Ilga Leimanis
The Best Kept Secret in Montreal: Celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montréal, Canada, October — December 2002
My curatorial essay:
The 10th Anniversary of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery is an opportunity to celebrate the passage of time and acknowledge the gallery's history, and also to look forward to future periods of transformation and growth. The anniversary exhibition, The Best Kept Secret, aims to expand established boundaries and attempt something challenging and special, while marking the heights the gallery has be able to achieve over the course of the last decade.
The Best Kept Secret was organised with the idea of transforming the gallery space, challenging the existing environment as well as the viewer/participant, looking both forward and backward. Five artists were selected based on the different types of installation work they had produced in the past: Ingrid Bachmann, Mary Anne Barkhouse, Thérèse Chabot, Stéphane Gilot, and Vid Ingelevics each uniquely address the specific exhibition mandate and site of the gallery, while representing a different aspect of Canadian contemporary art, with geographical, cultural, generational, and linguistic differences. Their differing approaches give each area of the gallery its own distinctive atmosphere.
Site-specific art "articulates exchanges between the work of art and the places in which its meanings are defined."1 These exchanges show a relationship between the art and its specific location - 'location' both as sense of place and as position occupied, with political, aesthetic, geographic, historic and metaphoric associations. If removed from the specific context of the site, the work, or the reading of the work, would not be the same. Negotiating the art/location relationship includes a process where each artist chooses to work with certain elements and references, adding and subtracting along the way. Similar changes and processes occur at an actual site, where daily routine adds experiences then erases them, in a continuous, performative, never-ending cycle. The university gallery is a public location, where multiple exhibitions are installed annually; between shows, the white walls are patched and cleaned, yet the past never completely disappears - rather, it lingers in the layers of memory.
The five artists included in this exhibition use the specific site of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery to investigate the intersections between place and its history. The theme of looking forward has also prompted examination, making transparent the inner workings of the gallery that normally remain obscure. This examination informally extends boundaries in the hope of encouraging new dialogues both inside the institution and beyond its physical space. Our culture has witnessed a proliferation of museums in the past century, each becoming a monument to its specific mandate. The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery is a university museum "committed to researching, collecting and interpreting Canadian art."2 Current museological discourse examines the structure and narrative of exhibited culture, and questions accepted systems of display, including the ideas, values and symbols employed in the exhibition and collecting practices of the institution. Thus "the museum [has] emerge[d] as a field of interplay between the social histories of collecting, classifying, entertaining, and legitimating."3
Although diverse in nature, the installations in The Best Kept Secret are unified by many common characteristics: a playfulness and fascination with dualities relates to a willingness to reveal the hidden (secret) mechanisms of (the) institution(s). The artists in Secret have presented new (or re-worked) projects, specific to the location, each with a sense of immediacy, spontaneity and excitement. Yet despite a desire for playfulness and fun, these works speak of contemporary concerns, mixing critique with appreciation, bespeaking the complex undercurrents that run through our society.
No stranger to the potential of site for evoking multiple histories and approaches, Ingrid Bachmann organized the 48 hours,
48 rooms event in 1999, in a rooming house on St-Denis Street in Montreal. Invited to create site-specific installations and performances
before its conversion to apartments, most of the artists in this art intervention dealt with the transient histories of the people who had
lived in the house.
In the current exhibition, Bachmann creates an interactive installation that explores the ways space can shape and create experiences, and modify behaviours. Knit One, Swim 2 merges new technologies with the traditional practice of knitting, bridging the material and the immaterial, the physical and the virtual, creating a fluid relationship between supposed opposites through digital technoligies.
Amplifying the basic, the simple, and the fundamental, Knit One, Swim 2 was first exhibited in Chicago and has been re-worked for Bachmann's contribution to this exhibition. In the artist's own words, she has married the ancient practice of knitting with a highly sophisticated interface board, suspending two fourteen-foot-long knitting needles hung "from the ceiling and connected through a system of weights and pulleys, guide wires and potentiometers, to a computer animation program. The movement of the knitting needles is tracked by a mechanical device (potentiometer), which triggers the animation of a swimmer on the computer monitor and causes cylindrical water-weights to rise and fall."
