Screamers and Bangers: The Wallpaper Project

After a long run of group exhibitions, it was refreshing to see the Walter Phillips Gallery main space turned over to a work by a single artist, particularly one that was such a dramatic insertion into the space. The gallery-within-a-gallery construction of Dagmara Genda's installation created an intimate and quasi-domestic space for her wallpaper installation: a room the size of a cozy living room or a one-room log cabin. This false room initially seemed somewhat awkwardly dropped into the gallery: a clearly staged space for showing the work, or a constructed prop to hold up the patterns on the walls. However, this staged set-up underlined the work's theme: how Canadian cultural vocabulary is constructed, and how manufactured notions of "authentic" wilderness inform this construct.

The recent resurgence of wallpaper in design and interior decorating has led to extensive re-considerations and re-workings of this usually quiet and decorative material, with artists exploiting the realm of pattern and texture to embed subversive imagery and content within these patterned surfaces. Genda's installation made use of this tactic, covering the walls of the room with red vinyl silhouettes of Group of Seven-esque trees and printed white outlines of wolves, bears, and elk within this red forest. From far away, it is the tree shapes that stand out. Up close, however, the animal imagery begins to take over, creating a can't-see-the-forest-for-the-elk effect, and creating an immersive space of jarring pattern and colour.

The exhibition text pointed to the widespread dissemination of reproductions of the work of the Group of Seven as "key in shaping our sense of what Canadian art is: landscape painting." During a recent trip to Ottawa, I did a quick trip through the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada - including the Canadian Art collection and the Group of Seven works. Despite having seen these works numerous times (and reproductions of them countless more), I admit that they always inspire a surprising swell of patriotic sentiment.

My response to the G7 works and their relation to Genda's installation is not without complication or confusion: I am well aware of the subjective representation of these landscapes and know that my Canada is rooted as much in urban spaces as in stands of stoic windblown trees. I would argue that my wariness around an earnest commitment to landscape-inspired Canadian patriotism is not unique: while landscape and wilderness have come to act as symbols for a generic version of Canadian-ness, our national identity is indeed far more complex than that. The jumbled silhouettes of "wildlife" and "wilderness" in Genda's work reflects this confused sense of Canadian identity and our notions of culture as it is informed by these emblematic landscapes.

Beyond the gallery and the Banff Centre, the town of Banff was a particularly appropriate backdrop for this work, where one of the most beautiful natural locations in the world has been transformed into a fudge-scented photo-op representation of itself. Here, visitors from around with world come to consume experiences of Canadian wilderness that can range from hiking up a mountain to buying a stuffed beaver. In this context, Genda's installation (created while in residence at the Banff Centre) also pointed to the problems of how (mis)representations of Canadian culture are received by a broader international audience.

Screamers and Bangers ran from October 25 - November 16, 2008.

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All images courtesy of Walter Phillips Gallery, credit Laura Vanags.

Aïda Ruilova

Aïda Ruilova's projections and short videos allow an access to intimate and haptic spaces where bodies are compressed into startling rhythms that are both slapstick and sensual. Repeated images and phrases alongside the physical acts of bodies transfer action upon other objects, spaces, and sound, shifting communicative acts into the body-extension phenomena of the cinematic, inviting what writer Vivian Sobchack might call the "skin" of viewing that "is both mine and not my own."

In a projection called "life like", a young dark-haired woman, played by Ruilova, lies in various stages of jarringly-cut grief, giddiness, hopefulness, nausea, boredom, and desperation upon an unresponsive body of an old man, played by French filmmaker Jean Rollin. Ruilova caresses and smothers Rollin's face with both hands, shifting between a silent wait for a heartbeat, towards a slow posture of unresolved seduction, cut between scenes used from Rollin's own films wherein various creeping young women ascend staircases with candelabra, stand torch-like in doorways, and disappear into crypt-like spaces. Ruilova has filmed herself in similar settings of rock-strewn beach and listless interiors, inserting herself within the slick procession of vampiric sirens. In contrast to Rollins' ritualistic icons, the dead interiors surrounding Ruilova and Rollins evoke sadness and neglect, with cold grey light, sagging wallpaper, and close-ups of a shag rug resembling congealed red rice. It seems more and more suggestive that the gothic actresses' emergence and submergence within crevices and trap-doors attempt to replace and reanimate Ruilova's failed seduction of Rollin. A scene wherein Ruilova is leafing through a photo-play of Rollin's films becomes an alternative forced act wherein an unseen set of hands grabs Ruilova's fingers and jerks them across an open page in a motion of simulated and furious writing.

