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RBC Work Room Art Gallery of Alberta June 30 - October 8, 2017
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Looking through the “Spectacles of Culture” I walked into Shelter thinking that I was the one doing the looking and instead was subject to a jarring gaze. On Friday, June 30th, 2017, I attended an opening reception at the AGA, eager to see the starting point for this exhibition that I would be writing about. Synthesizers, speakers and computers were just being set up— unopened boxes of equipment were still in the gallery space and the musicians behind Nulle Part, Ben Good and Jason Troock, informed me that only about a third of their usual studio equipment was present. Good, Troock and their collaborator in the project, photographer Zachary Ayotte, pinned notes and plans to the wall. Projected over a metre tall 3
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at about the aspect ratio of my phone screen was the close-up video of an eyeball by Ayotte on loop, looking, as changing light and shadow fell upon that rectangular section of an anonymous, unidentifiable face. Shelter is the first project in the RBC Work Room series, in which artists are given a space to simultaneously produce and exhibit artwork, allowing the outcome of the work to take shape over the duration of the show. Just as that giant eyeball confronted me Friday night, this exhibition opens the question of what it means to see work in its flexible, unfinished state and to encounter artists as they work through the material and conceptual development of art making. In this context, the collaborative efforts of Nulle Part and Ayotte evoke more specific questions that connect to the nature of interpretation of their respective media—electronic music and photography. To think through what might be different for visitors in their encounter of unfinished versus completed, discrete art objects, I started with Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist of the late 20th century for whom taking photographs became a key aspect of his early ethnographic work. Bourdieu conceives of our social world as a series of fields, where each of us are located in a certain position on the field according to the specific nature of our particular economic, cultural and social capital. Generally speaking, he argues that we are all distributed unequally within these fields—you are located by your financial status, martial status, gender, sexuality, politics, education and all those layering ways in which we are classified and differentiated in our social world.1 According to Bourdieu, we are never able to look with a naked eye. When we look through our “spectacles of culture” we are unwittingly peering through the multiple lenses of the classifications that differentiate us, which fundamentally produce our understandings of what we see. 2 This means that what you decipher from a work of art also clarifies or locates you in the various fields that make up our social world. In this way, as you look and classify what you see, based on your cultural location, the perceptual process in turn classifies you back, which in 5
part defines your own art competence. In the many years I’ve spent working with gallery visitors, I have often observed people, intimidated by what they are seeing, standing beside or peering around the frame of a canvas, reluctant to be classified as unable to interpret the work as well as it seems to interpret them. When an artwork in a sense looks back at us, it can feel like the objects see what we lack. If the artwork then proves indecipherable then it can feel like the work has a secret code we cannot crack. As Bourdieu explains, “…when the code of the work exceeds in subtlety and complexity the code of the beholders… when placed before a message which is too rich or ‘overwhelming,’ they feel completely ‘out of their depth.’”3 I wonder how this classificatory process functions when the work available for public interpretation is in progress, when it changes every day and when you get to see how it is made. As Ayotte described to me, the photo-based project he is planning for this show will build on a body of work in process entitled A Safe Distance. A key component of the series is capturing positions and views of male bodies that evoke seldom recorded or shared private moments: those shapes a body makes when you know no one is watching. Ayotte described playing with the movements and postures we keep to ourselves, contemplating what it means for masculinity and other gender identities. This extra layer of thinking about visibility—his own and that of his collaborators—while thinking through these questions of looking, was at front of mind as he anticipated the opening of the exhibition: In thinking about how the whole project will unfold, I kept coming back to the act of observation. Not only will we, as physical bodies, be observed in the space but also our behaviour, our modes of making work or interests, our habits. My comfort with sharing these things differs from day to day, person to person. Some of what we will be observed doing we will be conscious of. Some of it we won’t.4 I am interested to see how the multivalent looking relationships inform each other over the course of the exhibition: Ayotte’s exploration of 6
private bodily gestures through the camera lens, his own usually private process of making art now visible through the exhibition lens and the particular “lens of culture” through which each visitor will look and interact with him and this process. Returning to Bourdieu and thinking through the interpretive potentials for visitors to this exhibition, the theorist provides some insight into the way the medium of photography may contribute to the multileveled looking and interpreting relationships being set up in this exhibition. Bourdieu referred to photography as un art moyen (translated to English as “a middle-brow art”) and in his study titled thusly in the 1960s, he argued that the medium existed at a midway point between art and popular culture, in part due to its simultaneous ubiquity and connection to the art-derived aesthetic conventions. 5 Ayotte’s work is a tether between worlds. Photography, as an everpresent part of our mediated world and its relative lack of history compared to other artistic media, may suggest more flexibility in its conventions. One look at a photo-driven social media like Instagram, however and it is clear that even amateur users “obey implicit canons.”6 As you scroll through that social medium, the user images reflect unspoken, untaught conventions of light, subject and composition through repetition. Behind that relative uniformity are countless images that go unseen and un-apprehended: images that do not fit the implied canon. By bringing bodies into reproduction from angles and in positions edited out of our regular vision, Ayotte may help us see the canon by presenting images that are a departure from it. In speaking with Good and Troock, I’ve been left thinking about what their approach to collecting and manipulating sound adds to this conversation about recognition and location. A week into their time working in the gallery space I had my final conversation with the musicians, where they discussed how deeply integrated the space of the gallery will be with the many layers of their process in creating a track. Using Good’s shoe and recording equipment, they explored what latent percussive sounds could be uncovered in the gallery. This collected 7
