Rebecca Travis: Projects

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TenderPixels.CorruptedFiles

Featuring works by: David Hanes (Berlin/Toronto), Fabienne Hess (UK), Lorna Mills (Toronto), Louise Noguchi (Toronto)

July 21–August 27, 2016

Curated by Rebecca Travis

This group exhibition brings together works that variously explore the pixel as a soft and ‘tender’ component. In some cases it interweaves and transmutes between forms, or is rendered onto fluid supports. In others it supports imagery or text that seems to offer protection or even emotional, human connection. The pixel’s malleability, however, also makes it susceptible to damage and manipulation. Each work in the exhibition originates with found sources; many of them discarded as digital trash, pulled from mass media outlets or eroded to low-grade quality. It is here that the current of ‘corruption’ running through the exhibition stems - aesthetically in terms of visual glitches and deconstructed language, and more discreetly in the quietly insidious allusions to power, control and duplicity that underlies much of the work on display.  

Fabienne Hess’ Terms and Conditions (2015-16) series features small-print from email signatures, cookie notices, corporate web agreements, meticulously hand-transcribed in metallic ink onto translucent dustsheets. The result is text content that is never quite wholly visible, a reflection of the often silent, marginal positioning of jargon-heavy terms that at once protect the sender and make the reader complicit. Meanwhile, the Corrupted Series (2013) sees supposedly deleted images resurrected from digital memory devices via trash recovery software. The retrieved images – evidence that some deleted files never fully disappear - are under process of abstraction, being rewritten with new data or dissolved into visual noise. These digital residues, in this case featuring ‘portraits’ are printed on silk, a support that evokes the slippery nature of digital media and transitional state of the imagery.

Image transition is central to the mechanics of the humble GIF file, a medium resurrected from relative obscurity to become one of the major sharing modes of the social media / meme age. For Lorna Mills the GIF is also a format through which to create highly formally aware, mesmeric artworks that pull from the wide terrain of web culture - both high and low. In Hand Job (2014) and Knee Slapper (2014), disconnected, heavily pixelated limbs perform jarringly repetitive but hypnotic actions suggestive of power, control and gender politics.

David Hanes also exploits the GIF format in his new screen-based work Psycho.gif (2012-16) using it as a lo-fi vehicle through which to transcribe the entirety of Hitchcock’s iconic 1960 horror film, an exercise which playfully draws on Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho and sees over 6000 images interlaced. Corruption, lies and deceit abound in Hitchcock’s film, while the obviously ‘corrupted’ visuals in Hanes’ GIF version speak to the nature of low-rate streaming and file conversion, and bring to the fore a ‘materiality’ in the digital.This materiality is also apparent in Hanes’ ongoing Aware series, in which found images of gallery documentation become the source material for digital manipulations. Derived from online searches of popular artworks and pulled through Photoshop’s ‘content-aware’ function, the resulting images appear devoid of their cultural objects and through dye-sublimation printing become ingrained in the warp and weft of a screen-like stretched polyester support.

Louise Noguchi’s Compilation Portraits (1995) offer an analogue counterpoint to the exhibition’s digitally based works. They are comprised of two silver print photograph portraits hand-woven together – one of a criminal, pulled from a true crime book or mass media source, and one of the artist attempting to replicate their facial expression and pose. This physical interweaving offsets the digital meshing within Hess, Hanes and Mills’ works. As with Hess’ Corrupted Series, the combination of the two images produces a sensation of data being overwritten, with the intermediary result being a strangely virtual, pixelated composite, blurring gender, race and time period. A combination of an ‘innocent’ portrait with a ‘guilty’ one, Noguchi’s Compilation Portraits are corrupted both visually and figuratively.

Lorna Mills appears courtesy of Transfer Gallery, NY and DAM Gallery, Berlin

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Sexish

Maryanne Casasanta, Orly Cogan, Cathy Daley, Julie Moon, Ilona Szalay, Dara Vandor and Janet Werner

December 10, 2015–January 23, 2016

Art historically, depictions of women’s sexuality and beauty have been rendered predominantly by and for men - think the multitude of Classical and Renaissance nudes, Manet’s Olympia, Renoir’s bathers, Jeff Koon’s ‘Made in Heaven’ series with his ex-porn star ex-wife, and John Currin’s recent pornography-inspired oil paintings, to name but a few. This imagery has both responded to current fashions and sensibilities, and aided in constructing contemporary notions of female beauty, sex and eroticism, but from men’s perspective and desires. Critics claim that the contemporary art world remains a male-dominated industry and, despite ground won in gender politics, it would still seem that the majority of artists for whom sex is a successful message and subject are men.

