Two solo shows at the Contemporary Art Gallery complement each other in poetic ways

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      Nancy Holt: Selected Photo and film Works
      Erin Shirreff: Pictures
      At the Contemporary Art Gallery until June 16

      The prevailing atmosphere at the Contemporary Art Gallery is hushed, almost meditative. Two small solo shows, one by veteran American artist Nancy Holt and the other by emerging Canadian artist Erin Shirreff, complement each other in interesting and poetic ways. Each addresses the act of representation, the nature of duration, and the role photography, moving or still, may play in realizing an artist’s intentions.

      Shirreff, who was born in Kelowna and is based in Brooklyn, is acclaimed for exploring the relationship between sculpture and photography, or, more broadly, between a three-dimensional reality and its two-dimensional representation. On view at the CAG are four of her silent videos, each playing with the idea of depiction and duration, either through found images of Okanagan Lake and the United Nations building in New York, or with pictures of other artists’ work.

      In the exhibition brochure, Shirreff talks about creating a “contemplative space” between the direct experience of an artwork, landscape, or cityscape and its representation or reproduction. She takes multiple photographs of a pre-existing still image under different conditions of light and colour, then very subtly animates them in video form. In UN 2010, we have the sense of watching day slowly break over Manhattan; at the same time, we realize we are looking at an artifice, a reproduction of a reproduction. A puff of smoke or steam hangs motionless in the air. Photography mediates our connection with the real.

      Holt, who was born in Massachusetts and is based in rural New Mexico, is widely acknowledged as a pioneer of both conceptual and site-specific art. And while she is also acclaimed, along with her late husband Robert Smithson, as one of the early proponents of the land-art movement in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s, she is represented here by examples of her concrete poetry and by photographs of smaller-scale undertakings. (The CAG has also planned a program of Holt’s film works at the Cinematheque on June 10, starting at 7 p.m.)

      Holt’s photos from the 1960s and ’70s demonstrate an integral, unvarnished relationship to her conceptual projects. (Her films, too, extend our understanding of her land art, such as her famous Sun Tunnels, located in Utah’s Great Basin Desert.) Her films, videos, and photographs, she has said, are not simply ways of documenting ephemeral or difficult-to-access works. They are artworks themselves, possessing their own particular aesthetic and adding the dimension of time to her explorations of space and light and human presence in the landscape.

      Many of the photos on view here are nicely framed archival prints, newly made from old negatives. They therefore possess a quality of precious objecthood that probably would have been missing from the original, process-driven images, created by an artist who intentionally worked outside the gallery system. However, Stone Ruin Tour, a silent slide show of black-and-white images of an unnamed, leaf-strewn site in northern New Jersey, strikes just the right conceptual note. Accompanied by a manually typed “tour guide”, this work beautifully communicates the assertion of idea over object.

      Images such as Ruin View, in which an ancient Mayan structure (an observatory, perhaps) is photographed through a window in a nearby temple, communicate Holt’s interest in framing the landscape through an opening or aperture. That would be an aperture within an aperture if you count the camera, which you must. The camera is also doubly signified in Over the Hill, a grid of 16 successive shots of fellow artist Joan Jonas walking up and over a sandy incline. She carries a professional-looking camera with her, alerting us to the staged rather than spontaneous nature of the endeavour. Although her back is turned, Jonas is playing to Holt’s lens and, by extension, to us.

      Perhaps because of its pre-computer-age simplicity, Holt’s typewritten concrete poetry is very beguiling. The World Through a Circle, in which the words “EARTH SKY WATER MOON SUN STARS” form a perfect ring floating above a stanza of verse, reveals some of this artist’s abiding ambitions and ideas. As realized through her later, large-scale land art, these include the evocation of the worlds within us through allusions to the movements of celestial bodies in the vastness of the universe beyond.

      Comments

      1 Comments

      John K Grande

      Jul 16, 2013 at 12:59am

      BRAVO on doing this show! Much awaited ! JKG

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