ARCHIVES >> Front Gallery: Emmanuelle Léonard
Back Gallery: Internationale Virologie Numismatique
PeepHole: Shaan Syed
Front Gallery: Emmanuelle Léonard
Back Gallery: Internationale Virologie Numismatique
PeepHole: Shaan Syed
Emmanuelle Léonard.
Mike Collins, other services
, color photograph, 21 x 14", 2004
The Internationale Virologie Numismatique (IVN)
Shaan Syed, Two Dogs, video still, 2004
April 08, 2004 - May 15, 2004
Opening Reception: 08 April, 2004 8PM
Emmanuelle Léonard
Working
"Emmanuelle Léonard's project Statistical Landscape (in the eye of the worker) utilises the real estate, infrastructure, labour and audience of Mercer Union to perform a critical political project: clarify the image of the local working mass." Kika Thorne -- excerpt from brochure essay
Leonard is a Montreal-based documentary photographer. Her work in general rests in the eye of the worker. As part of "Working" her exhibition for Mercer Union, Léonard, for the second time, initiated a collaborative project for which she invited 20 participants, asking them to photograph their workplaces. The first of these projects Les Travailleurs was exhibited at Espace Vox, Montreal, 2002. Currently, her work can also be seen in Toronto at the Pari Nadimi Gallery.
Brochure Text by Kika Thorne
These are mad times, insecure times, formless, union-busting, short-term-contract, no-benefits, loss-of-rights times. The flexible economy pits workers against one another while cultivating the notion we have little to gain by solidarity. In education, communications, the service industry, manufacturing, you hear it everywhere, “nothing lasts forever.”(1)
"GM doesn't want thirty-year agreements any more,” said François Poiré, a 17-year veteran with GM, “They want temporary workers for lower wages.”(2)
Emmanuelle Léonard’s project Statistical Landscape (in the eye of the worker) utilises the real estate, infrastructure, labour and audience of Mercer Union to perform a critical political project: clarify the image of the local working mass. “Twenty workers are invited to produce their own images following two parameters: that they do it in their workplace and that this place be deserted (in order to privilege a relation to the space rather than to inter-personal relations).”
“Each image represents a field of labour.” From retail to administration, farming, healthcare and food services, across the spectrum, these divisions account for almost all of us. “Together these photographs construct a statistical landscape of work in Toronto. The size of the print corresponds to the percentage of workers in that industry.” Seventy square inches of image equals one percent of the workforce.
9,425 Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, 2,660 Mining and oil and gas extraction, 15,765 Utilities, 124,395 Construction, 395,970 Manufacturing, 151,870 Wholesale trade, 272,680 Retail trade, 123,135 Transportation and warehousing, 100,760 Information and cultural industries, 177,210 Finance and insurance, 56,890 Real estate and rental and leasing, 246,655 Professional, scientific and technical services, 4,840 Management of companies and enterprises, 121,490 Administrative and support, waste management and remediation services, 143,985 Educational services, 189,450 Health care and social assistance, 47,870 Arts, entertainment and recreation, 141,560 Accommodation and food services, 110,745 Other services (except public administration), 84,655 Public administration, 2,522,020 All industries, 2,564,585 Total Toronto Labour Force
When Léonard relinquishes power as photographer, she adopts a contemporary technique in the field of visual sociology: “give the kids a camera!” But when she collects this photographic research and transforms it into proportional representation, she frames qualitative imagery with quantitative measure, and in so doing, she gives back an invention.
In the logic of hieroglyphics, the scale of the king’s pictogram matched his power In the logic of Statistical Landscape, the scale of the information and cultural industries matches our power. Now visible, the fields of data conceive “the emerging picture language”(3) of local capitalism. Allan Sekula argues, “The archive has to be read from below, from a position of solidarity with those displaced, silenced or made invisible by the machineries of profit and progress.”(4)
If there is a narrative to this exhibition, it observes a bitter arrival in The Walkers. Of this photo-series Léonard writes, “A kind of introspective gaze links with the fight of the body in the cold.” These photographs are melancholy, understated. They sing an increment of sorrow for the embodied economies of immigration, the dematerialization of the Canadian Dream. If there is a silence that runs through this narrative, it is one of many.
When asked how she can return to the camera after Statistical Landscape (in the eye of the worker), Léonard responds by disregarding the rigidity of “one correct process,” proposing instead to open multiple approaches—“crossing paths of view” to provoke questions about representation’s links to the working sphere.
As public space is squeezed out by capitalist momentum, Emmanuelle Léonard asks how photography can expose our collaborative granularity, our social life, when all we can afford, both ethically and economically is empty streets.
In Statistical Landscape, the artist’s subtle intervention suggests that the place of work is the self. We are not merely hand/eye coordination or even other people; we are also objects, light and architecture. The worker is a particular force within and against a set of conditions. The absence of the human makes a conceptual afterimage, but more clearly and more radically, it is an image of an empty place. The immediate experience of Statistical Landscape is of a population that has abandoned the workplace.
“Whereas in the disciplinary era, sabotage was the fundamental notion of resistance, in the era of imperial control it may be desertion. Battles against the Empire might be won through subtraction and defection. This desertion does not have a place; it is the evacuation of the places of power.”(5)
"...this time however I come as the victorious Dionysus, who will turn the world into a holiday... Not that I have much time…" —Frederich Nietzsche (from his last "insane" letter to Cosima Wagner)
Notes
(1) Most recently as a line in Outkast’s latest hit songs: Hey Ya! Outkast. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. 2003.
(2) Joanne Wallador. GM Workers End Strike In Canada. The Militant. 1996; Vol.60/No.39.
(3) Allan Sekula. Photography between Labour and Capital. Mining Photographs and Other Pictures: 1948-1968. NSCAD/UCCB Press. 1983; p. 193.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Hardt M, Negri A. Empire. Harvard University Press: 2001; p. 212.
