Hollow

Harmonicas have a difficult time sounding like anything other than themselves. Tentative, haunting and more than a bit awkward, the noise they emit straddles the human and the mechanical, sounding metallic, grating, train-like and imperfect, whimsical, filled with the breath of the player.

The removal of these human fluctuations from the harmonica's sound is one of the striking things about the multitude of harmonicas resonating in Hollow, Joseph Kohnke's installation in Stride Gallery's main space. The harmonicas, some barely a foot off the floor, others perched on pedestals, others suspended from the ceiling, are being played mechanically. The mouths of CPR dummies have been altered to expel air in a constant jet as small rotating plates joined to bars transform the circular energy of motors into jabbing forward-backward motions that pull and push the instruments across the airflow.

Eerie noise results from this mechanized process, a sound disconcertingly more even than could ever be produced by a person blowing into a harmonica. The noises emitted by Kohnke's harmonicas blend together into one seamless drone, though by moving around it is possible to hear each separate instrument. While they are in time with each other, the harmonicas are slightly staggered so their different sounds can be heard coming together and apart.

Visually, as well as audibly, the installation emphasizes that the sounds are being produced mechanically, in a factory environment, a room filled to excess with machines moving tirelessly forwards and backwards. The resulting cycle creates an odd space, one that remains tentatively between human and machine, between music and noise. While the installation is mechanically driven, a human presence feels as though it is directing the activity in the gallery. The air that flows steadily out from the mouths of the CPR dummies is not breath, but a very close surrogate. The separation between life and its imitations begins to feel very thin.

The noise produced by the plastic lips does not feel exactly like music, but it is reminiscent of the fragments; notes, scales and rhythm, that make up music. Music is an event, the moment of sound creation, to which we are witness in Hollow. But music also has some kind of human content, the possibility of flaws and improvisation that exists even when generated electronically, that is noticeably absent in this installation. Hollow, like a musical composition, has structure and repetition, but the slight variation that gives music form, that allow our brains to distinguish it from noise, never arrives. Every cycle of Hollow is exactly congruent, and while I am constantly waiting for some subtle variation to emmerge from the next cycle, it never does.

Previous works by Kohnke, such as Marked, have similar content to Hollow; conceptions of human qualities and their mediation by technology. In Marked Kohnke used photographs of human skin to form a conveyor belt from which imperfections were cut out by a machine over the duration of the exhibition.

What is particularly endearing about Hollow, however, is that the experience of the work transcends the ideas behind it. The materials are not an allegory; the installation is not an illustration of an idea. What you see, what you hear, is what you get.

Photographs by Drew Anderson

Stride Gallery
Joseph Kohnke

Simple Functionalism

For an audience accustomed to seeing work that is pared back and minimal, that deals in subtle colors and hard to detect architectural alterations, Simple Functionalism, an installation by Garry Neill Kennedy at the Walter Phillips Gallery, still leaves very little for the eye to cling to. The only occupant of the large white room (that in the past has had many different shapes to accommodate its extremely varied contents) is an official, though dated-looking brown desk towards the entrance. The desk is sufficiently official that at first glance it might seem like the gallery attendant's desk, except for the presence of a second desk of a more contemporary style, complete with gallery attendant, outside the entrance of the gallery space.

Relieved of its usual trimmings, which vary from paintings to sound installations, the qualities of the building itself are revealed. The nature of the apparently neutral space begins to emerge, the aesthetic choices still present and active in the room become evident, especially in the brown desk.

If this was 1981, this unmasking of the institution, a revelation similar to Dorothy's discovery of the man behind the curtain, would be where it ends. This, after all, is a Garry Neill Kennedy exhibition, and institutional critique is what he is known for. It is, however, 2008 and Simple Functionalism seems more than a little empty, not only because this type of grand gesture, leaving the gallery empty to reflect on the institution, has the feeling of a rebellion belonging to another time. The show taps into a feeling of emptiness in part because it is a double. The current Simple Functionalism is a twin: a recreation by Kennedy, at the invitation of the Walter Phillips Gallery, of a show 27 years earlier in the same space.

As may be the case with all twins, the resemblance is deceptive. What is important about the current manifestation is not only its new context, as the institutional change that has occurred is obviously emphasized by the recreation of this piece, but also the relationship that now exists between the two exhibitions. If the new show seems empty at first, it is because the real significance of this new exhibition does not come principally from what is present in the gallery space, but exists somewhere stretched between the two pieces, in a kind of time warp.

If the format of institutional critique twists the exhibition to reflect upon the space and context it inhabits, then it should come as no surprise that this method also tends to relate back to the artist using it. Garry Neill Kennedy is widely considered a foremost Canadian conceptualist, a distinction never left behind when discussing the work, especially its newest permutation. This emphasis on Kennedy's significance to the Canadian art scene as well as his reputation as the infamous president of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, leading the college during his time as president to become Canada's leading institution for art education, seems to go hand in hand with any discussion of Kennedy's work.

