Jenipher Hur
Momentary Equilibrium of the Fantasy Harmony Schematic

Friday September 7th to Saturday October 7th.
Opening Reception: Friday September 7th

Perhaps the best ever motorcycle documentary, On Any Sunday (1971) came out during the last major phase of the Vietnam War, a bit before Nixon’s Watergate, and right around the time that the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was ratified in Moscow. It is fun to imagine, then, how the filmmakers were able to digest these wild episodes of contemporary life and come out with so perfect an expression of individual freedom, complete with awesome wipe-outs, blinding speed, and heart-wrenching flip-flops (Mert Lawwill lost the #1 plate that year while the actor Steve McQueen placed respectably in many events both on and off road). It would seem that utopia depends very much on perspective.

The equilateral triangle, for example, itself a perfect storm in terms of measure, degree, and projection, is still not without its scandals: if for some it comes to symbolize unity at the heart of a circle, the checks and balances of the democratic process, or the Holy Trinity, for others it is the un-deadly Mexican Stand-Off of the geometric set—benign and without agency. In the work of Jenipher Hur, the equilateral triangle acts as both stand-in for pure potential, and conversely, as a point of departure to implicate the flaws of theoretical quandary in general. In fact, if Unified Field Theory has proven elusive for scientists, then Hur’s own quest for total harmony would seem to illustrate again the tragic hard-headedness of unilateral pursuits. But the apparent flexibility of the repeated forms in “Momentary Equilibrium of the Fantasy Harmony Schematic”, in terms of strategy and materials, creates an unlikely pairing of potential and volition which seems to comically undermine its uniformity. These small intuitive works skirt the boundaries of quasi-acute investigation, and in the end come out a measured rhapsody of charms that spark carefully, each trying in vain to reattach itself to the seat of power. It would seem then, that what we make or do On Any Sunday is of utmost importance, despite rumours to the contrary—that we should rest.

Jenipher Hur is entering her fourth year at Emily Carr Institute. Her playful sculptural works critique the process of critiquing as much as they offer relief from conundrum.

Tegan Moore
No Light Stands Alone

Saturday, June 30 to Saturday, July 28, 2007
Opening reception: Friday, June 29 at 8pm

Like the Concrete Poet who tries to make words look like other things, Tegan Moore has set out in No Light Stands Alone to package light itself. As ambitious as this may seem, her discrete sculptural experiments appear to trap light somewhat less vigorously than the average atom or solar panel, bringing to mind a quasi-scientific approach more akin to wishful thinking than physics. Made from found and manufactured materials, Moore’s forms are contrived and geometric—clunky yet exquisite—offering us a palpable sense of her continuing research, even as the hidden glory of things is miraculously exposed.

Different from detournement, where objects are reused or appropriated to undermine an original message or purpose, Moore’s pairings of light and object instead elicit an inborn sense of camaraderie between constituent parts. Dramatic oppositions like real and unreal, the authentic and the fabricated, may be implicit, but here seem played down to favor a more earnest, meticulously-crafted, take on our basic, indexical relationship to nature and natural phenomena. In this sense, Moore’s sculptures perform the noble duty of poetics first and critique second, for if plastic and foam can approximate sunlight through the trees, or a cooler stand-in for a glacier, then surely one’s disbelief has already been suspended enough to ignore a latent critique of consumer goods (if one does indeed exist). One is reminded instead of an electrician, with voltmeter in one hand and a copy of Thoreau’s Walden in the other, dutifully testing sockets to bring about a revolution.

Tegan Moore will be entering her fourth year at Emily Carr Institute this fall. Her current body of work was inspired in part by a recent trip to Iceland where she experienced first-hand the effects of a different kind of sunlight on vast, clear lakes.

Maxwell Simmer and Shiloh Sukkau
The History of Mystery

Saturday, May 19 to Saturday, June 23, 2007
Opening reception: Friday, May 18 at 8:00pm

Perhaps hardwired by the tragi-comic reality of life and death, one sees epic-stylings everywhere, if one is honest—with war and scandal, love and adventure, supernatural forces and sometimes even a questionable birthright—all connected to the stellar and seemless narrative arch of the everyday. (In fact, they say this grand sweep of the epic can be seen even from space in the varietal paths of the Amazon River basin, in the moon-shaped crests of the Alps, and even, to generalize further, in the extended archipelago of Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines.) But within the expansive historical scope of the epic it is always mystery that proves to have particular substance: if I could extend this metaphor further yet, it is mystery itself that builds a small cabin on the river after escaping death, hides there indefinitely, and then returns to its homeland to serve a false king until its true royal bloodline is revealed. Mystery is a fuel for poetic justice sometimes, and other times it is that narrow fissure that runs counter to prevailing norms and sets up subversion from within.

The particular and mysterious belongings of persons unknown provide for Maxwell Simmer an array of material to discover the underlying forms of narrative that connect to personal meaning. Taken from found photo albums, images are cut up and reconfigured to announce an absence of persons except for where they overlap with peripheral objects—objects which in turn act as witnesses to record presence in shadow, action through discolouration and wear, and sometimes ingenuity by virtue of their made-ness. In a kind of feedback loop, these objects are taken out of their original context and then used by themselves to re-create their original context, these objects thus re-legitimizing their importance as narrative cues all the more: for example, a string of balloons from a birthday party re-organized to form a smile. This heavy-handed insistence that form and content are inextricably linked becomes a farce of itself, even as it tries to make universalist claims about that link.

