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1/4/2015

Two Exhibitions

Darling Foundry visual arts centre, Montreal

Chih-Chien Wang: Act of Forgetting

This new exhibition by Chih-Chien Wang, The Act of Forgetting, closing an intense cycle that unfolded over the past two years, states the artist’s commitment to an emancipation of mediums. The installation integrates his most recent video and photographic work, staged through a double central projection and a hanging, as well as random objects laid down in the space and spot performances, all energized by slight lags and audio video splits. A subject dear to Wang, the intimacy of beings is laid bare in confidences, as body and ritual performances by some twenty artists from different backgrounds. Invited to open up before the camera, which scrutinizes them by circling them in a non-stop travelling loop, actors, musicians, dancers, singers perform short scenes, revealing secret memories of childhood, sexuality, culture, and art.
Chih-Chien Wang

Chih-Chien Wang was born in Taiwan and has resided in Montreal since 2002, where he completed a Master’s degree in Photography in the Department of Studio Arts at Concordia University, following his studies in Cinema and Theatre at the Chinese Culture University in Taipei, Taiwan. His work is the subject of recent solo exhibitions at venues such as Centre Expression de St-Hyacinthe, in 2014; Centre Space in Toronto and Musée régional de Rimouski, in 2013; the Montreal Museum of Fine arts, in 2012; and his first solo exhibition in 2005, presented by Dazibao. He is also included in numerous group shows, including Out of Grace, at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery in Montral, in 2010, initiated by Lynda Gaudreau; the Quebec Triennial’s Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, in 2008; and Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography and the Canadian Imagination, at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, in 2006. Represented by Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain, his artworks can be found within the collections of several important Canadian and international institutions.

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Stephanie Loveless: For Romantic Fantasy

For Romantic Fantasy is both precursor to and extension of a project called Performance Prescriptions (2009) “an apothecary of actions prescribed for audience-identified ailments”. With Prescriptions, Loveless invited her community to tell her their perceived ailments, whether “psychic, physical, or psychological,” for which she would then prescribe curative actions. Most of her cures involved the voice: she proposed learning non-human languages, speaking to trees, to a body part, or to the dead.

For Romantic Fantasy was a self-prescription, and offers Loveless’ own voice repeating the heteronormative song of optimistic longing, “Some Day My Prince Will Come”, with increasing loss of linguistic intelligibility. Produced through digital time shift and documenting her attempts to master these new sounds, For Romantic Fantasy is played out in multiple speakers and in increasingly slower time signatures until the voice moves well beyond language. Its process is evocative of Alvin Lucier’s germinal project, I am Sitting in a Room, wherein he recorded, played back and re-recorded a simple text spoken by himself until the text itself was lost. His didactic language is replaced with that of the resonant and formant frequencies in the room caused by the interrelation of the subject voice, the recording device’s capabilities and the architectural volume and material, or acoustics, of the room in question. Loveless has fully engaged the spatial here in the form of physical installation, but has replaced the recording device as the interlocutor, and does not activate the acoustic phenomena of the architecture to perform the work. Instead, the handmade speaker structures and their orientation within the room hint at both the complexity of location and the difficulty of making a sound, and assert the nature of the exhibition as a constructed and deeply coded site. It is with this distinct series of actions that Loveless places the act of listening at the forefront of the work, and importantly, the first listener is herself. This unique subject position offers up the individual as literally polyphonic as she dismantles a seemingly antiquated and prescriptive text into the sonorous.

In this exploded view she also implicates the environs, the spaces and the tools of both construction and delivery in her engagement of the Disney song, shifting the focus from individual performance to the range of reception. Transforming the textual message of the original lyrics into overt vocalization asserts more fully the spatial nature of song. To sing, the body must physically shift the boundaries of acoustical space within the throat and expand its potential for breath - it must change its own parameters. It is within this complex series of registers: the physical, sonic, spatial, and the social, that Loveless engages the tireless refrain of prescriptive coupling and masculine saviours, but she performs the dismantling of the ideas with a display of coded feminine powers, one of which is the double bind of embodiment. Her occupation of space begins an undoing and invites us into experience.

Image: Chih Chien Wang

Opening:Thuersday 2 April 2015

Fonderie Darling
745 rue Ottawa
Montreal, Québec
H3C 1R8

Opening Hours:
Wed 12pm to 7pm
Thu 12pm to 10pm
Fri - Sun 12pm to 7pm
Mon-Thu closed

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