The tide, though, is turning. Sexish brings together works by seven female artists that muse upon aspects of sensuality, sexuality and the female form, a small survey symptomatic of a wider reclaiming of the female sexual image in art. Sexish’s offerings are by turns overtly erotic and quietly sensual, openly suggestive and coyly covert.

Janet Werner’s subversions of the traditional portrait genre often challenge or play upon conventions of beauty, while Julie Moon’s ceramic ‘amorphous forms’ subvert classic ideals of the female figure, and in Maryanne Casasanta’s intimate, close-cropped photographs, the artist’s own body becomes an abstract form.

Perhaps surprisingly for an exhibition exploring sex and sensuality, there is as much a focus on clothing as nudity. Cathy Daley’s iconic ‘little black dress’ series mines contemporary vocabularies of glamour, fashion and popular culture to examine the iconography of the feminine as it exists in the cultural imaginary. Orly Cogan’s needlepoint works likewise evoke common female archetypes. Working with existing vintage fabrics and found embroideries, Cogan sees her works as ‘collaborations’ with women from previous eras, modernizing the traditional medium and fulfilling a space between the dichotomies of soft and tough, dirty and clean, fantasy and reality.

Dara Vandor also explores the realms of fantasy, erasing the figure altogether and instead making meticulous drawings of delicate lingerie and folds of sumptuous silk. The works play upon the erotic and power-based connotations inescapably associated with certain fabrics and garments. Power and control similarly play an important part in Ilona Szalay’s oil painted scenarios. Her female subjects are often engaged in some form of power play, with themselves, with others, (and ultimately with) the viewer.

We are told that “Sex Sells”, and perhaps it does - at least according to the preponderance of in-your-face sexual imagery in advertising, films and in visual art. But for whom does it sell, and whom to? Who benefits from the transaction of these obvious and often overly illustrative sexual depictions? How is its aesthetic derived and who controls it? Sexish seeks to step away from shock and awe, and encourage discussion around these long standing questions. It is an exhibition framed by the female gaze - women as seen by women, with a title deliberately eluding a fixed or determined state - mirroring its continuously evolving and unresolved subject.

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Sexish, installation views at Birch Contemporary, 2015-16

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New Monuments Forget the Future

Featuring works by: Luis Jacob, Eva Kolcze, Howard Lonn, James Nizam, Richard Storms and Renée Van Halm

July 30–September 5, 2015

Curated by Rebecca Travis

“Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future…” -Robert Smithson (Entropy and the New Monuments, 1966)

In the wake of rapid urban developments populated by functional structures seemingly designed neither to offend nor impress, architecture – at one time synonymous with permanence – appears to be becoming increasingly shortsighted and transient, a response to the present as opposed to a statement for the future.

Drawing on this sense of impermanence, New Monuments Forget the Future brings together artworks that reference architecture in varying degrees of flux. Rather than having solid foundation, the structures throughout the exhibition are caught in transitional states between the built and deconstructed, actual and imaginary, the abstract and representational.A process of reduction and rebuilding is evident in Luis Jacob’s minimal sculptures The BILTS (1997), which distil the dominant skyscrapers of downtown Toronto to geometric shapes lifted from their foundation footprints. Countering our usual perception of these high-rises, Jacob’s architectural models stretch horizontally and are rendered not in reflective, seductive glass, but in lacquered milled maple.

Richard Storms’ paintings based upon glassy condo exteriors and curtain walls also slip between abstraction and representation, while Renée Van Halm’s compressed facades negate a sense of overall scale and context, proving unclear as to whether the overlapping beams and planes represent an intentional ‘inside-out’ architectural style, or supportive scaffolding, thanks to their claustrophobic, cropped compositions.

A progressive journey toward painterly deconstruction can be seen in the works of Howard Lonn. Borromini’s Window (2012)contains tangible architectural elements that, interrupted by brushwork and dislocated from a structure as a whole, appear as fragmented ruins. Lonn’s new work Untitled (2015) takes this dislocation further. The ‘structure’ is provided more by the physical presence and application of the paint itself than any particular subject. Sweeping, girder-like elements transect the canvas but remain ambiguous, suggesting aerial views, shadows and surfaces without fully disclosing a specific form.

James Nizam’s early photographic series Dwellings (2006) captures buildings on the brink of demolition that are temporarily re-energized through his experimental lens. The opposite is true of the Brutalist university buildings in Eva Kolcze’s film All That Is Solid (2014), which begin as steadfast structures but soon bleed into painterly abstraction thanks to her chemical interference with the negative film  - a process that draws parallels between the material degradation of both celluloid and cement.

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