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16/4/2015

Two Exhibitions

Vox contemporary image center, Montreal

Lucy Raven

Lucy Raven’s practice encompasses a wide variety of forms, including animated films, interventions into live television, installations, and performative lectures. They all bear witness to the artist’s exploration of the effects of technology on the world, and the connections between labour and image production.

Curtains (2014) presents ten still images: each stereoscopic photograph has been split into the red and blue panes of anaglyph 3D glasses, and over five minute intervals, the chromatically opposite colours slide toward one another, overlap, coincide, and part ways. The film depicts the painstaking, frame-by-frame process of creating visual effects for 21st-century Hollywood cinema, particularly the conversion of 2D films into 3D: though this is referred to as “post-production,” Raven aptly notes that it still relies on 20th-century modes of industrial production, with global assembly lines running from Los Angeles through Beijing, Chennai, London, Mumbai, Toronto and Vancouver, capitalizing on cheap labour and government subsidies.

One can clearly see here a continuation of ideas, both formal and political, from Raven’s 2009 film China Town. Also built from still images—this time proliferating, reminiscent of stop-motion animation—it traces the production of copper wire from a Nevada mine to a Chinese smelter. “If Curtains shows us the unification of the wired world which seems to have annihilated distance itself to put all its resources at our fingertips, China Town offers the unification of global logistics that both requires and is required by the technology of the wire—the elusive economic dominations that hold all of us in relation across vast gulfs of continents and oceans

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Raymond Boisjoly: “From age to age, as its shape slowly unravelled…”

Raymond Boisjoly is an Indigenous artist of Haida and Québécois descent. His work focuses on the representation of aboriginality, language as a cultural practice, and the ways in which these issues are materialized and experienced. His process is situated in proximity to photography, and he is interested in vernacular forms of representation and modes of production of images.

The series of large-format inkjet prints “From age to age, as its shape slowly unravelled…”—created specifically for VOX, along with a silent video—is derived from a process premised on the deliberate misuse and unlikely interfacing of seemingly incompatible technologies associated with the production and consumption of digital images. A video found on YouTube was played on an iPhone, which was placed on a flatbed scanner. The moving image resists the scanner’s attempt to fix it, resulting not in a mere snapshot but a mangled still, freezing an interstitial moment between frames, a mediated image denying access to its ostensible content.

The source video is a digitized version of Statues Also Die (1953) by Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Ghislain Cloquet. This anti-colonial short film—banned in France for more than a decade after its initial release—frames the changed historical circumstances of African statuary and material culture as a shift to the very being of these objects. Displaced from their intended context to museums and taken merely for tokens of aesthetic pleasure, these works of tribal art are newly mediated for another audience, just as a camera or other representational technology mediates its imagery. These changes are not neutral, and the meanings they produce are central to the understanding of “art” as a historical and colonial category.

Image: Raymond Boisjoly, from the series “From age to age, as its shape slowly unravelled…”, 2015, inkjet prints on adhesive vinyl, 132 x 191 cm to 290 x 419 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver.

Opening: April 17, 2015, at 5:00 pm

VOX, Centre de l'Image Contemporaine
2, Ste-Catherine East Street, 4th floor
Montreal
Tue - Fri 12pm to 7pm, Sat 11am to 5pm

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