20102010UNIVERSITY OF TORONTOMVS ProgrammeGraduating Exhibition
www.art.utoronto.ca ARTISTSKathleen BoettoRebecca Diederichs Bogdan Luca
ESSAYSMichelle JacquesVladimir SpicanovicAlison Syme
MEDIA (RE)VISION: HOW TO GET THERE FROM HERE
The 2010 Graduating Exhibition of:Rebecca Diederichs
Kathleen BoettoBogdan Luca
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTOMVS (Masters of Visual Studies) Programme in Studio Art
MEDIA (RE)VISION:HOW TO GET THERE FROM HERE
LISA STEELE“So, with his word “researches” Herodotus announced one of the great shifts in human consciousness not often enough recognized. Here was the shift from mere recording and repetition of tradition to the scrutiny of experience.” - Daniel Boorstin, The Seekers: the story of man’s continuing quest to understand his world.
In considering the work of these three graduating MVS Studio students, I am drawn to a consideration of Herodotus, the so-called “father of history” who wrote of Greek culture in the 5th century B.C.. Daniel Boorstin’s iden-tification of the difference between what he calls “mere recording” from “the scrutiny of experience” seems an interesting point of departure for this year’s graduating exhibition. All three take current conditions (i.e. images drawn from media culture, personal experiences, internet imagery, etc.) and convert them into experience for the viewer. Existing in the here and now, the source is not necessarily obvious or clear but the resonance is unmistakable.
In spite of how linked the pictures are to their (original) place and (actual) location, Rebecca Diederichs considers the placement and the arrangement of her exhibited images - now unmoored and disconnected from their origins, existing as representations - to be central to their reception by her viewer. As they come to rest on desktops, her trees and fields threaten to disrupt the “appreciation” of their inherent beauty (their “greenness”) by their very “flatness”, choosing instead to enter into the less regulated arenas of pleasure and instinct,
mobilizing desire and response as easily as cool appraisal and analysis. Kathleen Boetto strikes deep into the territory of sociologist Erving Goffman, whose study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life suggested that all of life is a kind of theatre and that context is all, allowing us to “perform” differently in different circumstances. Boetto’s work strikes a vivid, resonant chord with her (re)Presentations of the Sel(ves) of celebrities, performance as a kind of collective penance. Occupying the territory of the free-agent, Bogdan Luca’s images, while drawn from the internet and contemporary cinema, float outside of their original boundaries, estab-lishing new contexts for interpretation. Hovering above the abstraction/figuration dyad, Luca’s paintings speak to a nascent form of existen-tialism, one that questions our own ability to observe objectively.
Shared between the MVS Curatorial Studies and MVS Studio students, the 2009-2010 Proseminar speakers’ series again provided the MVS students with engaging and often provocative presentations. Most often those presenting a Proseminar also had individual meetings with the MVS students. The fall began with Barbara Fischer, Director/Curator at the JM Barnicke Gallery (Hart House) at the University of Toronto and head of the MVS Curatorial Studies programme, who gave us an insight into the challenges and rewards of being the commissioner for Canada’s pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Our colleague Carl Knappett, the Walter Graham/Homer Thompson Chair in Aegean Prehistory and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art, proved to be surprisingly
relevant to contemporary artists and curators in discussing his recent work in the production of “Knossos as a memory object”. Independent curator Nancy Campbell revealed her long-standing involvement with artists working in Canada’s far North. Jean Baptiste Joly, Director of the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart spoke about the origins of contemporary art as it has developed amongst young visual artists working at the Akademie since the mid 1990s. Gilles Forest, Director/curator at the Centre d’art contemporain, Basse-Normandie, spoke about the sense of “doubt” he believes to be essential in curating an exhibition. Gregory Burke, Director of the Power Plant, offered his strategy for putting together the exhibition “Universal Code” and the Director of the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo, Louis Grachos, spoke of how his gallery went about building a collection.
The winter Proseminar series kicked off with Vancouver-based multi-disciplinary artist Gareth Moore, in Toronto to complete a project with the Power Plant, who gave an overview of the past few years of his studio practice. Warren Neidich, Berlin-based artist/architect currently teaching in Delft, The Netherlands, spoke of his wide-ranging multi-disciplinary projects “History of Consciousness”. C Magazine editor Amish Morrell introduced the work of a number of artists whose work engages and transforms both real and imagined social spaces and ideas of collectivity. Still to come in the year are presentations by artist/architect and curator of the Eric Arthur Gallery in the Faculty of Architecture and Landscape Design, An Te Liu, who will talk about some current works in progress and Dot Tuer, theorist, critic and writer, currently teaching at the Ontario College of Art & Design.
This year, we adopted a slightly different writer/curator structure for the catalogue, inviting three arts professionals to engage with the work of our graduating students. We extend our appreciation to all three: Michelle Jacques,
Associate Curator Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, who considers the work of Rebecca Diederichs; Vladimir Spicanovic, Dean, Faculty of Art, Ontario College of Art & Design, who elucidates the form and the content of Bogdan Luca’s painting practice; and our own Art History colleague Alison Syme who decodes the mediaized imagery of Kathleen Boetto’s work in video and photography. And thanks also to Linseed Projects for their beautiful and thoughtful design of the catalogue and David Robinson (Print Maximum) for again overseeing the printing with great care and attention to detail.
