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Faking History Curated by Mary Anne Barkhouse & Reid Diamond April 1 - May 8, 1999 |
Daniel Bowden, Hanna Claus, Angela Inglis,Grant McConnell, Sally McKay, Alison Norlen, Steve Venright
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Nobody ever suggests that there was anything interesting going on before our planet came along, just a lot of solids and liquids, a lot of heating and cooling and spinning around, and a lot of splitting and rejoining of things. - Sally McKay, How it all Began... |
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SCIENTISTS have recently discovered that, technically, Pluto no longer meets the qualifications for being a planet, and that it is, in all probability, a rotating sphere of ice. Astronomers are split ion the question of whether or not to strip the celestial body of it's title as farthest planet from the Sun. A vote amongst the scientific community is being considered to define Pluto's current status. This is an example of viewing history as a field of motion, the object being not to dismiss historical claims, but to build upon, or add to existing information. In this way, the historical never stops. Like the starlight which reaches us some seventy years after its initial projection, history is forever arriving. For Faking History, we have selected works in which each artist has adopted a notion of history as an intrinsic element in the process of construction. In the age of immediacy and high cultural turnover, how is the concept of history being addressed?
But maybe before planet earth there were a billion planets just like it, with dinosaurs and cavemen and plankton and TV. Maybe the universe operates just the same as everything else. - Sally McKaySally McKay's visual presentation Giant Animals with accompanying leaflet How it all Began... offers a re-jig of conventional thought of evolutionary history. Avoiding the fantasia of Star Trek and time travel, McKay suggests that it may be arrogant to think we're not existing within our own little pools.
We have rocket ships and nuclear missiles, pets, breakfast cereals, marketing and desktop publishing. We have Walt Disney and simulacra, famines, wars and a hole in the ozone layer. We have natural fibres, fossil fuels and art museums, sci-fi encyclopedias, and much much more. - Sally McKayWhile McKay adopts the simple language and imagery found in grade school history books, her view is deceivingly complex. Like a strand of DNA, the information within reaches beyond its formal constraints.
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On viewing Daniel Bowden's video installation A2K, the impression is given that we are standing on the Earth at an undefined moment in time. The evening stars move forward over a barren landscape, giving the illusion of the globe spinning faster than its normal revolution. It's not when but where that is most evoked; the realization that we, individually are the point of contact between past and future. A soundtrack of chirping crickets heightens the drama, a suggestion of a shared community of sentient and (supposedly) non-sentient beings.
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Alison Norlen's window installation Pinball VIII is a continuation in her series of large scale drawings that are concerned with the machinations of history. Annexing the pinball machine's standard thematic presentation of an environment for play, Norlen re-tools the table, offering lateral views of the social utopias that are presented to us for consumption. For this new work, Norlen presents imagery of the Yukon, mapping out the territory between Whitehorse and Dawson City. A landscape is littered with decades-old, abandoned gold digging dredges, some standing three storeys high, testimonies to both a history and a future of hype, hysteria, hope and hardship. Meanwhile, a Yukon showgirl spins and dances throughout.
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Grant McConnell's approach to depicted history is to use it to pose questions. What if, as in his painting Speaker's Chair, the centre of power in the House of Commons was at one time moved from town to town? McConnell questions our insistent use of precedent to validate current structures and, in doing so, helps to redistribute our notion of the myth of centralized political entities.
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Hannah Claus shares a similar view of cultural antecedents. The doily, a symbol of domestic propriety, is accessed as a representation of a new cultural presence. Using its imprint in four panels of encaustic and beeswax materials, Les Plaies suggests that the story of the doily is not yet over. Likewise, in her beaded works traditional Iroquoian narratives take on a personal context. Her internalization of old stories and formats results in a reinvigoration of vocabulary, one that speaks to issues surrounding the rights of the individual to self-representation and evolution within the mega-datastream of historical context.
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Angela Inglis' the how and why library consists of a volume of aged instructional books that have been mulched, glazed and re-presented on the wall as an altered physical form. The books become a different kind of storehouse of knowledge. Inglis' re-coding of the texts becomes a stand-in for our own selves as the ultimate manifestations of accumulated information. As we interact with the world, we express our knowledge through our actions, activities and representations. We are what we know, the same way that we hold onto books we may never read, there are stories we may never get to tell.
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The good news is that Jesus has returned. The bad news is that he's brought his family. The result is that nothing will ever be the same again (not that it ever was).Steve Venright's bookwork The Long And The Short Of It starts with his own interpretation of one of the grandest of narratives, but rather than taking an ironic stance, the voice of a confidant is imparted. |
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The good news is that the earth is round (or roundish anyway)... The bad news is that it's floating in space. The result is that we're going to have to think fast.While Venright baits us and tosses us back, it isn't out of a sense of playing with us but, rather, of us playing together. Venright also presents a series of veriegraphs, visual works that invite a sense of (I)futalgia, a stylized remembrance of what the future was once rendered to be. While the works are reminiscent of a scene in the film (I)2001: A Space Odyssey, in which we are propelled in a spacecraft through acid tripping colours into the future, the origins of these modified laser prints are more primal: they are finger paintings. For his last stanza, Venright leaves us, with no pull back: The good news is that Art is long. The bad news is that Life is short. The result is that you should invest in Art while you're still alive.While these artists temporarily turn the lights out on standard notions of history, our eyes adjust to the dark. Wherever you are standing on the Earth is how the stars will appear tonight. There's no stopping history now. - Mary Anne Barkhouse & Reid Diamond |
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