In an untitled work from 2003, a woman lies upon a rocky beach while the motions of the sea move back and forth as if being rewound and replayed by a hidden remote-control. Each movement is synced with the sound of slow, thick breathing. This use of the unfixed still quality of rewind and playback is repeated in an untitled work from 2002, this time strange enough to shed the heavy-handed atmosphere of the gothic landscape. A collapsed dark-haired woman lies on the edge of a film crane shot so that only the outstretched arm is in view. The crane's arm moves back and forth, again in sync with breathing that is now eerily inward, leading up to a prolonged breath wherein the crane slowly retreats out of shot. As narrative expectation latches onto the intakes and exhales, the feeling is of a soothing, physical, and empathetic resignation. In this way, Ruilova liberates a mere illustration of the film-body of cinematic time by anthropomorphosizing the crane's movements, both relocating and stretching filmic presence within the inner solitude of the breathing body.

Ruilova's use of extreme close-up angles and claustrophobic cuts, associating the horror genre in film, ensures that the viewer is already in a state of nervous anticipation. These already-familiar techniques are then compressed in her shorter pieces, wherein utterances such as crying, spitting, screaming, and breathing become immediately of the same body as each interrupted sighting of action. At several points in the video "You're pretty," a record is scraped queasily across a rough surface while a lanky character utters a pathetic cry. The angle at which this scene is shot, that of a cramped retreat across a stone wall, cannot be separated from the character's voice, becoming the wall and texture of his half-sobs. In "Hey," a woman in salmon-orange hisses "hey!" followed by varied combinations of cuts to clacking blue fingernails upon a banister, the frenzied jerk of a pair of legs and pointy-toed shoes up a ladder, the jiggling of the woman's cheap blouse, and a strange searching act of a riding crop prodding unseen pests. A repeated hyperventilated sound resembling the rising squawk of a chicken comedically insinuates motivation behind each jiggle, jerk, and useless prod. This strategy of foreshortening allows an access to the inner filmic reality of the characters' bodies and their utterances.

"Beat & Perv" lays bare the futility of trying to find clarity in the video's repeated code. As each reiteration of the phrase "beat, bah-beat, bah-beat!" gets no closer to crystallization, attempts to define the meaning of each drum-beat and utterance become as exhausted as the character's smeared eyes, dangling hands, and flat squat of bare legs. The underlying humor in Ruilova's videos is most obvious in "Almost", wherein a young woman in kohl-black eyes crouches and crawls in shadowy corners while biting her bottom lip and drooling, shaking her fists with cartoony rage. Expressions of fear and suffering made cliché by well-known horror conventions are given no room to breathe here, cut off through interruptions that ridicule the seriousness of such sincere portrayals. A piece called "The stun" turns this into an act both frozen and stretched, as a man's cry of alarm becomes forced, his jaw wrenched open by disembodied hands in the shivering hiccups of a scene caught between backward and forward movement, accompanied by the strains and refrains of feedback and stretching leather.

The tension and anxiety in Ruilova's work has often been interpreted as a self-defeating structure which merely repels and frustrates the viewing experience. While Ruilova's alien bodies and rough cuts flesh out meaning through repeated viewings, their incompleteness challenges the idea of viewing them using conventional narrative expectations. This provokes what writer Vivian Sobchack calls the viewer's "body that makes meaning before it makes conscious, reflective thought." Ruilova's projections and videos, contrary to the idea of being endless prisons for the characters which inhabit them, are spaces of limitless reiteration and reanimation; both film-loop and endlessly deferred closure make up a suspended, rather than definitive, atmosphere of dread that strengthens Ruilova's work. Rather than becoming frustrated with anticlimax and its endless loop, there is instead a resigned bliss in the intuition and personal experience of the inner body of viewing.

