The Cave
Images from Young Joon Kwak's collaborative exhibition, The Cave, at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
I recommend going to Kwak's portfolio site to read the artist's statement because there is a lot going on here. Principally, the exhibition takes its name from the a natural feature of Banff, Alberta, the Cave and Basin site, which was the first site in Canada to be designated as a National Park. The cave is significant for a number of other reasons, particularly its sacred uses by the Stoney Nakota nation, and the fact that it is the only home of the Banff Snail, a tiny gastropod found nowhere else in the world.
Most of the included pieces abstract or distort conventional ideas of sex, gender, and sexuality. The ones which I found most striking, once I knew what they were (and there is no signage - I was just lucky enough to be able to attend a curator’s tour), were the objects on the pillars. These sculptures are made of the melted and distorted parts of fleshlights (a masturbation toy designed for use with a penis, for those of you happily in ignorance), in one case turned inside-out. In this inverted form, the remains of the fleshlights become even more alien, deeply unsettling, a bodily/non-bodily horror. The melted metal parts, shaped into almost a human hand, take on an ethereal, fungoid life of their own.
Kwak encounters and reacts to the “social concepts of nature and outdoor culture” which are a part of the atmosphere of Banff the town, Banff the park, Banff the natural space, and Banff the popular, fictionalized image. Subverted here also is the idea of a “man cave,” and the natural world as a rigidly masculinized space. The gauzy, tawdry drapery of the tent piece particularly drags this notion out in absurd style. Rather than a practical shelter, the tent becomes a diaphanous cocoon, more illusion and instagram than haven.
In this way, it almost seems that Kwak is maintaining their exclusion from the outdoor world, imposing their body on the space, but ultimately remaining inimical to it. In the main video piece, Kwak and Ye wander through the urban and natural spaces of Banff, alternately ethereal and grotesque, seemingly desperate for belonging, or at least survival. Of course, I am not unaware of my own subject position in viewing all of this, particularly my position as an outdoor educator and a female person in the context of the wilderness. Watching the pair hike up mountain slopes in heels, dragging wheeled luggage and draping tinsel from trees causes me almost visceral sympathetic pain. But with this is in some ways how we all approach first experiences - with discomfort and struggle, clinging to the things which are familiar and comfortable to us.
However, this struggle and exclusion does not seem to be a comment on femininity and non-masculine identity being at odds with the natural space. One of my old favourite video art pieces, the Lesbian National Parks and Services: A Force of Nature by Shawna Dempsey and Lori Millan, which is also set in Banff and radically rearranges the assumption of female and feminized bodies in the wilderness setting. Adrian Stimson’s Buffalo Boy’s Why Not?, another video piece, also tackles expectations of gender, but focuses on the commodification of the First Nations experience by tourism, and the places this intersects with gender and sexuality.
Overall, The Cave is a hodge-podge, a space weirdly alien, at least to me. Every piece included by Kwak was absolutely part of the overall theme, but I think that the net was cast too broadly for such a small exhibition and led to a confusion of voices. Perhaps this confusion is the real take-away from the exhibition; in trying to fit themselves into the space of Banff, or Banff into themselves, Kwak has created an unresolved, limbo-like space. It is not a destination, but a question. I can’t say that I figured out what that was.
Other artists who contributed or lent their work to this piece included Marvin Astorga, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, Adrian Stimson, and Kim Ye. Most of these artists were included for their own prior interpretations of the site of Banff, either physically or ideologically.
Photo credit: 'twas I.