Within the University of Toronto, there are many people to thank. Graduate faculty who served on panels this year include: George Hawken, Marla Hlady, David Hlynsky, Alexander Irving, Will Kwan, Sue Lloyd, John Massey, Ed Pien, Shirley Wiitasalo, Joanne Tod, Kim Tomczak. Special thanks to all the administrative staff in our department Gaby Binette Sparks, Joanne Wainman, Vicky Dingillo and Ilse Wister.
And finally, we thank the Department of Art for providing on-going support for the MVS programme as well as crucial funding for this catalogue. We thank Carl Knappett, Graduate Program Director (Art History) who has provided the MVS with valuable advice and guidance and our chair Elizabeth Legge for helping us to further our aims, again, throughout this year. We thank the Faculty of Arts & Science for on-going support of our students, especially the Dean of Arts & Science, Meric Gertler, who continues to demonstrate a strong and indomitable interest in the visual arts and their (our) contribution to an enduring civil society.
Lisa Steele, Graduate Program Director, MVS Department of Art,
School of Graduate Studies, University of Toronto
In an essay published in Minotaure in 1935, Roger Caillois argued that mimicry in the insect world does not serve a defensive function, increasing insects’ chances of survival; on the contrary, the phenomenon is “a luxury and even a dangerous luxury, for there are cases in which mimicry causes the creature to go from bad to worse.” Phyllia moths, for example, “browse among themselves, taking each other for real leaves, in such a way that one might accept the idea of a sort of collective masochism leading to mutual homophagy, the simulation of the leaf being a provocation to cannibalism in this kind of totem feast.”1 Caillois’s conception of mimicry as an essential element in a luxurious social activity, one equally frivolous and destructive – pathological as much as almost ceremonially sacrificial – is central to Kathleen Boetto’s work, which explores the mechanisms of identifica-tion and imitation that support celebrity culture. The insatiable public that consumes images of famous stick insects and social butterflies devours them in all states, but perhaps with the most pleasure when these creatures are in the process of going “from bad to worse.” Who has not experienced the horrified delight of looking at photographs of a cracked-out Lindsay Lohan or Amy Winehouse stumbling out of a hotel in the wee hours? Our obsession with watching charismatic, successful, imitable young women – or rather their images – go to pieces is the subject of these works. Female celebrities running the gamut from the as-yet-undamaged to the masters of disguise to the rock-bottom-hitting addicts populate these images as they do the social imaginary. Two series of Boetto’s works are represented in this exhibition. The first, the projection series (2009), consists of five sets of photographs, arranged vertically to look like segments of filmstrips. Each vertical set contains five photographs that show the artist attempting to assume the image of a particular celebrity through a literal act of projection. Using stills from online videos of five stars (the first hit
for their names on a YouTube search), Boetto projected the features of famous faces onto her own and shot the resulting hybrid visages. We see the artist trying, with varying degrees of success and coincidence, to map the carefully constructed façades of Amy Winehouse, Lady Gaga, Lindsay Lohan, Miley Cyrus, and Paris Hilton onto herself. The second series of works are videos: Being Amy, Being Mischa, and Being Lindsay (2010) show the artist, masquerading as Winehouse, Barton, and Lohan, trying to hold the pose of a decidedly unflattering tabloid shot of a drug-addled and dishevelled-looking celebrity for as long as possible. The projection series focuses on the composed face, whereas the videos overtly bring the uncomposed or even decomposing body and its demands back into the picture. While the projection series takes images of famous faces from the height of their success, the violence that subtends celebrity culture still pressures these photographs from within. The Lindsay set features a still of Lohan from her music video Confessions of a Broken Heart (Daughter to Father), in which the singer-actress’s “real life” family drama is offered as fodder for public consumption. The video itself flirts with the threat of domestic violence without showing any explicitly. Boetto’s images, however, bring destructiveness to the fore: from top to bottom, the composite pictures become progressively more fractured. Closely aligned in the top photograph, the faces twist slightly apart in the next one down. In the middle image, the heavily made up, closed eyes of the projected face create the look of smeared eyeliner and running mascara on a teary face, while in the fourth photograph the eyes move further apart and what appear to be bruises emerge on one cheek. Hands clutch the figure’s head, as if trying to hold a disintegrating self together. In the bottom photograph the most pronounced schism between the two faces results in the disturbing image of what appears to be the figure taking off – like a pair of glasses
KATHLEEN BOETTO 05
KATHLEEN BOETTOBAD ROMANCE
by Alison Syme
KATHLEEN BOETTO 0706 KATHLEEN BOETTO
these pages: Gaga (left), Gaga detail (right), 5” x 16”x 9”, inkjet prints, 2009.
previous page: Lindsay detail, 5”x 16”x 9”, inkjet prints, 2009.