By moving the needles, the viewer/participant is directly responsible for the movement of the figure on the screen. The participant completes the piece by challenging his or her preconceived and intimate connection to knitting needles, as these have become large, aggressive, and ponderous. The difficulty we encounter in trying to maneuver the needles highlights the sometimes awkward relationship we have to technology, and brings awareness back to the function of the body in its relationship with technology. Bachmann conceptualizes the needles as two oversize computer mice, expanding the distance between the action (hand-eye coordination and the function technology is meant to fulfil.
Knitting has historically has been gendered feminine; women's technology associated with home, clothing and protection. Whether as a solitary or communal practice, the linearity of knitting corresponds to the narrative of a story, with each stitch representing a word; personal histories are written into the knitted article. In this work, Bachmann substitutes the yarn with the potentiometer that produces the digital animation. The physicality of the wool and its corresponding garment are thus dissolved to immateriality, action ultimately producing nothing, communicating no story.
This current incarnation of Knit One, Swim 2 is, in Bachmann's words "less Spartan" and more bodily connected to the image than was its Chicago version. Bachmann has consciously chosen to incorporate the notion of beauty, reflecting on the current investigation of a topic once considered frivolous and historical in the language of contemporary art. Commenting on the game, Bachmann ends up distorting this relationship between play and reward, for there is no real climax at the end - a pretty picture with no narrative thread, no final moment of satisfaction.
Beautiful in their own right, the weights used to support the needles are visible at the back of the installation, creating movement that is not immediately apparent. By making the machinery visible, Bachmann exposes the mechanisms involved in the workings of technology. An earlier reading of this piece discussed the notion of trauma and coping with a heritage and "circumstances over which we have had no control."4 The needles, divorced from their original purpose, stimulate a sense of anxiety, while our attention is focused on the swimmer - a metaphor for absorption and meditative immersion. The apparent disconnection between the elements of the installation encourages a sense of absent responsibility. Bachmann speaks about being seduced by the image in front of us, yet unaware of activity behind you. Unable to see the entire picture, we keep moving forward anyway. This subtle seduction raises many historical parallels; Bachmann acknowledges these while also making an effort to retain transparency, Knit One, Swim 2 speaks of history, the early technology of knitting, the gendering of that technology and the weight of memory, which moves with us. It is our function to understand and be conscious of the weight and processes of history.
Family and a connection to the natural environment have informed Mary Anne Barkhouse's work equally. Barkhouse has roots on both the west and
east coasts of Canada, belonging to native and non-native communities. Coming to terms with this dual heritage has been the focus of her
professional work; a duality also apparent in the form of her work: large-scale outdoor public art projects paired with craft commissions,
primarily metal-smithing.
The principal investigation throughout her diverse body of work is Barkhouse's attention to the socio-political and economic conditions traced through her family history, and the related history of colonization. Through the use of animal imagery in her jewellery and installation work, Barkhouse lends a voice to the 'other' – the marginalized and the dominated. Previous work featured narratives of her life: stories collected from family members and others, describing her dogs and her stint as a punk rocker. Her recent heritage and wild animal-inspired installations, several done in collaboration with Michael Belmore, bring sharp focus to human intervention and exploitation of communities and the environment. In lichen (1999) at Toronto's Sculpture Garden, for example, three wolves wait at a metropolitan bus shelter, while a photograph of a raven replaces the customary advertisement. All seem to be waiting for a "change in our attitude towards them."5
wake is a new site-specific installation created for the Secret exhibition. Featuring five cast beavers, each representing one century since colonial contact in North America, this work comments on the continued presence of the fur trade in Montreal and its impact on both beaver and Native populations. Celebrating resilience and the escape from eradication, Barkhouse defines the word 'wake' as an awakening from sleep or unconsciousness, a vigil or gathering to remember and celebrate the life of a person who has died, and the track or trail left by anything that has passed.
Using these multiple definitions, wake creates a quiet, reflective space, bringing elements from nature into the gallery. The entire area of the installation is painted blue, with four stained glass windows set into two facing walls, resulting in a space reminiscent of a small country chapel. Barkhouse replaces traditional narratives from Christian history with images of what beavers like to eat - poplar trees, water lilies and grasses - to re-endow nature with a recognizable value. The five beavers 'swim' within this peaceful space, perched on tree branches collected from Barkhouse's backyard.
