Image by Nadia Berelique
Curated by Gregory Denton and Xenia Benivolski
The ten artists whose works make up Slight Gestures create objects and images that are strangely compelling, and they do so with relatively simple methods and with everyday materials. Certainly, these strategies are not new in art making, but these ten share a sensibility that deserves some direct attention. The pieces are marked by a sentimentality and reverence that offsets the straight conceptualism of some of the process-based work, and inspires reverence and curiosity in the viewer. Why do we keep some things while we throw others away? How do you decide which piece should be seen, what is worthy of an audience? what is the minimal requirement for a gesture?
Entropy and chance play a role here, as does humour:
By allowing technical flaws the artists are freed from the burdens of style and are guided instead by moral and emotional attachment to an absurd end. In an interview with Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Jörg Heiser once said "These stories of failure and collapse and then not failing after all – that’s also the heroic theme of slapstick: the hero who accidentally breaks something, but in so doing brings about a stroke of good fortune and knocks over the villain, etc. You laugh because something that cannot really work actually does work. It’s a kind of triumph."
In choosing these artists, we wanted to know if that sensibility could be made clear. We asked the artists for their own views about their practice and used their input to create the show’s title. In the transcription of that conversation, included here, Nikki Woolsey describes her sculptures as a collage of objects that speak to one another - their relationship is even described as a romantic one. In seeing these works together, we create a larger conversation between the diverse and thoughtful practices of these artists.
By using found and ready made objects, prints and collage, artists are building things that they feel warrant our attention and sentiment. Janis Demkiw is embellishing an embellishment, James Gardner rescued pieces of compositions from his studio floor otherwise headed for the garbage bin, Victoria Cheong presents a projection screen specific for video that has detached itself from its original function and Mark MacKinnon aesthetically alters his TTC Uniform in a minimal, performative gesture.
This exhibition features work by:
Nadia Belerique
Victoria Cheong
Lyndsey Cope
Janis Demkiw
James Gardner
Christy Kunitzky
Cameron Lee
Mark G. MacKinnon
Jennifer Rose Sciarrino
Nikki Woolsey
OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, October 14 at 7:00pm.
The exhibition continues on Friday, October 15 and Saturday, October 16 from 11:00am - 6:00pm.
A commemorative publication Accompanied the Exhibition:
In an effort to open the curatorial process and help the artists themselves define the direction for the show, a private artist’s talk was held in advance of the show. It took place at Double Double Land on Tuesday, October 5 at 6:30pm. In attendance were the two curators and all participating artists with the exception of Nadia Belerique and Lyndsey Cope, who could not attend.
Below is that conversation.
Greg Denton: Thanks everybody for coming. This project came out of a series of exhibitions that we were putting on at the White House, but has become it’s own independent thing here at Double Double Land.
Xenia Benivolski: its just the way things turned out.
GD: So we wanted to talk a bit about where everyone is at with their work and give folks a chance to talk about what they've proposed - to see the space that the work will be shown in, and for the two of us to ask some questions about your practice.
XB: Yeah we have questions like....WHY would you make this? I think thats the one thing about the show is that the pieces are kind of puzzling which brings out the question: why would you make this? and so we kind of wanted to figure it out. So I’m not saying that there’s gonna be an answer but I thought we could talk about this.
GD: We both identify as artists first. So in those terms we didn’t come into the project with one straightforward role or theme that we have to force other people to do. So we thought about having this sort of mini artist conversation/talk first, that would help shape the way the exhibition will turn out.
Maybe you could just talk about the piece that you’ve suggested, maybe it has changed since we have decided to include you in the exhibition. Who will go first?
XB: Yes. Victoria, could you talk about your work?
Victoria Cheung: Yes, I’m going to show a screen, a projection screen. The idea is that it’s a screen that you could project on but there are no projections: it’s just the projection screen as an object, made out of white T-shirt material and suspended between two stands.
XB: what inspired you to do this?
VC: Well I was sort of thinking about the idea of making screens, since most of my art practice is in video and film. I was thinking about different ways of showing them...I feel like a lot of times when videos are in art galleries it’s either super stark, projected onto a plain wall or it is on a gross looking TV screen. It’s just not so nice, as an object to be exhibited. So I started thinking about different spaces and different ways of showing video work which would be more appropriate to the videos that I make and I was just starting to work with textiles and so it seemed appropriate to put these things together.
XB: So could you use it as a projection screen?
VC: You could, I could.
XB: But you don’t want to.
VC: I’m not sure. I was thinking about making specific screens for specific videos, so making a screen before making a video was an interesting thing for me, so I might try and make a video that works for the screen but for now I want to focus on the screen.
James Gardner: I think that’s great. I’ve been debating with my roommate lately about his video work and he was talking about how its easy for a video artist to just take the video and put it on a TV or a projector, they don’t think about the cord going to the TV and all of the other materials: it’s not just about what’s on the screen. So I think its important to think about these things and give them consideration.
Christy Kunitzky: Yeah, it feels really sentimental to me, to make a screen for a video. It sounds really warm.
VC: Yeah you could, like wear it you know
CK: Well no, I mean even the use of t-shirt material it feels very personal, like, tender.