KATHLEEN BOETTO 09
– one set of eyes and revealing another pair below. This stripping away of layer after layer hints at the absence or annihilation of any core of identity. Lady Gaga would appear to be one step ahead of Boetto, by already figuring her own construc-tion and destruction in the images she produces for public consumption – as crushed starlet in Paparazzi or used sex doll in Bad Romance – though she always comes out victorious in her own narratives. But Boetto suggests the impossibility of such attempts to control the public’s appetite for destruction. The still Boetto uses in the Gaga projection is from the video for Poker Face, an encomium to the ideal of the inscrutable and imperturbable female mask. In the video the “natural” face of the celebrity (who wears “nude” lipstick) is shown to be equivalent to the mirror-masks, opaque glasses, and other deflective devices that appear throughout it. If this human camouflage appears to serve a defensive function, however, in the Gaga set the “natural” celebrity mouth becomes an orifice devouring the subject from within: while the first and fourth images focus on the right “fit” of the mask, in the third and fifth images, where the eyes closely coincide, a rapacious fame-hungry maw opens up in the figure’s chin. Is this autophagy or “mutual homophagy”? Since self and other have become merely similar pastiches here, perhaps there is no longer any difference. The videos invoke a different kind of destabi-lisation of the self in the field of vision through mimicry. The form of their titles indicates that being is as much at stake as appearing. The imitation of celebrity in these works moves beyond the simulated pattern of facial features to an experience – for an extended moment – of bodily becoming. Holding still to simulate another’s image, like a mimicking insect, becomes a test of endurance that ends, in Being Mischa, with a literal fall after 18 minutes. Self-preservation is not at stake in these videos or in the tabloid photographs that inspired them: the Winehouse headline
reads “Courting Death.” The emaciated bodies of the self-destroying celebrities in the source photographs indicate what kind of auto-canni-balizing and “self”-exhausting metamorphosis would be necessary for the attainment of the morphology as well as the mystique of these fallen stars. In both series, Boetto continues the investi-gation of the function of mimicry in human subject-formation, scission, and dissolution undertaken by earlier artists such as Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura. Sherman and Morimura are both attuned to the theme of bodily appetite and the drives connected with image idealization. In her late ’80s abjection images, which incorporated vomit and other bodily detritus, Sherman explored the violence of female embodiment and the corporeal threat of boundary dissolution that arises from trying to fulfil an ideal image. In a slightly more light-hearted vein, Morimura’s early ’90s tableaux vivants invited the viewer’s consumption of the artist’s self when he pictured his face on canonical art historical fruits like Cézanne’s apples. Boetto’s work’s emphasis on celebrity culture rather than art history or the “everywoman” calls attention to the profound ambivalence that underpins the valorisation and imitation of contemporary icons. Do we want to look like, be, or destroy these women? All three, apparently. They represent grander versions of our own narcissistic fantasies of triumph; in retaliation we hound, ogle, and fetishize them, turning them into extreme versions of our own failures. By revealing the basic mechanisms of identification (projection) and of imitation (disci-plining as well as clothing the body), Boetto implies that we are all caught up in a regime of simulation that functions as a provocation to cannibalism. By keeping a degree of distance from this regime – failing to fully assume the images, to stay still, to be pure appearance – Boetto ensures that she can flirt with as well as critique the luxurious masochism of celebrity culture without becoming one of its totem feasts.
1 Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” trans. John Shepley, October 31 (Winter 1984): 17–32, 25.
08 KATHLEEN BOETTO
Being Mischa, January 13th 2010, (top left, top right), video, 18:01 minutes, 2010.Being Amy, September 11th 2008 (bottom left), video, 17:08 minutes, 2008.
Being Lindsay , August 27th 2009 (bottom right), video, 30:27 minutes, 2009.
10 KATHLEEN BOETTO
KATHLEEN BOETTOCURRICULUM VITAE
b. Toronto, Canada 1985
EDUCATION 2010 Master of Visual Studies, University of Toronto 2007 Bachelor of Fine Arts Specialist with Honours, York University
SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2010 Media(ted) Performance The Centre for Women’s Studies in Education, Toronto 2007 Portrait of A Girl The Gales Gallery, York University
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2009 RE:VIEW One Spadina Crescent, University of Toronto Smoldering Heat and Blazing Passion University of Toronto Art Lounge 2007 Good Housekeeping The Goldfarb Gallery, York University See Here! York University 720 by 480 The Goldfarb Gallery, York University Once; Again Lennox Contemporary, Toronto
2006 Birdsong Akasa Gallery, York University Birdsong Gallery G+, Index G, Toronto Pause The Goldfarb Gallery, York University
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE AND AWARDS
2010 Instructor, VIS 130 Visual Strategies; Time-Based, University of Toronto 2009 Technical Intern, Vtape, Toronto 2008 Teaching Assistant, VIS 120 Visual Concepts, University of Toronto 2007 Cross-Disciplinary Certificate in Digital Media, York University 2006 Instructor, HTML Tutorials, York University 2006-7 Time Based Art Computer Lab Monitor, York University Member of Visual Arts Student Association, York University 2006 Research Intern, Vtape, Toronto 2005-6 New Media Computer Lab Monitor, York University
KATHLEEN BOETTO 11
Paris, 5” x 16”x 9”, inkjet prints, 2009.