Walter Phillips Gallery

Aïda Ruilova

Aïda Ruilova's The Singles: 1999 - Now

The cuts in her The Singles 1999-Now videos are almost visible like sharp glass. In effect its like that torture chamber where any movement in one direction means you will be pierced with a spike, which causes you to quickly withdraw in the opposite direction, into another spike, and so on, until you are worn down to a prodded victim of the device. Aïda Ruilova's art isn't exactly like something from the SAW movies, but the abrupt cuts happen fast and repetitively, and blunt your senses which try to follow time in a continual flow. This shifts your senses, and your sense of reason, around in a flurry of reactionary flinches within the tight space between you and the TV monitor. The metal music-inspired edits are more intense because of the perpetually moving, unsteady camera, and its picture limited to blips of body parts or close-ups of interior landscapes. You can't understand this percussive production without work; it's a cool medium in the McLuhanian sense.

Aïda Ruilova, I Have to Stop (still), 2002. Single-channel video. Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York.

The first attempt to watch what's going on leaves you with a sense of unspecified panic or nonsense- a woman with a bruised face (Ruilova) rocks against a mirror as she rhythmically shouts "beat-ba-beat..." in "Beat & Perv" (1999). In "You're Pretty" a half-naked man whimpers in a concrete garage with an amp. Before having time to reflect on these upsetting provocations, while other pieces comprising The Singles cut in and out on staggered monitors like a mad peek-a-boo game, the first one you tried comes on again. You get only slightly further this time in your efforts to ascertain the troubled emotions of the actors. The sounds of scratching vinyl against cement, grating, jiggling, and banging are irritating while being something constant to grasp on to. There is some truth, after all, to the work intentionally "hurting" or more accurately, distancing its viewer. Implicating the viewer in such a physical way, jerking between multiple screens, scenarios and audio-visual cues, the videos seem to want something. The structure itself resembles the vampires and torturess' of later works. It also summons up the spirit and social undertones of early performance work of the 70's such as Vito Acconci's Seedbed, or other pieces eliciting something along the lines of a persecuted reaction in viewers. These political pieces were sometimes meant to provoke unrest, self-awareness and subsequent action. But in Ruilova's time, where chaos is attributable to familiar youth cultures of noise and punk habits, the spirit of unrest and physical agitation is perhaps more inviting, or even liberating for some.

Aïda Ruilova, You're Pretty (still), 1999. Single-channel video. Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York.

The videos source the cinematic styles of montage and experimental films, the objective framing devices and body-as-subject of early video and performance art, and rock music. Her melding of these styles is her own trope, but familiar in its resulting aura of anxiety, ennui and anger. This reading is reinforced by the connection between the blast-beat, syncopated and intercut form- and the content of the pieces. In "Oh No," "Do it," "The stun," "Beat & Perv," "Hey," "I have to stop," "Come here," "Almost," and "You're Pretty," each stages a threesome between individual, prison and fixation or object as surrogate lover. They echo the synopsis for a Jean Rollin (see below) film where victims fall prey to a social experiment or environmental hazard: "their thoughts, memories and emotions are slowly eaten away by disease, turning them into sad, helpless creatures." 1 Close-ups of the body show quick segments of limp, pale limbs, which suggest bodies drained of life, held up or bounced around mechanically by unseen animators. Otherwise the young, bed-haired, glamorized protagonists are in fight-or-flight mode, or cradling electric musical instruments like rhesus monkeys and their chicken wire mothers. Sadly and somewhat comically, it seems that a technocratic culture- amps, fake nails, a desolate apartment, rock bands and iconography aren't ersatz for love or belonging. These cultural manifestations as bedfellows seem to worsen the pain and mental disquiet of a larger, prevalent but unmentioned cause. A musician raised in the Tampa "Death Metal" scene herself, Ruilova treats contemporary Goth culture in all its standardized signs and codes as a social response to banal domestic enclosures and other dreary dead ends.

Aïda Ruilova, Come Here (still), 2002.. Single-channel video. Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York.