Because of the importance Kennedy's work accords to the context of its production, it cannot be without significance that in the 27 years that separate and also define the Simple Fuctionalism exhibitions, the tone of his work has changed. At the time of the first presentation Kennedy's work often took on this introverted model of critiquing the institutions in which he exhibited. Pieces such as Recent Plants, which showed in 1980 at Mercer Union Gallery in Toronto, were clever and self-reflexive, turning the art world back upon itself, analyzing his own situation.

Since then, much of Kennedy's work has grown beyond producing art about art, addressing a greater global context such as the 2008 work presented in Beijing I don't want to pay the full price. Kennedy's newer work also touches on many political issues, as with his 2008 work, this time in Halifax, The Colors of Citizen Arar. The work has become more active, more direct, covering the walls in bright colors and making bold statements.

It is this change, this shift in Kennedy's work but also in the art world at large, that the new Simple Functionalism takes on. The walls of the gallery do feel empty but this time it is less because they are unveiling the unseen institutional structure and more because they are loaded placeholders. The significance of the work is not easy or quick to obtain, it stretches back and beyond the current contents of the gallery, existing between the present manifestation and the one that has passed.

All images credit Laura Vanags.

Walter Phillips Gallery

Melanie Authier's 'Vista Blitz'

Beauty, to writer Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, is stubborn, self-sufficient, containing an "implicit counter-power" of indifference to critique. He commends a beauty that remains independent from what it subverts, slippery in its appearance of mere passivity within the slick surfaces of a contemporary, or 'technological' version of the sublime. Contrary to Gilbert-Rolfe's counterproductive beauty, artist Melanie Authier is interested in beauty's role as catalyst within an experience of a contemporary sublime.

At first, seeing Authier's paintings is like trying to rely on written accounts of dreams. When I visited her solo exhibition 'Vista Blitz' at The New Gallery, the textural spaces within her paintings evoked the too-close miniature worlds of such intimate staring, while promising to finally reveal all after each repeated visit. In a painting called Pendulum, transparent waves in greens and mineral-blues undulate like water alongside hard-edged shapes in plastic orange-pink.

An ear-shaped burrow of strokes in blue are covered in the flecks and pockmarks of surrounding peaks in Black Buzz, alongside a tongue-tooth shape of viscous red and a 'sash' of pink. The hair-like waves of marks in these paintings seem both to swell in autonomous movement while interrupted by the sharp edges of half-stenciled shapes, and they seem like fresh locks of hair snipped blunt in a compulsive cultivation of covert coiffures. In Vista Blitz, the composition evokes the painted lines of an elevated highway collapsed and twisted by an earthquake.

Centipede-like tracks in blotted black-red create a 'C'-shape of foliage around a flat negative space of beige and its outcroppings of gooey sediments and smeared shreds of debris. The final painting in the exhibition, Snake Punch, is like a vortex of colour and technique which curdle towards a shared point of attempted contact, further kept in check by large stitch-like black shapes curling towards the upper right. Delicate purple brush-marks appear to make a hot-pink shape pucker and soften, while three hard-edged shapes of mint-green resemble a manually-operated stage set depicting a stormy sea and its sleepy, cut-out sea-serpents.

Whether sliced into by sharp edges, glazed with a delicate wash, or smeared in swellings of thick toxic colour, Authier's paintings contain a consistency where the flat and the painterly seem tempered by an organic illusionism, a balance which exists alongside what Authier calls a challenge to any sense of compositional order. This consistency is most visible in the paintings Relay and Flipside, where areas of soft brush-work seem gouged into and cut through by the suggestive shapes of sand dunes and jutting glaciers. Sometimes there is a strong formal sense of containment within the paintings, wherein areas of colour, texture, and drawing are interrupted from escaping or dominating. In an interview, Melanie linked this idea of interruption to her interest in activating disorientation, and spoke of wanting to provoke associations of spaces not tempered by more immediate readings.

Of compositional references to landscape painting in her work, Authier spoke of her interest in "emotional exploration of these sites of longing, yearning and desire" alongside both historical and current ideas of landscape. There is a sense that Authier's paintings also exist in a space that writer Jane Bennett might call "in excess", within a "contingent tableaux", and which writer Vivian Sobchack might call the feeling of an inanimate gaze which "fixes us with its "irrational" autonomy" and which "not only eludes but also refuses human comprehension and reduction." This idea of existing in excess links to Authier's interest in "not trying to be sublime", but creating work which "peripherally investigates and engages characteristics associated with the sublime".

Authier's work promises but won't reveal all, differing from painting which might be satisfied to merely point to ideas without adding an element of invention. Asking us to question our preconceived readings, Authier's work stretches ideas of 'beauty' and 'sublime' in ways that can make them habitable amidst a present of easy immediacy and transient meaning.

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