REBECCA DIEDERICHS
Rebecca Diederichs’ current photographic series is comprised of individual and paired images of lush trees and parkland, alongside images of a workspace – an artist’s studio – full of objects and materials that indicate the creator’s existence and activity. Posted in different configurations, the contents of the images mingle and interact, their relationships to each other in flux suggested by the inclusion of post-it notes, pins and other notations. Diederichs’ trees call to mind the picturesque inclinations of mid-nineteenth century photo-graphic experiments, such as Oak Tree in Winter (c. 1842-3) by William Henry Fox Talbot; her informal, seemingly casual interior shots evoke Moyra Davey’s unassuming photographs of the domestic and the overlooked. By incor-porating these divergent references in her work, Diederichs has created a project that aims to use photography to depict an extended experience. Size, configuration, viewpoint and approach to the subject shift from image to image, and within images, yet it is clear that these layered, photographic contents describe a particular experience with a particular location. Elements appear and reappear – trees, fields, windows, sketchbooks, tables and chairs, and Diederichs uses an image-within-an-image technique so that we see test prints of some of the photographs posted on the wall amongst the range of objects pictured in the views of the studio space. As the elements move around, we get the sense that she has worked her materials, that she has spent time considering, analyzing and rearranging them. She aims to convey the complexity and duration of her experience; each photograph functions not as a simple document of the instant at which it was taken, but rather, is there to contribute to the complex, shifting and mutable description of a moment that unfolds over time.
Between 1844 and 1846, Henry Talbot issued The Pencil of Nature, the first commercially produced book containing photographic illus-trations. Essentially an instruction manual, it
described the many ways in which photo-graphs could be used, both practically and aesthetically. Talbot also dedicated a great deal of his text to describing his photographs. In 2008, on the occasion of her exhibition at the Fogg Art Museum at Yale University, Moyra Davey published Long Life Cool White, in which her photographs and writing commingle in a single investigation. Davey is completely upfront with her admission that she sees photography and writing as inextricable activities, querying whether “as Benjamin and Brecht speculated, photographs are more at home with, even in need of, words?”1 While Diederichs has also been inclined to combine image and text in past work, words appear only accidentally, or as brief notations, in this project. Photography and photographs as notation devices are her language, her way of telling a story. As individual images are arranged and rearranged, within and between her larger composi-tions, we begin to understand her attempts to find the right ‘words.’ In the summer of 2009, while in England, Diederichs took hundreds of photographs, in the expression of what she describes as “a compulsive desire to remain within the ‘energy’ emitted and gathered from the subjects and a particular moment of being.”2 Upon her return to Toronto, she aimed to find a way to convey the imprint of this encounter, as she names it. Image size and selection, juxta-position, and framing become subtly and deftly applied strategies that aid in the expression of the many narratives that describe her rela-tionship to taking, accumulating, ordering and presenting photographic material, and ultimately, our relationships to looking at, expe-riencing, interpreting and reading them.
Diederichs’ selection of images was distilled from the many that were taken at the time. The photographs vary in size, composition, perspective and subject. Two ‘portraits’ of individual trees, closely framed so that there is little foreground, offer great detail but are scant in evidence of location, thus creating a
REBECCA DIEDERICHS 13
BETWEEN IMAGE AND EXPERIENCEby Michelle Jacques
14 REBECCA DIEDERICHS REBECCA DIEDERICHS 15
these pages: (top image) Telling of Green, diptych, digital image, 17.5” x 54”, 2009.(lower image) Telling of Green, diptych, digital image, 17.5” x 62”, 2009.
previous page: Telling of Green, diptych, digital image, 24” x 18”.
tension between specificity and ambiguity that marks this project. Many of the other photographs are presented as diptychs and also play on a tension between the real and the represented. Through their scale, composition and perspective, they invite us, in a variety of ways, into our own encounters with Diederichs’ spaces. An image of a table at an open window is composed so that we are invited to look out onto a playing field; its pendant image, which depicts another surface abounding with photo-graphic prints, invites us to take a seat and peruse the desktop’s contents. Diederichs moved her photographs around her workspace, searching for the best articulation, and as she did so, she photographed those configurations in the studio, taking pictures of pictures, layering ‘place’ photographs with those of spaces and still moments. In this way, she writes and re-writes and edits her photographic language, searching for the most effective phrasing to describe the indent of an encounter. And as we now move around her images, searching for the implications of the shifting clues, meaning emerges not just from what is on the wall in front of us, but also from the myriad of connota-tions from our own encounters that we bring to our current experience of Diederichs’ imagery.