Attracted by the beaver's industriousness, Barkhouse writes that nothing is too big for the animals to attempt, "they approach their task methodically, with a set goal in mind."6 Similarly, Barkhouse addresses multiple layers of historical and contemporary connections between the beaver and native populations, including perpetrations against their economic and ecological systems; as an over-consumed economic resource of the new world, the beaver population came to the brink of extinction. Its decline had direct implications for the environment and the delicate balance of our complex ecosystem.
Attitudes and concerns about hunting and trapping have changed over time, and we have collectively woken up to a new reality. With wake, Barkhouse provides a space where we may gather and remember the past, and where we can stand in front and in admiration of the beaver - a rare opportunity with an animal reluctant to show itself on demand. A fitting conclusion to the project, a baby beaver was recently born on Barkhouse's home property: the spirit of celebration and regeneration surrounds the survival of communities, and contributes to the synchronicity of events generated around the unveiling of multiple secrets.
Interested in "collective history written every day through local mythologies and regional speech," Thérèse Chabot comments on the lack
of space for the heartfelt and the sacred, reflections of our cultural memory. Her site-specific installations, or spiritual interventions,
feature the recurrent theme of the sacred garden, timeless and nomadic. Exploring the relationship between nature and culture, she creates ephemeral
works that refer both to the immediacy of the site (its history and meaning) and to the distance of her own home and garden, where she nurtures,
collects, and catalogues her materials.
Chabot speaks of 'the gesture' as the stimulus behind her production; the origin, the spark for communication and the catalyst for life. Her work is also about feeling and a reference to previous memories. She claims that she does not invent any gestures, but works with inherited, ancestral ones. With these gestures Chabot creates reflective spaces where the viewers can become aware of the hidden, and connect with themselves in a meditative space.
In addition to this spiritual element, Chabot's work acknowledges traditional female crafts, such as the labour-intensive and solitary rituals of embroidery and tapestry. Promoting this association, Chabot uses flowers grown in her garden as her primary material. While flowers are "commonly recognized both as subject in the long tradition of still life painting, and as a source of pigments for making paint and dyes,"7 Chabot's work "remind[s us] of the private place within ourselves, the place where we store our secrets, memories, fears and desires."8
Chabot has participated in a series of site-specific installations, collectively entitled Contemplation on the Spiritual (2001-2002), in majestic European cathedrals and synagogues, bringing her dried flowers from Quebec to create portable 'prayer gardens' on foreign soil. Recently, Chabot has inserted herself into her installations "body and soul," pursuing her feminist engagement with the work. Through her own experience, she acknowledges multiple women's personal, political, and social identities. Offrandes d'une reine (2001) became "an allegory of finding one's own power."9 Crowning herself queen, Chabot metaphorically reclaimed power for herself as well as for each "Queen of the Home."
Interested in this theme of power and the "false and ephemeral glamour this status provides,"10 Chabot approached The Best Kept Secret by blending her roots in meditative architectural spaces and sacred gardens with her royalty-inspired theatrical performances. Chabot explored the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery permanent collection in search of inspiration and, investigating the contents of the vault, found Alan Glass' (Queen Bee) Nouvelle rosée, nouveau miel, (1963). Without knowing who had made the piece, Chabot was surprised to find out it was someone she had already been encouraged to contact.
Nouvelle rosée, nouveau miel is typical of Glass' production: shadow boxes filled with collected items; mini visionary universes where he invents architecture for birds, bees, flames, night, seas, stars, the wind and the sky.11 Queen Bee contains an image of Queen Elizabeth I, The Ditchley Portrait (c. 1592) by Marcus Gheeraerts, painted four years after the defeat of the Armada, when the Queen was fifty-nine years old. Shown standing on a map of Great Britain, Elizabeth is typified in this image as the Virgin Queen (referring to her status as the most eligible woman in the world, yet never married). Glass places the portrait in the upper part of the box, obscuring the map, instead positioning the Queen on top of a honeycomb, surrounded by bees and eggs.
