Shifting Sites
Yves Arcand, Susan Coolen, Janieta Eyre, Rosaura Guzman Clunes, Ramona Ramlochand, Eugènie Shinkle, Greg Staats, Andrea Szilasi, Joanne Tremblay
Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography
White desert, detail, Copyright Ramona Ramlochand
Shifting Sites serves up a fairly spectacular feast of many courses. Curated by CMCP assistant curator, Andrea Kunard, it's the discordant mix that makes it so interesting. It includes everything from Yves Arcand's documentary street photography and Greg Staats' images of everyday banalities, to Ramona Ramlochand's images of travel slides re-projected on locations inside her home. For craftier samplers, Kunard includes Andrea Szilasi's almost life-size partially woven images.
Loosely exploring contemporary realities of identities displaced and fragmented locations, as in land, on a literal level, the photographers generally focus on symbolically archetypal "sites" - land, the human body and time. We all experience the world through our physicality, its fluidity as well as its limits. As human beings, our oldest non-human connection, perhaps, is to the land.
Unlike almost all other visual media, photography captures "the reality" of all three - the space, the person, the moment - within a single instant. At least, that's the mythology, and certainly its ideological exploitation, unmasked, both astounds us and renders us more jaded about these claims. On a crude level, anything photographic could be in this exhibition since the medium itself creates a fragmentation of space and time - hence "shifting sites".
With some minor exceptions, Kunard's thoughtfulness emerges in her curious selection of often courageous, challenging work.
"Piece Work: 'Irish Chain' 1999" by Susan Coolen. Living in her hometown of Prospect, Nova Scotia, Coolen collects flotsam and jetsam washed up on the seashore. Photographing bits of pottery, bottles, glass, mug handles and other objets trouvÈs, in black and white on a black background, Coolen assembles a massive series of beautifully detailed small images, laying them out in a simple quilting pattern. Using black binding to demarcate the squares, the objects (and images) are reassembled in patterns impossible to create before the object's fragmentation in space and time. As Kunard points out in her accompanying essay, Coolen's motive here is "to highlight the Irish origins of the community".
Paradoxically, Coolen creates a convincing metaphor for the present-day community, for it too is a composite of numerous fragments left behind by previous generations as well as present-day generations' intervention (Coolen's photographic work, for instance.).
Fittingly, the intricate task of unraveling the actual origins of this odd assortment, Coolen leaves to our imaginations. In fact her other work, "Piece Work: 'Around the World', 1999" includes shards that appear decidedly Oriental, Greek, and Asian in origin. Otherwise, from a distance, it would be difficult to tell the two works apart. Was all this pottery and china made in Nova Scotia? Quebec? Or, as in some parts of North America, was pottery from China already available in Prospect, as far back as the village's founding in the mid 1700s?
These ideas find a partial mirror in the tiny 35mm colour contact prints EugÈnie Shinkle chooses to make her larger images. Manipulating literally hundreds of photographs ostensibly shot all over the world, Shinkle assembles new composite images. Often lining up the edges of the contact prints, preventing overlap, carefully zigzag stitching these miniscule paper rectangles together would take hours. (Whether this was done by hand or machine is one of the debates at CMCP. The stitching's evenness suggests machine work.).
"Horizon Line II, 1999", vertically suspended from a steel bar, features two image strips, each seven contact prints wide. A mass of blues, lighter at the top, descends to deep lapis, in the left strip, while in the right hand strip, the neutral tones of stonework, sand, wood and brush evolve to a richer dark orange. Both strips end unevenly. Besides the altered horizon line - it's vertical - her work challenges us to re-view the landscape represented. Instead of stepping back, some viewers, like myself, spent more time looking at these images very close up. Perhaps this was about trying to identify the locations within each tiny photograph. (Security guards will politely request viewers to step back behind the metal barriers on the floor.).
In "Retablos, 1994", Rosaura Guzman Clunes presents two large composite colour images of three women who appear to be related. Dressed in black and photographed in front of a black backdrop, the clothed details of their bodies melt into the background. In the first, this mid-section is replaced by a repeated green tinted photograph of soldiers. At the bottom, their hands hold up a measuring tape, each section lined up to make 60 inches. In the second image, the Guzman Clunes uses extreme close ups of the palms of hands in the middle section. Now, the women's eyes are closed and at the bottom, they display their hands in different poses.