Image and Installation by Victoria Cheong
Cameron Lee: It’s interesting that the t-shirt fabric and the light and if people are walking around it, a lot of this is about the form of it.
VC: Yeah, there is a dynamic element in the fringe pattern; it looks really nice when it moves. So it would be nice if people were close to it so that it could pick up that movement.
Cameron Lee: It collapses that space between someone viewing a screen and someone being on screen.
VC: It’s true: if you see a screen you tend to stay away from it.
CL: Stand back, so you don’t interrupt the movie. So there is distance.
XB: What are you making, Cameron?
CL: The work that I was making has a lot to do with knowing how to build something, it’s about skill: I come from a painting background and it can be very macho. I am interested in things that relate to that, like the tools. Or beers: a symbol of male bonding, so I relate these things to gender identities… but I don’t know if that is really obvious in my work.
Installation by Cameron Lee
Jennifer Rose Sciarrino: That is so interesting: the part about being good at something or making something “real”. I feel that with my work sometimes, I replicate things and I try and make them “perfect” and I spend so much time on the actual craft. For this piece I am doing something very similar, in a way of relinquishing control: taking something that I use and ‘making itself’ with it: I am taking pieces of plaster and putting them in solutions of acrylic and pigment and water, and then letting the water evaporate, leaving a mark. And I find it really hard because it’s so ugly, but I’ve decided that’s what it is: it’s just going to do that thing. I’ll have control over the shape, the materials but the rest of it us up to, I guess, how dry the room is.
CL: It’s sort of like that anti-Cartesian thing where you are letting the physical connect with your psychological intent: you are relinquishing control of your materials with a set of guidelines hoping that it will work, so there is a degree of luck involved.
JRS: And if it doesn’t work then I will just force myself to show it.
Installation by Jennifer Rose Sciarrino
XB: Does anybody else feel this way?
CK: I feel like that’s the whole basis of my practice, for example: I have three materials and a set of rules and whatever happens happens.
XB: But then it feels right for some reason?
CK: Sometimes it feels right but sometimes it’s like, why am I making this? Who cares about my stupid rules and who cares about whatever I end up with, if I don’t care that much about it. It’s hard cause you still have to have some control over it. You still have to decide if it’s “worthy”.
VC: Do you rectify the impulse to intervene?
CK: I would follow the rules but sometimes the results are just unsatisfactory, but I still feel that it warrants attention, and that it deserves to be shown, because that is part of the process and the rules were followed, so the whole process is the piece not just the end result.
VC: It sort of takes the idea of failure out of the equation, because if you followed everything exactly there is no reason to fail.
Installation by Christy Kunitzky
Janice Demkiw: Its interesting what you said about the object being worthy because in the process of creating it, its like you’ve given it life. For example, if you were doing a performance and it was either good or bad and it’s over and there is nothing you could do. So to take a process where there is something you could do, by not showing it, but to then let it arrive at its eventual destination: sort of to just let that exist.
CK: Yeah I think I think a lot about that thing Bruce Nauman said: You know, I’m an Artist so everything I do in the studio is art: I don’t really know if I believe it but sometimes it’s like, it’s getting there.
XB: I think that’s so interesting that you can take something, and you can mark it, and then you can put it on display and people will talk about it and then it becomes something else. I guess Nikki, that’s kind of how I feel about your work sometimes?
Nikki Woolsey: I guess I collect objects and I look for something in an object that appeals to me, when I make something it is based in the desire to explore how things are organized and put together and categorized in the world and try and find connections that might not be apparent. I guess that’s why I like to do collage. And I see my sculptures are kind of like collage too. One idea that Cameron and I might work on together or I might just do it, is make work on connecting objects to each other, so the object itself is longer physically than I’ve done before so it forms a more complete sentence. I’ve done things with maybe just two things and made them sort of talk to each other... So their original function isn’t really important, but it’s there, it should be recognized - and it forms a kind of romantic relationship. If I can look at something and kind of smile, if they’ve developed a relationship outside of their original function, then... I want to do that with a longer series of objects. It will take a lot of editing.
Installation by Nikki Woolsey
XB: Where you do find these objects?
NW: Some of the things are art materials, like plaster or sponges, or foam or styrofoam. I go to Value Village all the time and stockpile crap, or pieces of wood from the garbage or whatever. I guess the specifics of what I pick up change...
JD: I feel like I identify a lot with what Nikki was describing about her practice in terms of exploring relationships of things, especially things in space and how they relate to one another. I am really interested in framing, and in scale relationships. A lot of projects I do involve miniaturizing objects or enlarging objects and how they interact with space once they’ve been transformed. Like along the baseboards, building a miniature one that just fits in next to the real one, adding another contour.
Installation by Janis Demkiw
Mark MacKinnon: Kind of an embellishment on the embellishment.
JD: yeah, exactly. One of the things about framing is that I feel difficult showing in gallery spaces. I have a difficult time with the white void. My interest in framing is that it is like endless, like it doesn’t have to have an edge - you put an object in a space it should never end, almost. That’s why I like to create in the context of a space. And my interest in edging, the scale thing creates a sort of edge.