Inspired by this work, Chabot merges her feminist interests with the mystical and natural, to examine the ritual productions of honey from the flower. The resulting installation, Une reine, 700 mâles, 26 646 ouvrières, allows her to comment on the fragility of power and the desire for empowerment. The delicate flower known as Queen Anne's Lace has been incorporated into a long piece of fine fabric and paired with a wax corset moulded from the artist's body, made into an abstracted, ethereal, queen's gown. Making reference to Alan Glass' shadow box, Chabot cut an incision into the corset, and from it trail red and pink roses in a river down to the floor, leading to a box that contains a rose-petal heart. Chabot completes the installation with additional flowers arranged on the floor, and with antique beekeeping tools.
Chabot's reinterpretation of Glass' work offers a "utopian space suggesting a transformative inner space."12 Her ephemeral installation emphasizes the fleeting nature of power, fertility, and beauty. In this whimsical work, secrets are enveloped in smoke and flowers, creating a magical and almost surreal atmosphere – yet beneath the clichés and humour is a commentary on power and related behaviour.
Monumental, architectural constructions initially influenced by Modernist conventions of painting have come to typify the work of Stéphane
Gilot, who uses the simple game and the act of play to reveal the complex rules and relationships that govern social behaviours. A recent
site-specific installation at the Museé art contemporain de Montréal, Libre arbitre/Free Will (2001) used not only "the physical
configuration of the gallery...but other aspects of the space that drew attention to the social function of the museum"13 - such as the connection
between surveillance systems and the video game. The viewer entered a hidden area where they could monitor the museum's surveillance system
and watch other unsuspecting viewers navigate their way through the installation. However, the video was not a 'live' transmission, but an earlier
pre-recording of invited participants playing a game of Capture the Flag in the same space.
Fulfilling the mandate of this exhibition and its theme of transformation and looking forward, Gilot opens the Montreal branch of his Genetic Transformation Unit for the Colonisation of Mars at the Ellen Art Gallery, inviting the public to participate in an once-in-a-lifetime adventure. An earlier incarnation of this piece was presented in Gilot's native Belgium last year. The Genetic Transformation Unit playfully celebrates the game, paying homage to a humorous time-machine-like retro throwback to how the future was portrayed in the early days of television. With low technology and cheap special effects, this work also raises more sinister and troubling notions of violence in relation to historical and future colonisation. Gilot has created a site-specific installation where future tactical 'plays' are possible, mapped out with rules and borders.
Gilot conceived of this structure as "a hybrid architectural space [which] bring[s] together three irreconcilable elements: a salon, a cinema, and a hallway." The Genetic Transformation Unit is set up in the corridor of the back gallery: once inside, the viewer/participant finds him- or herself in a darkened space, subjected to a harmless "treatment of a series of monochromatic emissions." At the entrance, calm male and female voices, reminiscent of flight attendants', assure total comfort and safety, inviting participants to sign up to "be amongst the founders of the colonization of Mars" and to "transform yourself and open the door to your descendants."
Maintaining a connection to painting, Gilot selected the monochromatic colour violet for the Unit's exterior. A combination of red and blue, the colour represents an integration of the red planet (Mars) with the blue planet (Earth). Gilot raises important questions about home and the kind of future that might await his collection of willing participants. Will they become Martians? How will this affect their relationship to humans left on Earth? How will they be categorized? By whom?
Questions of belonging are all the more interesting when the context of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery is considered: the work is placed very close to the permanent collection stored in the gallery vault. There is an associated element of secrecy and selection that may not be immediately apparent. In the process of selection (whether for art collections or new colonies) who is chosen and why? Historically, colonisation and migration have served the privileged, as well as providing asylum for the refused. Similarly, Gilot comments on the saturation of capitalist ideology and its key words - growth, progress, and expansion. What kind of government or political system will rule currently unpopulated Mars? Is this colonization profit-driven, or is it responding to another system of values, providing an alternative or escape?
Gilot's interests in public versus private space, and in surveillance technologies and genetic manipulation, are brought together in the Genetic Transformation Unit. We are invited to play a game, but are we in somebody's living room/private space, a transient waiting area, or are we just watching television and receiving (potentially) harmless messages? By posing more questions than it answers, this work sets up a forum for challenging discussion.