Exploring the Gothic themes in a more atmospheric, fictional and filmic way, her longer videos "Tuning" (2001), "Untitled" (2002), "life like" (2006), and "Lulu" (2007) develop scenes of castle and apartment interiors, cemeteries, seascapes and beaches that become dramatic "characters" as in the B movies of French film auteur Jean Rollin. Rollin's sexploitation Vampire films specialize in all things sex and death where to elaborate would mean listing off foreseeable Gothic revival imagery such as red sashes, candles, and daggers. In Ruilova's "life like" as well, she unleashes a repertory of affective imagery stripped down from Rollin's footage and her own camera work, through the same distancing edits and repetition as in The Singles. Unlike Rollin's preference for atmosphere under the guise of narrative coherence, life like is unabashedly a collage work of favored symbols and themes. The pairing down of this genre to a saturated aesthetic and its occult rituals seems like an un-ironic testament to the allure of "emo" in its popular inception and the late 18th century gothic literature in a more academic sense. The graveyard girl, eroticized, vulnerable and in touch with magic, the cosmos and spirits is at the forefront of this utopia.

In "life like" a young woman desires to act in one of these roles, rather than unwillingly being paid to for the benefits of male fantasy- as she mourns over the supposedly dead body of Jean Rollin. The edits chop up a sequence of her touching the rough skin of his face and trying to revive him through seduction, expanding the sense of time in which she is exhaustively doing this by splitting up and repeating the real-time footage. The line between art and life is erased as she visits the sites where Rollin's films were made- doing strange and witchy things to imagine herself as a reified character in one of his films. Perhaps Ruilova similarly mourns the death of romantic cinema or true superstition, as she self-awaredly revives aspects of seduction and the symbolism of the natural and metaphysical worlds, while disclosing them as artful escape implicated in a fully social context.

1 www.shockingimages.com/rollin/intro.html

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Walter Phillips Gallery
Aïda Ruilova

Constellation

Constellation is far from being a direct replica of the night sky; however, it achieves the nebulous feat of paralleling the experience of stargazing. The small space which Constellation inhabits beneath the floorboards of Stride Gallery's main space is impenetrably dark, punctured only by tiny points of green, red and white light. Despite the confined nature of this space, the lights have the appearance of extending back into a deep, dark and vast depth beyond the actual physical confines of the room.

The stars in Constellation are those of the electronic world, Moody employs the Light Emitting Devises (LEDs) of computers, routers and other electronica to form this neo-celestial body. The familiar formations of electrical mechanisms, this piece points out to us, have become our new markers in the dark. Historically the arrangement of the stars in the night sky was used to navigate long distances, especially on the vast oceans devoid of landmarks; these new blinking, flashing points of light indicating various electronic presences are an invaluable tool for negotiating your way to the bathroom in the early hours of the morning without accidentally meeting a chair or other item of furniture.

The aesthetic as well as practical changes brought to our lives by technology are probed by the material composition of Constellation. It is a poetic and whimsical idea to build a universe out of computer parts, one which could be interpreted as a literal act of playing god. I would even go so far as to infer that the work incites all of us to play at divinity, taking control of the world around us, building newer worlds out of the debris of the current one.

Of all the endearments offered up by Constellation, the reversal of scale is one of the most powerful. Inside the small space, looking out on a vast cosmology of stars will be interrupted at some point by bumping into another person or a wall. This physical confrontation reveals the tiny size of Constellation, and has the effect of making viewers into clumsy giants, leading me to briefly imagine myself as creator and ruler of this tiny universe, an idea only confirmed by the familiarity of the materials.

Ideas, however, are somewhat fragile; left on their own, ideas do not always wear as well as they should. The physical manifestation of Constellation, however, is in no danger of either undermining or underwhelming the ideas generated by the work. An injustice would be done to the direct experience of the work by attempting to cling onto any specific meaning or intention: the physical and visual reality of being in the piece makes direct and primordial contact.

It is strange to feel this kind of uninterrupted, primal draw to anything based in electronics; the attraction of technology is usually based in a more in-the-present-moment aesthetic, a sometime fickle, instant gratification type of wonder. Constellation, while not downplaying its materials, somehow transposes their meaning, using technology to represent not something high paced or confusingly inaccessible but rather an updated version of nature: familiar, chaotic but essentially human.

Some of the LEDs throughout Constellation blink ceaselessly, perhaps a token of life on other planets or the continued functioning of wireless internet. Either way, the mischief they playfully suggest feels like a gentle reminder of the autonomy of every universe from its creator, and accordingly the persistence of surprise.

Images courtesy Stride Gallery.

Posted by Jasia Stuart on February 4, 2009