Aside from notions of time and life-lines emerging from the measuring tape, a sense of connection and continuity asserts itself through the women's faces as well. Guzman Clunes' work suggests bloodlines can survive (and outlast?) political and military interventions intent on disruption, death and chaos.
Published by The Ottawa Xpress, 2002
Loosely exploring contemporary realities of identities displaced and fragmented locations, as in land, on a literal level, the photographers generally focus on symbolically archetypal "sites" - land, the human body and time. We all experience the world through our physicality, its fluidity as well as its limits. As human beings, our oldest non-human connection, perhaps, is to the land.
Unlike almost all other visual media, photography captures "the reality" of all three - the space, the person, the moment - within a single instant. At least, that's the mythology, and certainly its ideological exploitation, unmasked, both astounds us and renders us more jaded about these claims. On a crude level, anything photographic could be in this exhibition since the medium itself creates a fragmentation of space and time - hence "shifting sites".
With some minor exceptions, Kunard's thoughtfulness emerges in her curious selection of often courageous, challenging work.
"Piece Work: 'Irish Chain' 1999" by Susan Coolen. Living in her hometown of Prospect, Nova Scotia, Coolen collects flotsam and jetsam washed up on the seashore. Photographing bits of pottery, bottles, glass, mug handles and other objets trouvÈs, in black and white on a black background, Coolen assembles a massive series of beautifully detailed small images, laying them out in a simple quilting pattern. Using black binding to demarcate the squares, the objects (and images) are reassembled in patterns impossible to create before the object's fragmentation in space and time. As Kunard points out in her accompanying essay, Coolen's motive here is "to highlight the Irish origins of the community".
Paradoxically, Coolen creates a convincing metaphor for the present-day community, for it too is a composite of numerous fragments left behind by previous generations as well as present-day generations' intervention (Coolen's photographic work, for instance.).
Fittingly, the intricate task of unraveling the actual origins of this odd assortment, Coolen leaves to our imaginations. In fact her other work, "Piece Work: 'Around the World', 1999" includes shards that appear decidedly Oriental, Greek, and Asian in origin. Otherwise, from a distance, it would be difficult to tell the two works apart. Was all this pottery and china made in Nova Scotia? Quebec? Or, as in some parts of North America, was pottery from China already available in Prospect, as far back as the village's founding in the mid 1700s?
These ideas find a partial mirror in the tiny 35mm colour contact prints EugÈnie Shinkle chooses to make her larger images. Manipulating literally hundreds of photographs ostensibly shot all over the world, Shinkle assembles new composite images. Often lining up the edges of the contact prints, preventing overlap, carefully zigzag stitching these miniscule paper rectangles together would take hours. (Whether this was done by hand or machine is one of the debates at CMCP. The stitching's evenness suggests machine work.).
"Horizon Line II, 1999", vertically suspended from a steel bar, features two image strips, each seven contact prints wide. A mass of blues, lighter at the top, descends to deep lapis, in the left strip, while in the right hand strip, the neutral tones of stonework, sand, wood and brush evolve to a richer dark orange. Both strips end unevenly. Besides the altered horizon line - it's vertical - her work challenges us to re-view the landscape represented. Instead of stepping back, some viewers, like myself, spent more time looking at these images very close up. Perhaps this was about trying to identify the locations within each tiny photograph. (Security guards will politely request viewers to step back behind the metal barriers on the floor.).
In "Retablos, 1994", Rosaura Guzman Clunes presents two large composite colour images of three women who appear to be related. Dressed in black and photographed in front of a black backdrop, the clothed details of their bodies melt into the background. In the first, this mid-section is replaced by a repeated green tinted photograph of soldiers. At the bottom, their hands hold up a measuring tape, each section lined up to make 60 inches. In the second image, the Guzman Clunes uses extreme close ups of the palms of hands in the middle section. Now, the women's eyes are closed and at the bottom, they display their hands in different poses.
Aside from notions of time and life-lines emerging from the measuring tape, a sense of connection and continuity asserts itself through the women's faces as well. Guzman Clunes' work suggests bloodlines can survive (and outlast?) political and military interventions intent on disruption, death and chaos.
Published by The Ottawa Xpress, 2002