In yet another photograph, also one half of a diptych, we see the landscape through a half open window, which offers us a view into the landscape that is in part clear and realistic, and in part blurred and abstracted. Talbot expounded photography as an unprecedented means by which an artist could “introduce to our pictures a multitude of minute details which add the truth and reality of the repre-sentation.”3 Diederichs, on the other hand, uses a tactic such as this distorted view through glass to introduce the notion that abstraction might embody an encounter as meaningfully as a realistic depiction. Amongst the objects included in her interior views are a number
of sketchbooks, often pictured with pages open. Ordered, multihued dots, painted in gouache fill the pages of one book; in another, rectangles, in landscape format, are described by variously coloured juxtaposed stripes or in ranks of loosely painted, but orderly lines. At the same time that Diederichs was recording her surroundings photographically, she was also responding to her encounter in a series of gouache sketches painted in exercise books, or cahiers. Presented alongside a view through a window, or a photograph of a green field, or, in one particularly suggestive photograph, on a table top, alongside paintbrushes, in front of a view onto a green playing field, we are tempted to find some accordance between the painted images and the surrounding landscape. Are the stripes an abstraction of the players, interpreted as streaks of colour as they move across the field? Do the colours selected for the dots relate to the tones of the sky in the abutting photograph? Diederichs describes the process of painting in the notebooks as one in which she “[transcribed] the energy of being there, watching, seeing, listening,” so that although “seemingly arbitrary, these books of marks are as much about the encounter with a place as photographs are its document.”4
By moving through her photographs as she does, Diederichs transforms them from an accumulation of individual images into a layered and complex document that shifts and unfolds to reveal new connotations and points of entry. Her search is not in aid of focusing or limiting meaning; her goal is to introduce a myriad of possible readings. Through her assiduous rela-tionship to her photographic information – her choice of subject, yes, but more importantly, her judicious selection, ordering and juxtaposition – Diederichs creates a space that communicates the energy of encounter and invites us to seek discovery – both in what is represented, and in the experience it engenders.
1 Moyra Davey, Notes on Photography and Accident,” in Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays by Moyra Davey, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008, p. 92.2 Rebecca Diederichs, “Draft Thesis,” November 4, 2009, p. 7.3 William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, New York: Da Capo Press, 1969, Plate X.4 Rebecca Diederichs, “Draft Thesis,” November 4, 2009, p. 7.
16 REBECCA DIEDERICHS REBECCA DIEDERICHS 17
Telling of Green, diptych, digital image, 17.5” x 62”
18 REBECCA DIEDERICHS REBECCA DIEDERICHS 19
REBECCA DIEDERICHS
b. England 1962 EDUCATION
2008-10 University of Toronto, Masters of Visual Studies.2006-08 Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, Ontario, B.F.A.1984-88 Ontario College of Art, Toronto, Ontario, A.O.C.A. 1980-82 York University, Toronto, Fine Arts (Dance and Visual Arts). SOLO EXHIBITIONS (SELECTED)
2007 Neutrinos They Are Very Small, Render Art Gallery, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario.2006 Neutrinos They Are Very Small, Agnes Etherington Arts Centre, Kingston, Ontario. BLAZE, Window Project, YYZ Artists Outlet, Toronto.2005 Neutrinos They Are Very Small, with Sally McKay and Gordon Hicks, curated by Corinna Ghaznavi, Art Gallery of Sudbury, Ontario.2000 Pattern Language, The Red Head Gallery, Toronto.1999 GRAFTING, The Lynnwood Gallery, Simcoe, Ontario.1998 Considered Vacillations, Tableau Vivant, Toronto.1993 Forced Arrangements, The Gallery, University of Toronto, Scarborough. GROUP EXHIBITIONS (SELECTED)
2009 Persona Volare: EXPO, Tom Thomson Art Gallery, Owen Sound, Ontario.2007 Granite Club, Persona Volare, Tree Museum, Gravenhurst, Ontario The Road North/The Road South, Persona Volare, Harbourfront Centre, Toronto.2005 Canadian Club, Persona Volare, Rodman Hall Arts Centre, St. Catharines, Ontario. Canadian Club, Persona Volare, Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, France.2003 Persona Cantare, Persona Volare, Toronto.2001 Commute, (Red Head Gallery/ARC exchange), ARC Gallery, Chicago.2000 Persona Volare, Persona Volare, Toronto. whorehouse, curated by Jenifer Papararo, Toronto.1996 Duke-U-Menta, Duke of Connaught Tavern, curated by The 23rd Room Collective, Toronto. Limousine, Free Parking, Toronto. 1994 Neo-politan, Place & Show Artists Projects, Dufferin Mall, Toronto.1992 The State of Viewing: Distinguishing Between Wayne & Shuster, Place & Show Artists Projects, Gallery 101, Ottawa, Ontario.1991 HOMEFRONT: Current Issues in Interior Decorating, Place & Show Artists Projects, StreetCity, Toronto.
1990 ec: e without the bar is c, Embassy Cultural House, London, Ontario.