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sound inventory formed the raw material that they manipulated into rhythmic layers, onto which they were just adding vocals. The approach, as they described in an earlier meeting, was a key element to their sound: by mining ubiquitous objects for their particular tone and timbre and decontextualizing them, the sounds maintain familiarity and lose identifiability, like that feeling when a word is on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t quite call it by name. This central part of their sound connects to a key dimension of the way social practices function, according to Bourdieu. I know how to identify a popular Instagram photo without looking at the number of likes, but I couldn’t necessarily tell you what rules it applied to be successful. The extent of my success in that identification exercise in turn places and identifies me. The artists are already becoming aware that their work will be subject to the ongoing complex interpretation and classification of visitors, not just their artistic output. Good suggested at the opening reception that he thought it might be interesting to leave the track they were 10
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working on loop in the space for people to encounter when they weren’t present. Only a week after working in the space alongside visits from gallery patrons, Good described the vulnerability of sharing unfinished work—of being identified as the maker of this unfinished thing. Ayotte also described how hanging something on a ladder turned awkward in the exhibition space and how he instantly contemplated the way such a moment could be apprehended by a visitor who walks in the room, perhaps completely unaware of the work-in-progress focus on this space. Looking is not passive: observers are not merely receivers for visual information. Although this exhibition experiment is in its early stages, the experience of Ayotte and Nulle Part already demonstrate the behavioraltering power of being seen, located and classified. This exhibition of work in progress brings the co-creative power of looking to light in ways we cannot anticipate. We have to keep watching to find out. Endnotes 1 Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998), 15-16. 2 Pierre Bourdieu, “Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception,” in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press), 3. 3 Ibid., 12. 4 Zachary Ayotte, email correspondence with the author, June 21, 2017. 5 Rosalind Krauss, “A Note on Photography and the Simulacral,” October 31 (Winter 1984), 49. 6 Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 7.
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Writer’s Biography Carolyn Jervis is an Edmonton-based art writer, curator and gallery professional. Jervis has a Master of Arts degree in Art History, Critical Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia. She has worked extensively in local galleries and arts organizations and has written for national and local publications, including C Magazine and SNAPline, as well as exhibition monographs and catalogue essays for galleries in Canada and Germany. In her current position as Art Gallery Coordinator, Jervis is organizing the opening and inaugural exhibitions for MacEwan University’s first public gallery, which opens in October 2017.
Artists’ Biographies Zachary Ayotte is a visual artist working primarily with photography and installation. With light and form, he uses depictions of bodies and space to explore distance and experiences of the unknown. A sense of otherworldliness hovers over his work. Interested in the relation that intimacy and familiarity have to disconnection and uncertainty, Ayotte allows the forces in his work to elide and collide, generating tension. This process allows him to embrace and comment on the superficiality of the photographic image, exploring it as both a manipulation of light and a mode of delivering information. Ayotte has participated in select solo and group exhibitions in Canada and Europe, most recently contributing work to Do It Yourself: Collectivity and Collaboration in Edmonton at the Enterprise Square Gallery. He lives and works in Edmonton, Alberta. Nulle Part is an Edmonton electronic production duo that makes hazy melancholic music inspired by the concepts of place, longing and loss. To achieve their rich, layered sound, the duo utilizes an arsenal of analogue synthesizers and drum machines, detuned cut-up vocals, and clouded pianos. Their music is then further washed by their shared love of vintage tape delay and reverb units. Nulle Part has participated in a wide range of interdisciplinary art, dance and film projects, recently scoring the Citie Ballet’s production of Ghosts for their Reflections series, exhibiting as part of the Art Gallery of Alberta’s SONAR sound art exhibition, soundscaping the Edmonton Arts Council’s Ramble in the Bramble art installation and composing a 30 minute piece for Yukichi Hattori’s Solo? ballet production at Calgary’s Fluid Festival, among others.
List of Works Zachary Ayotte and Nulle Part Shelter, 2017 Multi-media installation Courtesy of the Artists
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RBC Work Room is an extension of the RBC New Works Gallery, which features new artworks by Alberta artists. This project series continues the Art Gallery of Alberta’s commitment to supporting the work of Alberta artists. Organized by the Art Gallery of Alberta. Presented with the support of the RBC Emerging Artists Project. Special thanks to Audio Sponsor Long & McQuade, “where the music begins.”
© Art Gallery of Alberta 2017 ISBN: 978-1-77179-024-6 Editors: Leonore-Namkha Beschi, Laura Ritchie Design: Charles Cousins Photography: Charles Cousins Essay: Carolyn Jervis Printing: Burke Group Printed in Canada
The Art Gallery of Alberta is grateful for the generous support of our many public and private donors and sponsors, as well as the ongoing support of the City of Edmonton, the Edmonton Arts Council, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Cover Image: Shelter (detail), 2017. Multi-media installation. Courtesy of the Artists 15
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