If Simmer’s compositions suggest a structural subversiveness between objects and their narrative parts, then Shiloh Sukkau’s text works rely on the underlying structure of the epic as a historically-grounded but embattled genre to be excavated and reiterated into noise. With texts appropriated from the back covers of science fiction and fantasy novels—novels famous for heroes and heroines, and for odyssey-like treatments of journey and redemption—Sukkau makes a place for sweeping statements against a geometric ground-zero, to suggest, amongst other things, an ironic attachment to art history, and perhaps to history in general. At the same time though, the earnestness of her crafty approach underlines a genuine commitment to principle it would seem, with the evidence of labour inflecting a desire to reconstruct and cherish myth—to suspend disbelief long enough to make a drawing or save the universe.

Maxwell Simmer is a 2007 Emily Carr graduate. His collage technique blends computer and handmade approaches in a way that betrays a double-mindedness: like Janus, Simmer likes to look in opposite directions simultaneously (a credit to his perceptive abilities). Currently he works on Granville Island replanting all the flower beds by the end of next week.

Shiloh Sukkau is also a 2007 Emily Carr graduate. Her grad piece is an elaborate, handmade stained-glass window in an odd geometric format (with heroic text) and can be viewed in the Charles H. Scott Gallery until May 21. She is tree planting for the summer, which is funny, because Maxwell is planting plants too (universalist).

Manolo Lugo / Anna Szaflarski
Watchers

Saturday, March 24 to Saturday, April 21, 2007
Opening reception: Friday, March 23 at 8:00 pm

A hallmark moment for the budding professional anatomist must have been the creation of the first major and officially sanctioned anatomical theater in Padua, Italy in 1594. The gory prospect of such a place—with circular viewing mezzanines made to surround a table upon which various experiments could be performed on the human body—were all the rage for medical professionals and citizens alike who, among other things, were perhaps eager to colonize something a little closer to home. Of course with all things writ large and made explicable, the handling of bodies in this exploratory context took on a carefully-prescribed structure which has since become known as the scientific method—a useful, if sometimes vicious, way of looking that seems so often to reinforce the subject-object split seen everywhere today, from medicine, to art, to thinking too. The anatomical theater can be seen as symbolic of this tendency to examine and destroy, even as literal dissections took place there.

Arranged to capture the original spirit of these kind of anatomical theaters, WATCHERS looks at the relationship of the viewer and object, and how the body becomes the site of inscription for this crucial, though volatile, exchange. Working separately, Manolo Lugo and Anna Szaflarski have created works which seem to stand on opposite sides of the great subject-object divide, revealing in their similarities how each creates the other through an economy of reiterated viewing events. Szaflarski’s paintings play spectator to Lugo’s biomorphic puddles, each emulating the body in terms of composition and form respectively. It is the subtle differences in their modes of production, however, that betray different aims: whereas the paintings declare themselves to be as unconsciously produced as dreams in the course of evolving, they are still constructed scenes, and self-reflexively so. Lugo’s puddles on the other hand have been allowed to unfold naturally, guided as they are by the chemical traits of his materials, to reveal a quality of sentience and volition. It is this difference in attitude about the production of the body and identity—as a nebula looking to find form either from within or without—that unifies Lugo and Szaflarski’s works. It is with a keen sense of theatricality that each playfully exposes the follies and strengths of the other.

Manolo Lugo is a fourth year student at Emily Carr Institute. An unlikely candidate to participate in controlled experiments, his work often leads him to carefully test various materials to obtain the best, most transgressive, result. His practice also looks at the body’s relationship to architecture—in terms of both space and social structures—which oblige the body to comply with established hierarchies.

Anna Szaflarski is a third year student at Emily Carr on exchange in Berlin. Currently she is designing homes, castles, and sieging equipment, in order to then “burn it all.” Besides painting and drawing, she has recently written a pop song—which she thinks will probably turn out to be an isolated event. She contends that her blob paintings are mainly a problem-solving exercise to think about how to represent the body, in terms of inner and outer limits, and of the spatial limits of groups and individuals.

Rebecca Brewer
Over and Over the Hills

If the historical Romantic Hero were alive today—whether cloaked (as He would likely be) in the flecked red and black shadows of a Victorian opiate hotel, or else in an upholstered diner somewhere, quietly mulling over His notebook with a head full of abstract muses and reggae—then He might be surprised to learn that the latest incarnation of His Spirit has emerged with unblinking eyes to absorb morning’s warm light! For this new romantic the residue of a magical past has been imagined, and then self-consciously co-opted as taboo towards the forces of progress responsible for giving us everything from impotent liberalism to a doomed ecological situation to hyper-reality. Having been produced by this schizophrenic milieu, and hence well-aware of the limits of rationality, the mystic of today chooses to ramp things up anyways with a healthy dose of metaphysics.

The pursuit of the Sublime has remained as unchanged a quest as it has been a doomed and irreducible one, and it is perhaps this pragmatic characteristic of the romantic mind—to seek out a morning after the long Dark Night of the Soul in spite of all odds—which lends it weight. To navigate the fine line between genuflection and knowing better, and certainly with pragmatic intent, Rebecca Brewer has gotten down to work, making self-felted ephemera for the camping enthusiast who, with an askance view of the days of yore, understands the value of concrete action. Over and Over the Hills is therefore a critical response to nostalgia as much as it evokes an imagined, repeated past to expose the limits of rationality. With a tent, hat, backpack, and exquisitely rendered coat, this wanderer has hiked into the darkness and come out winking.

Rebecca Brewer is a fourth year student of visual arts at Emily Carr Institute. Her interest in recurrent mystic subcultures and romantic (even sublime) constructions of nature stems from self-reflexive criticism as much as a genuine desire to see and do things differently and better. A high school hippie by her own admission, she has since become only hip.

Rebecca Brewer, Tiley Hat, 2006.