There’s an interview I read with the artist Charles Ray, and in it there is that piece - there’s a family and they are life scale sculptures, and they are naked and holding hands, but they’ve all been scaled so they are the same height. So there’s like a toddler and the father but they are the same height, so their proportions are totally fucked. He said that where that piece happened, was where their hands were being held because of the scale shift. So that was where the disrupt happened, so with my scale shifting, it’s that rupture of what your expectations are.
XB: Do you know why you do it?
JD: The why is that since I was young, it has been a compulsion, specifically with miniatures. It is a little more difficult to rationalise the why, because it is an impulse i’ve had for so long. I can talk about what I think happens, but the why is a reflex.
Installation by Janis Demkiw
I think there is something very approachable when someone can recognize something...so there’s definitely, having a compulsion about things that are tiny is widely shared.
CL: People love miniatures.
JD: When I think about the why, I always think about my parents, my mother. Like, when she used to come to shows she would ask “Am I going to get it?”. I remember her saying “I think I get it” - I was like, focus on the way it makes you feel and have a reaction to it.
XB: I think we are so concerned with asking why in this because Greg and I talked about how these works make us feel. We’d say “This is awesome” but not knowing why we felt that way.
GD: There’s been sort of an investigative approach to this thing (curatorial process). I think we identified something about everyone’s work that ‘sounded’ the same.
XB: There’s kind of a successfully intended failure to it all.
CK: Or an absurdity, to the actions, or...
GD: Yeah, It’s almost like there’s something you can barely hold on to with everyone’s work.. like not enough that you can say “everyone’s working in this sort of genre or trying to make this sort of statement”, but there’s enough in common with the work that I think it will make for a really great this room (show).
MM: That’s what makes the title of the show that much more meaningful, “Small Gestures”.
VC: I like the word gesture a lot though, it has this implication of something that is like a movement, or a reflex.
MM: I really took to the title.
GD: Mark, what did you mean? How do you see the title influencing your work? Or how did you react to it?
MM: What I did, was, I have these uniform work shirts and they have a collar, like a standard shirt with a collar, and I wanted to take the collar off and wear it at work. So that’s what I’ve achieved at this point. But I’m not satisfied with the neck. There is this sub-collar that remains when you remove the main one.
Installation by Mark Mackinnon
XB: Did you cut it off?
MM: No, i just took the stitches out, and I sewed back the seam. But I want it to look like this collar (shows collar of shirt he is wearing) - I wore some shirts for comparison. (laughter)
XB: Do the customers notice you are wearing it?
MM: I haven’t done it yet. I was going to do it on Labour Day, but that didn’t happen. I am going to wear it at work, and the shirt will be the piece in the show. I am going to spend my day tomorrow looking for an open minded tailor or seamstress on short notice. I think I can find that in Toronto.
Installation by Mark McKinnon
CK: Where do you work?
MM: For the TTC.
XB: Will you get in trouble?
MM: No, I don’t think anyone will really notice. And for documentation, I was thinking of cell-phone camera photos, I think that would be most appropriate for footage.
JG: So, for my proposed work. i have been making a lot of paintings recently, and there are some cannibalistic tendencies in the work, so i’ve gotten to the point where I had done away with the frame, the square and whatnot, and was getting to the point where i could take old paintings and rescue them and cut them up. It’s a long and grueling and complex way of building a painting. When i’m trying to create these things, there are a lot of scraps and cutoffs, and pieces that have been painted, and then added to another painting and cut off. Kind of like a woodshop with sawdust or whatever. Sometimes when i’m cleaning up, there are these pieces that are so perfect as they are that I can’t do anything with them - I can’t put them in a new painting. About a month ago or so I decided to put them on the wall, and they look nice to me but I felt like i needed something to show that they are important, so i made these handmade frames. I call them accidental forms… I didn’t want to go back to a square frame, so I made these ones specifically for the form inside. In a sense, all of the marks that are there, the marks have been layered through many paintings - there’s no marks that I intentionally put down.
GD: This is another example of some of the process-based work that we were talking about earlier, but you mentioned that you were excited to make new ones. If you actively try to make these, how will it affect the outcome?
Painting by James Gardner
JG: Oh, I will never actively try to make them, It will always be this, my painting practice leads to this - there are lots of scraps. I never want to go back to that canvas stage, so this is sort of self-generated. Hopefully there will continue to be interesting ones.
XB:I feel like a lot of the works in the show are about this sentimental attachment to objects.
JD: And kind of rescuing in this case.
GD: There sort of doesn’t need to be an explanation in the case of some of this work, which is why our “why strategy” might not have worked.
Mark: I was reading that in the 1950’s and 60’s North Korean doctors were encouraged to use their own skin to perform skin grafts. This kind of reminds me of that.
JG: Wow, for the paintings in the studio, I’ll take one down and put it next to another and it will look good together and then I can combine them,
GD: So, the other thing that i find interesting is that lots of people have lots of ideas about the process, and use rules to define the outcome, but still, everyone has ended up making an object.
XB: I guess James’ are paintings but are sculptural.
JG: They are.