PROFESSIONAL PROJECTS
2004 Editor, Material World: Peter MacCallum, Photographs 1986-2004, published by YYZBooks, YYZ Artists’ Projects.2000/01 Urgent Witness/Drawn Remains, co-curated exhibition with Kym Preusse for YYZ Artists’ Outlet. PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS
2000-P Persona Volare, artists group1999-02 The Red Head Gallery, Member 1996-99 YYZ Artists Outlet, Board Member 1997-98 CARO, Board Member 1996-00 Artists With Their Work, AGO 1989-95 Place & Show Artists Projects, artists’ collective 1988-89 Round Up Committee and Member PUBLISHED TEXTS
2009 “Imaging Constants: Jimin Lee,” Open Studio, Toronto.2008 “Colin Lyons’ Boom Town,” Open Studio, Toronto.2007 “Spectrum Shift: Yael Brotman,” Open Studio, Toronto.2005 Introduction for Material World: Peter MacCallum, Photographs 1986-2004, published by YYZBooks.2003 “Crowding: Bill Leeming,” Open Studio, Toronto.2002 “Thinking in Minutes,” exhibition essay, Gordon Hicks, The Red Head Gallery. “but, am I speaking the language?” (Penelope Stewart, Manuel Lau, Ing-Lu Lucinda Chen, Luke Painter), Open Studio, Toronto. “Lilianna Rodriguez,” Open Studio, Toronto.2001 “Peter MacCallum in Substitute City,” Lola, #9, summer 2001. “Alistair Magee,” The Red Head Gallery, Toronto. Urgent Witness/Drawn Remains, YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Toronto.2000 “Velocity + Torque = Culture,” interview with Milada Kovacova, Lola, fall 2000.1999 “Hello from Julie Voyce,” interview with Julie Voyce, Lola, #4, summer 1999. “Janet Morton, Translate,” Lola, #4, summer 1999. “David Rasmus, Offering,” Lola, #4, summer 1999. GRANTS & AWARDS/RESIDENCES
2009-10 OGS Grant (Ontario Graduate Studies)2006 Ontario Arts Council, Mid-Career Individual Visual Arts Grant2003 “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” Thematic Residency, The Banff Arts Centre1995 The Canada Council, “B” Grant 1994 Ontario Arts Council, Individual Visual Arts Grant 1993 Canada Council, Individual Short-Term Grant 1992 Ontario Arts Council, Individual Visual Arts Grant 1984-88 George A. Reid Award, General Studies, Ontario College of Art Anne Adler Kagan Award, Experimental Arts, Ontario College of Art George A. Reid Award, Experimental Arts, Ontario College of Art I.O.D.E., Foundation Studies, Ontario College of Art
CURRICULUM VITAE
BOGDAN LUCA
In his seminal work, The Imaginary, first published in 1940, Jean-Paul Sartre states that the word image entails how an object can enter consciousness through observation or through imagination. If the image is imaginary, he goes on to say, there must be an equivalent to an observable perception, something that stands in for the real - a painting or a photograph, for example. He goes on to say that by imbuing this stand-in with meaning and feelings, the object becomes engaged through the intentionality of the viewer1. Seventy years later, in our visual culture saturated with images, it seems logical for an artist to be increasingly self-reflexive about his/her consciousness of both the images and the materiality of art. For Toronto based artist Bogdan Luca, who is graduating this year from the Masters of Visual Studies programme at the University of Toronto, the methodology of making paintings conjures a possibility to illuminate the phenomenology of image making and essay the proximity between perception and imagination.
Unmoorings, the title of this exhibition featuring several robust paintings made in oil on plywood panels, alludes to the desire of the artist to loosen the contextual meaning of the found vernacular and documentary images that inform the morphology of his figurative paintings. On one hand, this method of making paintings from photographs using appropriated images from various corners of culture speaks to the now familiar ecology of image making in which painting and photography coexist symbiotically, leading us to think of some photographs as painterly and of some paintings as photogenic. On the other hand, Luca posits his research as a form of bricolage that brings to our attention the shreds of cultural memory about films, events, and social phenomena that act as catalysts of painterly imagination.
Bogdan Luca grew up in Romania where he received his initial art training from observation common to many artists of Eastern European
descent. He immigrated to Canada in 1994. I met Luca for the first time a few years ago at the Ontario College of Art & Design Florence off-campus program where he was completing his undergraduate thesis under the guidance of eminent Canadian painter and art educator, Ron Shuebrook. Luca was also trained in animation and figurative drawing as well as landscape painting, which might help us understand his affinity towards creating scenic compositions and grappling with the plasticity and temporal dimension of painting as exemplified in his current body of work. Last year, as a part of his graduate programme requirements, Luca curated a group exhibition at the University of Toronto Art Centre. The exhibition featured works of emerging Toronto painters, and was accompanied by a panel discussion which I was asked to moderate2. The overall objective of this project was to engage the community of painters, offering a forum for them to reflect on the role of painting in the digital age. Thus, we may think of Bogdan Luca as an artist-philos-opher who questions how painting practice connects to the world of visual ideas and tech-nological mediations of perception while at the same time continues to offer a vehicle for “the magnification and clarification of being”3.