Internationale Virologie Numismatique
We Have A Special Plan for this World
"Tick. Tick. Tick. The sound of both bomb and clock, an irony only if one believes a distinction was ever possible. Especially since time and space begin solely when they are measured, and that is where struggle begins, too. Another possible irony."IVN-- excerpt from brochure text
The Internationale Virologie Numismatique (IVN) was established in 1999 by Mathieu Beauséjour, who works collaboratively under this title with artists, writers and musicians. For this exhibition at Mercer Union, Beauséjour will work with Pete Dubé. Together they create texts and artifacts of a ficitious underground artist collective in order to look at historical and contemporary utopian visions. Beauséjour and Dubé have previously collaborated under the this collective, exhibiting in "Les Commansseaux," Skol, Montreal. Beauséjour has extensively exhibited in Canada and France. He produces conceptually based installations and interventions that deal with notions of money and representations of power. Pete Dubé is a poet and writer who has published the "Vortex Manifesto", and a novel "Hovering World", DC Books.
Brochure Text by Internationale Virologie Numismatique
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The sound of both bomb and clock, an irony only if one believes a distinction was ever possible. Especially since time and space begin solely when they are measured, and that is where struggle begins, too. Another possible irony.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Time, as currently defined at least, marches on in a space increasingly contested. All around us one finds the cutting up of moments of experience into manageable (how’s that for a telling word) segments, each assigned its function. Time to study. Time to go to work. Relax and unwind NOW. Here is the first of the many violences done by culture. And there seems little point to reviewing once again the enormities of violence committed over parcelling out times terrible twin—space—into arbitrary divisions based on national “identity” and business interests.
There seems little reason to do so precisely because we have so many reasons to suspect reality’s infinite constructability. All of our experience and our study, our observation and reflection have suggested as much to us. As our comrades in The Vortex Faction have asserted in their Manifesto, and we concur:
The real is a hypothesis, it is elastic and is constantly in flux—in every respect it calls out for fiction to touch its skin, a kind of erotic boundary.(1)
Elasticity. Touch. The words call to mind both notions of plasticity and a tug-of-war, the creative act and conflict.
Here, too, is a starting point, not so much because the malleability of everything troubles us—actually, we rather like that—but because of who is doing the moulding. And why? Particularly when so much of what is around us wants to seem inevitable, as if the current organization of the world were the result of a natural, organic growth and self-structuring; as if no programme were being served.
But what is really being done is the guaranteeing that there are enough hours in the day to go shopping.
We’ll have no more of it, this reasonable time. No more of this TV-schedule life, this time for making money. This time for spending it. City streets, imagination, lust, all of human life now subordinated to the infernal logics of greed.
Even worse, the promise of a radical hipness is everywhere. There are products that can make us more cool, more rebellious and, of course, therefore, more desirable. There are products for people just like us, too tuned-in to wallow in the hype. This $85.00 tee-shirt will let the whole world know how savvy you are. Especially if you add a little spritz of the perfume of independence.
The end of days really is near. But the good news is that some people—different people—do have another plan for this world.
In the face of the spiraling needs of the machine and the relentless efforts of its manager/mechanics to find perpetually new ways to make us want their tripe (as we all know, the health of the economy is at stake,) we want to create little zones of eternity. Times and spaces free of evaluation, economics and exigencies. Times and spaces freed for creativity. Places where we can respond to the measured world all around us.
And, in view of the final implosion of capitalism’s logic, in which even the resistance is a market, we want to pitch a little dialectics. To show how the machine co-opts and calls forth its ancient enemy at the same time.
Because it does call it forth. If the playing field of imagery is totally free and they want to sell with our iconographies, what might we do? What might we find hot? Their gamble is a risky one because even as it opens up some possibilities for them it opens up a few for us as well. If they court and crush all revolutionary ardour at the same time—what the hell—why can’t we pant over and deflate power simultaneously? So here’s an invitation, since success is so sexy. We’ve set the proverbial table before our enemies, and our friends. Here is our boardroom, where no decisions need to be made right now, where time stands still, or moves, as you see fit. It’s your time after all. So, let’s take the iconographies of their power and do something else with them. Let’s re-engineer, to borrow one of their words.
Because the final conflict, if you like, could show up anytime—the struggle to retool those old shibboleths: time, money and space.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Notes
(1) The Vortex Faction. Manifesto: A Metafiction. Montreal: Vortex Editions. 2001; p. 14.
Shaan Syed
Two Dogs
Shaan Syed, who works primarily as a painter, for his exhibition at Mercer Union has produced Two Dogs, a hand-drawn animated short film showing two dogs in an ongoing and repeated dance of play and seduction. The film will constantly loop on a monitor through the PeepHole, acting as a tiny voyeuristic music box, emphasizing the intimacy of the drawing and the action represented on film. Two Dogs will also be screened as part of Images Film and Video Festival 2004.
Brochure Text by Shaan Syed
There is a brutal but bizarre sweet truth to seeing two dogs fucking.
Two Dogs is a hand-drawn animated short film showing two dogs in an ongoing and repeated dance of play and seduction. Each of the seven hundred and twenty frames that make up the animation were drawn on separate mylar sheets. The drawings were laid on top of each other so that the remnants of action could be seen through the translucency of the paper. As an artist who works primarily as a painter, drawing for this animation was an experiment that both informed and was informed by my work on canvas. Anticipating the individual movements that would come to make up the animation as a whole proved a new CHALLENGE, but it also felt remarkably similar to an intuitive brushstroke. The labour-intensive process of creating such a short representation of seemingly insignificant action spoke to me of the fleetingness of individual action and the transient yet permanent nature of experience and memory.