The Objectness of Objects
This was originally published in collaboration with the Richmond Art Gallery for the exhibition Eternal Return in the autumn of 2017. - Images below were taken by Rachel Topham photography.
A crack here, a stamp or engraving there; objects house trace evidence of not only their individual stories, but also the times and places they come from. Artists utilize these referential qualities to create alternative modes of expression and understanding. Archivists use these reference points to guide restoration, document provenance and situate an artifact in history. Observation exists as apparition in the present, an interpretive arena where personal, cultural and anthropological ideas are endlessly projected and adapted. As such, both artists and archivists are object interlocutors. Their métiers co-exist in a strange loop,i where place, time and meaning expand and contract.
Artists Barb Choit, Kevin Day, Alanna Ho, Anchi Lin and Lucien Durey were invited to investigate the Richmond Museum's Migration Collection. Each artist produced new work in response to their selected collection items. Eternal Return showcases these commissioned works and corresponding artefacts at the Richmond Art Gallery from September to November 2017. This exhibition explores object incarnation via an array of media that includes photography, performance, sculpture, video and sound installation.
Barb Choit's photographic assemblage series, Richmond Reconstructions, reflects on the still life art genre. Richmond Reconstructions references archival documentation, didactic display techniques, centuries-old Pompeii muralsii and reconstruction archaeology.iii Choit rigorously selected museum artifacts and positioned them against faux-fresco backdrops. In presenting viewers with seductive compositions that combine kitsch souvenirs with collected biological specimens and practical household objects, Choit conflates commerce and culture. By bringing together disparate value systems, Choit presents a limitless space for reflection, revealing how symbolism, meaning are fluid and malleable when it comes to object relations.
In study guide (speech to text mis-recognition and vice versa), Kevin Day utilizes the symbolic weight of a universally recognizable school desk and chair from the museum's collection to posit the viewer in a pedagogical setting. The desk faces a wall projection that shows a cursor navigating a fictitious database. Three concurrently running audio tracks bathe the viewer in a cacophony of thoughts, discussions and inner dialogues, prompting the viewer to explore relationships between seeing and listening, knowing and being, detached and embodied. The abstracted husk-like structure of the database paired with the audio stream of ideas directs the viewer/listener into a series of thought spirals wherein one questions the power and politics behind taxonomies, interface operations, knowledge acquisition, and the hierarchal organization of the senses.
After My Garden Grows is an immersive playroom created by Alanna Ho, who regularly examiness the capacity of objects to stimulate imagination. Painted bright red, the playroom walls add a fiery intensity to the installation that also alludes to more disturbing human phenomena such as dark web Red Rooms.iv Ho’s playroom has three components. The first is a sculptural cylinder that looms large above visitors. Red cord runs down its side and onto the floor like tentacles. A low frequency drone emanates from the sculpture’s interior. Ho inventively scales up a tiny traditional Chinese singing cicada toy from the museum's collection. Transforming the artefact into architecture, her ominous sound sculpture creates an entrancing, voyeuristic semi-private space. The second component is a motorized music box sculpture, created in response to piano player scrolls from the museum’s collection. Ad infinitum, it delicately plays both sides of an abstract score plotted onto a Möbius band. While the haptic and aural senses are heightened by the first two playroom components, the third element connects to visual sensibilities. Three floral lithograph reproductions from the Migration Collection are featured on a small red table, and a curious collection of ephemera rlating to the poetry found within the lithographs are displayed around them. Ho's objects and their quirky shifts in scale mindfully place us in a vulnerable state of wonder: the perfect condition for nurturing deep play.
Anchi Lin's three channel intallation explores the term 'preservation' in relation to objects, action and memory. In A Sealer, the installation's first looped channel features Lin performing recursive actions with the wooden handle of a Victor can sealer from the 1940s. The second channel reenacts repetititve gestures that Lin used to perform as a child working in a family factory sealing containers in a layer of protective plastic. In the third channel, the camera explores the various objects and contents preserved by the artist. An industrial object of mass production, the can sealer symbolically represents a pragmatic and proactive approach to living in unstable times. In contemporary times, food deprivation remains a universal concern, and as the artist so eloquently suggests: Safety in numbers, survival in counted cans.5 Lin's gestures in A Sealer also preserve the artist's childhood memories, in which times of hardship are blurred with times of playfulness.
Drawing inspiration from the museum's collection of salvaged bottles from the Richmond area, Lucien Durey explores the complex web of associations between glass objects, the human voice and music. As part of his series, Scarecrow, Visionary, Muse, Musa, Saguaro, Christiania, Durey reconstructs bottle shards, vases and many other glass elements into colourful mobiles. The series also includes recurring vocal performances by the artist during the run of the exhibition that reference pop music, art history and the everyday. By blending symbolism and intermittent performance, Durey highlights the difficulty of revealing personal narratives associated with found objects. At the same time, his performances also lay bare the dynamic power of music, memory and collective unconsciousness to transpose infinite associations onto an object.
The artists of Eternal Return have generated an interactive game of loops, a tangled hierarchy wherein signs, signifiers, and gestures are hyper-transient. Orbiting artefacts and oscillating artworks demonstrate that one cannot go back to the beginning; parameters and context are never identical. But one can visit imagined beginnings and observe how variations of past transmissions modify meaning and structure. In exploring the objectness of objects, it becomes clear that this process is inextricably intertwined with the eternal return.
Sunshine Frère, Guest Curator
i A Strange Loop is a system that contains what Douglas Hofstadter calls a tangled hierarchy, a structure that is cyclical in nature with no highest or lowest level. Douglas Hofstadter, “I Am a Strange Loop”, (New York: Basic Books, 2008)
ii Ancient Roman frescos were preserved through eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. A blanket of volcanic ash buried the ancient city of Pompeii. Among Pompeii murals excavated from 1840-1909, several examples of proto-still life paintings have been documented.
iii Choit's project title Richmond Reconstructions references reconstruction archeology, a process whereby institutions reconstruct ancient scenes in order to attract visitors.
iv Hidden in the internet's dark web, it is rumoured that 'red rooms' exist. These physical places contain people who have been taken hostage, they're abused and murdered as spectacle in a live-feed format. Red Room users can pay and control the activities of the spectacle.
5 The phrase 'Safety in numbers, survival in counted cans' was created collaboratively by Anchi Lin and Irina Rakina.
Published by Richmond Art Gallery to accompany the exhibition Eternal Return with artists Barb Choit, Kevin Day, Lucien Durey, Alanna Ho and Anchi Lin, September 10 – November 19, 2017.
Printed in Canada by MET Fine Printers, Vancouver. ISBN: 978-1-926594-27-9 Copyright: Richmond Art Gallery, the artists and author, 2017
The Richmond Art Gallery received a Canada Council project grant as well as a Richmond 150 grant in the support of this exhibition. The gallery gratefully acknowledges the ongoing support of the City of Richmond, Richmond Art Gallery Association (RAGA), BC Arts Council and the Province of British Columbia.
Thank you to all participating exhibition artists, the gallery and the Richmond Museum for their collaborative support, eternal enthusiasm and significant contributions to this exhibition. Thanks also like to thank Rachel Rosenfield Lafo for her contribution and support towards multiple aspects of this exhibition.