The paintings featured in this body of work are based on the images that Luca found on the internet and in newspapers. Some of the images were captured off the LCD screen with a digital camera and have been modified and reconfigured in Photoshop, as well as transformed into perceptual devices and visual maquettes for Luca’s pictorial inquiries. For example, in the painting entitled Silvio, Luca works from a Photoshop-enhanced collage model of a close up of the face of the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi after being hit by an apparently mentally disturbed passerby with a souvenir statue of Milan’s Duomo4. It is important to clarify that Luca’s visual studies are not necessarily directed towards critiquing and de-legitimizing the authority of media culture.
BOGDAN LUCA 21
UNMOORING THE PHENOMENOLOGYOF IMAGE MAKNG
by Vladimir Spicanovic
22 BOGDAN LUCA BOGDAN LUCA 23
these pages: Responsive Formation (left) 48”x48”, Machine of Desire (right) 30”x40”, oil on paper and panel, 2009.
previous page: Joey, 96”x48”, oil on paper and panel, 2009.
Rather, he sees his methodological orientation as a way of recycling and following up on the images and stories that were once worthy of our attention, and that can offer another – intermit-tently symbolic – existence of the found images through painting. This approach, according to Luca is not in order to impart another truth about the ubiquitous and impermanent state of contemporary life, but to transgress the real and remodel an imaginary object-image that embodies the psychosomatic response of the artist and his consciousness to the images. This fundamental value present in Luca’s works is perhaps most explicitly captured in Joey, a large painting that features the face of the actor Viggo Mortensen who plays Joey Cusack (also known as a Philadelphia gangster Tom Stall) in David Cronenberg’s film, History of Violence. Drawing upon a Photoshop model that juxtaposes three virtually identical frames of Joey’s face enlivened with red drips of paint and expressive brushstrokes, Luca resusci-tates the physiognomy of Joey. He does this, however, not in order to illustrate the culminating psychological sequence of the film, but to give his portraiture a sense of metamorphosis and evoke a hallucinatory effect in the perceptual experience of painting.
A more contemplative moment is offered in Machine of Desire, a painting based on a still image from a segment of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film from 1979, Stalker, found on YouTube. The composition features three standing figures that are featured in the film, all caught breathless in their philosophical voyage. There is the “stalker” whose role is to guide and bring people in and out of “the Zone” -- the wilderness terrain under surveillance by the government military forces; the writer obsessing about his inspiration; and finally the professor, hoping to win the Nobel prize one day while secretly plotting to destroy the ultimate destination of their journey - the
room that offers fulfillment of the deepest human desires.
There is something raw and unbeautiful about these works as they come to being through Luca’s expressive brushstrokes and muted RGB palette. The photographic images that Luca uses as references for his painterly investigations are not necessarily photogenic and seductive. In addition, Luca’s figuration is not directed towards realistic rendering and mimicking of the found representational images. Another unique quality of these paintings is that they are made on large and robust semi-industrial plywood panels. As such, they do not easily fulfill the decorative function and commodity status of painting. It is important to mention that Luca’s visual lexicon also incorpo-rates annotations of the residual and accidental properties of the digital images from which he works -- the traces of the mechanical imper-fections of printing, image pixilation, moiré patterns, and chromatic aberration. In tandem with deliberate applications of Stonehenge paper, these annotations of the technological slippages and signs of mechanical reproduc-tion, rather than enhancing the optical qualities of painting, instead mobilize the non-optical, haptic function of the eye.
In conclusion, these paintings constitute an authentic record of Bogdan Luca’s inquiry into the phenomenology of image making and the capacity of painting to de-territorialize and re-territorialize the consciousness of the viewer. At its best, Luca’s body of work distills for us “how images think”5 through the expressive processes of conjugation and tran-scription of objectivity into subjectivity, real into virtual space, and visualization of the figurative representation into the materialized topogra-phies of pictorial form.
24 BOGDAN LUCA
1 The full title of Sartre’s work is The Imaginary: A phenomenological psychology of the imagination. Routledge 2004.2 Under the title Facing the Screen, Luca’s curatorial project featured the work of Shannon Dickie, Alex Fischer, Shlomi Greenspan, Hyoki Kang, Michael Lawrie, Meghan McKnight, Amanda Muis, Alex Sheriff, Jol Thomson, and Jeff Tutt. In addition, there was a panel discussion that included Nicole Collins, Michel Daigneault, Monica Tap, and Joanne Tod, and Vladimir Spicanovic as the moderator. November 4 - December 19, 2009, University of Toronto Art Centre.3 See David Urban, “Painting’s Radiant Array”. Border Crossings, No 91. (pp. 45 - 56). Autumn 2004.4 As reported on the MSNBC, “The bloody image of Berlusconi, reeling after being attacked as he signed autographs following a rally Sunday, has created sympathy and solidarity on one hand, while on the other generating praise for his attacker on Facebook and YouTube”. For the full report on Berlusconi incident. see http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34412287.5 How Images Think, is the title of Ron Burnett’s book in which he explores the meaning of visual perception and the nature of images conjured by digital technologies. MIT Press, 2004.
