PERFORMANCE ET PHOTOGRAPHIE : SHOOT
Adad Hannah, André Lemke, John Marriott, Shelley Niro, Judy Radul, Ana
Rewakowicz, Alana Riley, Chih-Chien Wang, Chris Wildrick
Curated by Michèle Thériault and France Choinière
Opening Thursday, April 15 at 5 p.m.
The exhibition runs from April 15 to May 22, 2004.
The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from noon to 5 p.m.
Performance et photographie : SHOOT is the second part of a special three-part project, curated by Michèle Thériault and France Choinière. The works gathered for this exhibition bear witness to photography as both the subject and object of performance; as a performance prop; and as the trace of an otherwise ephemeral act.
The series Documents for Performance, a body of work by Judy Radul, uses performance as a means to a photographic outcome. In Theatrical, for example, Radul was stripped naked and placed in the trunk of a car and driven from her home in Vancouver to a site at the edge of the Fraser River in the suburb of Richmond. A flash camera was her only source of illumination during the trip. Adad Hannah’s Stills are tableaux vivants that similarly occupy the interstice between the recorded image and performance. Neither edited nor slowed down, these silent videos deliver stillness in real time. Shelley Niro’s series of twelve triptychs, This Land is Mime Land, features the artist dressed as various familiar personalities, such as Santa Claus, Elvis, and Marilyn Monroe, which she juxtaposes with her "real" identity. Niro examines how cultural icons can influence the construction of both feminine and contemporary Aboriginal identity. Here, too, the performance exists only in service of the image.
I Am Very Disappointed, a Powerpoint presentation by André Lemke, tells the stories of objects he mistook for other objects. A dismembered hand turned out, on closer inspection, to be an unexciting, old shoe. A lost, lone potato was actually just a crumpled brown bag. The artist describes his moment of discovery and his immediate disappointment. For Lemke, photography is at once evidence of his many hours of urban wandering — itself a performative act — as well as accessory to subsequent public performances in which he narrates his various disappointments. John Marriott also uses a photographic prop, here, as a lever for performance. In Picture yourself on the moon, he invited passersby to be photographed on the moon’s surface. Afterwards, each participant was mailed the momento of their "visit" to the moon. In To Scale, Ana Rewakowicz also invites the spectator to participate in her work. After making a rubber latex mould of a room from her apartment, she asked people to hold the awkward object while standing on a scale. The photograph of this action became the artwork. Alana Riley, on the other hand, includes herself in the performance, taking photographs with strangers who are invited to lie on top of her. Once in position, the artist squeezes the shutter release. Entitled Support System, Riley’s series clearly demonstrates where the artist situtates herself in relation to others, not without social and sexual implications.
All performances are ephemeral, but some are almost invisible. Chih-Chien Wang’s accumulation of self-portraits — 4x6 snapshots developed at the pharmacy — creates ritual out of everyday banalities. By taking self-portraits three times a day, at the same times of day for many days, Wang has created a performance out of photographing himself, called Counting. Looking like record album covers, Chris Wildrick’s posters simultaneously advertise and document his very fleeting and often private performances. For Lend Me a Copy of Your Most Hated Song on CD and I’ll Love It by the End of the Night, Wildrick posted advertisements that asked people to bring him their most hated song. He then listened intently to the songs over and over, until he had successfully forced himself to love them all, whether they were No Wave punk, Thai folk music, or midcentury high modernism.
The nine emerging and established artists in this show have integrated the formats, strategies and concerns from both performance and photography to create hybrid works at the intersection of both disciplines.