Transitions/Transiciones

Transitions considers the layering of spatial, temporal and conceptual dimensions in the interactive work of five Canadian artists. These multiple registers are in many instances produced through technological achievement in new media at an advanced level of innovation. The transitions the works enact from one condition or state or place or time or action to another are integral to each specific investigation. Through these, the artists create objects and situations that open up to cultural questions that are equally layered, and rich with meaning and implication.

In this exhibition, Ingrid Bachmann presents a gathering of suitcases, each of which open to their singular, animate narrative (The Portable Sublime); Steve Heimbecker presents a visual analogue of the wave patterns of the wind (POD); Valérie Lamontagne utilizes technological interfaces to activate dresses inspired by a fairy tale (Peau d’Âne); Éric Raymond enables fictional cartographies to be drawn by miniature robots (Scribes) and David Rokeby creates a surveillance environment that tracks visitors within the gallery space (Taken).

One aspect of the Transitions of the title is the transit the works enact between different spaces and geographies. Suitcases, as such, convey this reference to mobility and transposition. In other works, the spatial transpositions are produced through technological application and innovation: a prairie wheatfield is metaphorically sited in a Peru gallery; imaginary cartographies are derived from real geographies; the spectatorial body is transposed from its three-dimensional stance in the gallery to a fading projection on its walls.

In several works, however, that which passes from one state to another is more intangible - an element invisible to the eye in its natural state yet ‘located’ through the works: the registration of the windscape of a Montreal rooftop; the material rendering of sunlight and moonbeam; cartographies derived from extracted electromagnetic waves.

Temporalities also undergo transitions and transfers. Many of the works utilize recording or capturing mechanisms (video, computers, sensors, interfaces) as structuring elements. In Rokeby’s Taken, actions originating in ‘live’ time are looped, layered, reiterated, then allowed to fade away; Heimbecker’s POD transposes the windscape of an ephemeral autumnal night in 2005 to a lively rendering in the present; Bachmann treats as contemporaneous new technologies and the tools of previous eras, while in Lamontagne’s Peau d’Âne, a challenge set in a 17th C fable is met - perhaps surpassed - in the present.

The exhibition title might also suggest conceptual shifts. Bachmann’s several suitcases do not carry a traveller’s belongings to another place; rather, when opened, they reveal that they are each, differently, the ‘place’ of an imagined world; the visitor in Rokeby’s installation may fluctuate wildly between responses of attraction and recoil, incompatibilities each grounded in its own perceptual entirety, while Heimbecker’s installation operates through several conceptual relays.

The works are interactive in myriad ways, whether responding to a natural environment (POD, Peau d’Âne) or audience activated (The Portable Sublime, Taken). A performative element is frequently at play: the Sun Dress and Moon Dress of Peau d’Âne, presented freestanding, can also be worn; the suitcases are activated when opened, then close to their mysteries again; the actions of the audience create the conditions of action of Taken; the robots animate the cartographic drawings of Scribes.

A cartographic subtext reinforces the sense of geographies and locales that are transposed in these works: natural emissions in the immediate environment are eventually transposed into a cartographic registration by robots; dresses provide a type of ‘weather’ mapping while bringing a skyscape into the gallery, Heimbecker ‘scores’ the wind.

The works in Transitions transform everyday familiarities - wind and sky and sound and movement and myriad things of our object world - into portals for unpredictable perceptions and experiences.

Renee Baert