Vid Ingelevics began an investigation of history and memory, motivated by a search for identity lost through immigration.
His initial exploration led him to retrace the journey his family took after World War II, following their exile from Latvia.
Focused on documenting "some histories of everyday life" his approach was "Alltagsgeschichte a genre of historical investigation
of the unexceptional [and] the repetitive."14 Ingelevics combined his practice as a photographer with his interest
in the production of memory through the construction of history, and its preservation and presentation in museums.
The birth of photography in the 19th century coincided with the development of public museums. Photography was used to record the world, perpetuating notions of truth and completeness still central to the activities of museums and archives today. Addressing photography's function as a tool of documentation within the museum, Ingelevics worked in the photo archives of major museums, reclaiming staff photographers' documents and reinterpreting them in light of contemporary discourse. He exposes the fragmentary and incomplete nature of collecting and preservation that run parallel to historical narrative, challenging the seamless production presented by the museum.
Invited to continue his investigation of institutional memory and the construction of identity, Ingelevics came to the Ellen Art Gallery for a week-long residency to research the contents of the administrative archive. Approaching the institution as both an exhibition and an administrative space, he was interested in exploring the subtleties and networks between the two, while grounding his work in the gallery's archive (an infrequently used storage space).
Accepting the challenge to transform and activate the front window (traditionally the location for the exhibition title and a tantalizing artwork), Ingelevics moves the entire gallery archive from the storage room to the front window. In his words, his "intention is to disrupt the chronological suggestion of a gallery history at the same time as suggesting historical absences, categorical limitations, and future possibilities," to reveal challenges to knowledge and the potential for the retrieval and loss of information.
During his research residency, Ingelevics discovered an archive folder marked "unidentifiable negatives". Printed by the artist and mounted on the wall, these negatives are now "identifiable" by the public, who are invited to provide captions for them, to restore a lost history, if only a fictive one. Ingelevics is interested in the possibility of multiple captions, multiple meanings, collected and complied on the wall during the course of the exhibition. Ingelevics' final intervention is to invite the public to sit at the guard's desk, to occupy the only employee position in the gallery. Ingelevics' installation proposal instructs that on the desk there will be "three Concordia University binders: the first binder will be filled with receipts and work orders for which a visual referent cannot be found. The second will be filled with receipts matched with photographs of their referent objects. The third binder will be filled with photographs of objects currently in the gallery and offices for which a receipt or work order could not be found." This collection of object-related documents and photographs - of calculators, chairs, doorstops, hammers - implies the invisible presence of the gallery staff who use the objects, and so make apparent the behind-the-scenes gallery labour.
John Frow's definition of memory as techne is useful in examining Ingelevics' contribution to the Secret exhibition. The structure of memory has technological and institutional conditions of existence - 'technological' meaning storage-and-retrieval devices and sites such as books, calendars, computers, or museums. The term 'institutional' implies particular practices of recall: techniques of learning acquired in school, structured confessions or reminiscences, the writing of autobiography or history, the giving of evidence in court, the telling of stories related to an artefact or a photograph.15 As the gallery celebrates its tenth anniversary, Ingelevics plays with these techniques, making transparent the secret operations of monuments to time, including their processes of archiving and presentation.
Still the best kept secret in Montreal?
The aim of this exhibition is to celebrate the history of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery by inviting five artists to explore the gallery's mandate, its practices, and its environment, and to transform traditional white exhibition spaces. The gallery's past is displayed to us in the front window; upon entering, we wind through natural territories, interior chambers, interact with immersive digital technologies, to finally end up in a time machine aimed toward the future.
Serious works that attempt to either disclose or create secrets, their complexities are balanced by playful and colourful installations. They explore themes of keeping, collecting, and protecting, and address the concealed aspects of museum work, exposing the mechanisms and making reference to the employees who work behind the scenes. Sharing the gallery's mandate to "promote a greater awareness of art as a visual form of knowledge and address issues of particular importance to the University and the Canadian art communities" this 10th Anniversary exhibition looks within and beyond the boundaries of the institution, honouring the past and looking forward to the future.