink our relationships to nature, making diaphanous of the diabolical.

Carpet N Toast Gallery