Dec. 14, 2011 - Issue #843: New Year’s Eve Style
Taxonomia/Working Order
In the light wood frames that jut out from the gallery walls, translucent photos feature soft focus close-ups of sleepy taxidermy and fetal animals preserved in formaldehyde. Whiteman's subjects are otherworldly with their warm sepia or eerie yellow and blue colouration. The fetal creatures, like the closed-eyed horse, are unsettling reminders of an inaccessible potential to have what we understand as its intended life. This creates a conflict in meaning for the viewer: how does the awe of peering into a womb-like space to curiously inspect these forms of living things interact with the knowledge that they are dead? These creatures are disallowed decay and physical dissolution by their formaldehyde and taxidermy purgatories. How are we to understand what we see as dead when the live ideas about them are so active?
Building upon that imposition of intimacy are the artist's video works, in which a hand gently caresses a taxidermied bear and busts of various furry wild creatures that hang on S hooks on a metal wire-covered wall. The camera slowly follows the disembodied hand as it tenderly strokes these animal's faces. Perhaps this is in actuality more of a sensory investigation of the texture and shape of these formerly living things, but it more than welcomes the understanding of this act of touch as one of tenderness, a comforting for the unknown that led to each creature's end.
My time with The ProjEx Room's Working Order, a series of performance-based videos by Karen Zalamea, was spent pondering the artist's faux motivational call for perfection in the guise of a cheerleader. As the artist calls for the audience to "B-E E-F-F-I-C-I-E-N-T" between quick, precise cuts mixing her pom pom moves, high kicks and syncopated clapping, one is left to wonder what more can be gained from this video. Although it's easy to unpack the surface value of critiquing perfection through cheerleading, which has high expectations of just that, it's hard not to wonder what more could be done to increase the challenge and complexity of this provocation. The irony of the video was in the outcome of the demanding editing the work clearly required. Although often brilliantly on the mark, moments when the ever-so-slight disruption of the rhythm of movement and sound were distracting. The flow of the video was not tight enough to not distract from the call for perfection. It would be interesting to see what happened if this sincere cheerleader persona rebelled against her message, squirmed free from her tight editing, and used this charge of energy and disruptive complexity to realize this work's full provocative potential.
Until Sat, Dec 17
Taxonomia
Works by Maria Whiteman
Working Order
Works by Karen Zalamea
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