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Halifax
No Money Down at the Khyber ICA | Gerald Ferguson at Gallery Page and Strange | Pudy Tong at Anna Leonowens | Diane Landry at MSVU Art Gallery
posted by Sue Carter Flinn - March 22nd, 2010.
The situation at the Khyber ICA is starting to remind me of movies like The Ice Storm, where nice families try to keep up an a pleasant façade while quiet turmoil simmers behind the scenes. Although the Khyber building’s uncertainty looms (a consultant’s report on the fate of the building is now complete and will be presented to city council soon), the artist-run centre continues on with its fifteenth anniversary show, No Money Down, named after the arts society’s first moniker.
I will not burn out, unidentified, from the Khyber ICA archive
Two walls are covered in posters, exhibition postcards, and other Khyber memorabilia arranged like a teenage girl’s room. On the surface, it’s fun and nostalgic looking at those iconic old Mac fonts, hand-drawn posters, and all the artists that have shown in the space (like Gillian Wearing, Luis Jacob, and Kelly Mark), but really, this feels like a scrappy ode to survival. It’s unfortunate that their current funding situation doesn’t allow for some curatorial or historical context here. Or a guest book, for that matter. There are no plans for the archives after the show, but ideally the Khyber will follow Eyelevel Gallery’s lead and donate them to the Dalhousie University Archives (who recently launched a comprehensive thirty-fifth anniversary catalogue online).
Gerald Ferguson, Rocks & Trees, Peggy's Cove, enamel on canvas
I was out of town for the opening of Gerald Ferguson’s show at Gallery Page and Strange, but I’m sure it was an emotional event for many people. Ferguson’s last painting series before his death in October is certainly a surprising departure: abandoning the frottage roller for a brush (apparently the first time he used one consistently for forty years) and garden hoses for scenic vistas like Peggy’s Cove and Point Pleasant Park. Perhaps Ferguson was reexamining or trying to rediscover the essence of painting. Painted on canvas and wood panel from sketches Ferguson drew from inside his car—east coast weather doesn’t always cooperate with plein air activities—he strips down the landscape to its core. Thick black enamel cakes like tree sap, marking crude forest shapes, round boulders, jagged stumps. Surveying the twenty-five or so pieces, I felt like I was sitting inside his car, witnessing these scenes through the safety of a window.
Pudy Tong, Constant...Intervals (photo of former MP Rahim Jaffer taken March 9)
A couple of doors down at Anna Leonowens Gallery, MFA student Pudy Tong is taking the news for a slow spin. Constant...Intervals examines “journalistic rhythm” in our twenty-four-hour news-on-demand world. For Editorial, Tong slyly plays with the old cinema trope of the spinning newspaper transition, but uses his own high-tech custom software. An image is projected onto a wall; its slow-going 360-degree spins are calculated by averaging the time between real-time updates of the top story at theglobeandmail.com. A photo of Toyota Canada’s CEO Yoichi Tomihara slowly spun in increments, like a stuttering clock with a dying battery.
Behind the projection, Chronological has two conference teleprompters on telescoping stands display the latest Globe headlines from RSS feeds. The slowness of Editorial movement versus the speed of the teleprompters’ font roll creates a weird game of anticipation. In fact, as my own technological ADD kicked in, I found the slow spin frustrating and spent most of the time craning my neck to read the headlines. As an editor/journalist by day, I think I expected more from this show, but this has less to do with Tong’s clever installation than it does my general frustration with the profession’s stumbling uncertainty and the popularity of “click” journalism over storytelling.
Diane Landry, Flying School, 2000, sound installation with automation
Over at MSVU Art Gallery though, there was nothing to mope about. The Defibrillators, an overview of Diane Landry’s “oeuvres mouvelles,” was one of the most delightful shows around. Landry’s kinetic installations, which filled the room like a giant breathing entity, evoke a more visceral and emotional reaction than Jean-Pierre Gauthier’s Machines at Play (with the exception of his bubbling janitor’s closet) at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. You must be dead inside to not experience some kind of childlike joy at a harmonica-playing garden of lively umbrellas. But it was Madonnas, a washing machine outfitted with an animated twelve-image portrait (praxinoscope) of Landry that would rotate with the agitator, which has stuck with me. How many hundreds of times in our lives (especially women) will we carry on such mundane domestic activities without a second thought? Talk about being stuck on the spin cycle.
Sue Carter Flinn is a Halifax-based writer, editor and artist. She is Arts Editor at The Coast, Halifax's alternative newspaper; editor of Visual Arts News, the only publication dedicated to visual arts in Atlantic Canada; and winner of a 2007 Atlantic Journalism Award for her profile of photographer George Steeves.
Khyber ICA: http://www.khyber.ca
No Money Down continues until April 1.
Gallery Page and Strange: http://www.pageandstrange.com
Gerald Ferguson: Landscapes 2008-2009 continues until April 2.
Anna Leonowens Gallery: http://nscad.ca/en/home/galleriesevents/galleries/default.aspx
See website for current exhibitions.
MSVU Art Gallery: http://msvuart.ca
See website for current exhibitions.