BOGDAN LUCA 25
Silvio, 96”x48”, oil on paper and panel, 2009.
BOGDAN LUCA
26 BOGDAN LUCA
b. Bucharest, Romania 1980
EDUCATION
2008-10 Master of Visual Studies, University of Toronto2003-07 Bachelor of Fine Arts, OCAD1997-00 Diploma, Sheridan College Classical Animation
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2009 Emergence I, Whippersnapper Gallery, Toronto Peep show. Lonsdale Gallery, Toronto Storm of Painters. Edward Day Gallery, Toronto Re: View. University of Toronto Recherche. Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York2008 The Artist Project. Liberty Grand, Toronto Grounded. Edward Day Gallery, Toronto Peel Annual Juried Exhibition. Art Gallery of Peel, Brampton Look 2008 Juried Exhibition. Gallery Lambton, Sarnia2007 Recent Work from Florence. XPACE Cultural Centre, Toronto When is Now – solo exhibition. Praxis Gallery, Toronto The Figurative Exhibition. Lipman Contemporary, Toronto
SELECTED AWARDS
2009 University of Toronto Fellowship Timeraiser Foundation Purchase Award2008 University of Toronto Fellowship Look 2008: Best in Show2006 Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award2005 Pirelli Relativity Challenge: first prize Carol and Morton Rapp Foundation Award
BOGDAN LUCA 27
ARTIST TALKS
2010 University of Toronto. MVS enhanced tutorial. Paradox engine2009 University of Guelph. On painting from digital sources. With M. Pierce2009 Whippersnapper Gallery. Painting and its relationship to photography.2009 Central Technical School. Illustration as professional practice.
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES
2009-10 Work Study - research assistant, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto2010 Instructor – Visual Strategies. Visual Studies, University of Toronto2010 Member of the organizing committee for Out of Sight: Looking Beyond Seeing, a graduate union of art history students’ 2 day international symposium on the extra visual in the visual arts. University of Toronto2009-10 Teacher Assistant Training Program workshops at the University of Toronto2009 Organizer and curator of Facing the Screen, an exhibition and panel discussion on the relationship between painting and the digital realm. University of Toronto, Toronto2009 Presenter in the Graduate seminar organized by the U of T Fine Arts Students Union, University of Toronto2009 Participant in exhibition and panel discussion, Recherche: a salon celebrating intertextuality, aesthetic experience and memory. Stony Brook University, New York2008 Teaching Assistant, Visual Concepts. Visual Studies program, University of Toronto
CURRICULUM VITAE
Alison Syme holds a B.A. in Literary Studies, Fine Art History and Semiotics and Communication from the University of Toronto and an M.A. and Ph.D. in History of Art & Architecture from Harvard University. She currently teaches in the Department of Art, Centre for Visual and Media Culture, University of Toronto at Mississauga. Her areas of research include European and American 19th & 20th century art and visual culture, queer theory, feminism, psychoanalysis, fin-de-siecle studies, history of science. Her forthcoming book, A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-Siecle Art is being published in 2010 by Penn State University Press.
ALISON SYMEBAD ROMANCE
Michelle Jacques is a Toronto-based curator, writer and educator who currently holds the position of Associate Curator, Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her recent projects at the AGO include Sarah Anne Johnson: House on Fire (2009); Luis Jacob: Habitat (2005-2006); and Christine Swintak: The thing that won’t let you walk away (2005). In 2007 she was one of the curators for Toronto’s Scotiabank Nuit Blanche. Recent writings include “The Artist-run Centre as Tactical Training Unit” in decentre: concerning artist-run culture (YYZ Books, 2008); and “Art and Institutions: An interview with Janna Graham and Anthony Kiendl,” Fuse, September 2007. She sits on the board of Vtape, is a contributing editor with Fuse, and is adjunct faculty at OCAD. She received her B.A from York University and her M.A. in Art History from Queen’s University.
Vladimir Spicanovic is an artist-educator born in 1967 in Kraljevo, Serbia. Spicanovic immigrated to Montreal in 1989, shortly before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the civil war in Yugoslavia. He obtained his BFA from Concordia University where he studied under the celebrated Canadian abstract painter and print maker Yves Gaucher. Spicanovic also holds an MA and a PhD from McGill University. In his doctoral work, Spicanovic investigated the ramifications of post-modernism in the studio teaching of painting and the education of artists. Spicanovic’s research spans painting, photography, visual music, critical writing and the philosophy of education. His artwork can be found at Birch-Libralato Gallery in Toronto, and in various public and private collections. Spicanovic’s curatorial projects have been presented at the SoundaXis festival, YYZ Artists’ Outlet, and the Goethe-Institute, Toronto. Spicanovic is Dean of the Faculty of Art at OCAD.
28 ESSAYISTS’ BIOS
MICHELLE JACQUES
VLADIMIR SPICANOVIC
BETWEEN IMAGE AND EXPERIENCE
2010 MVS Studio Graduating ExhibitionUniversity of Toronto Art Centre
April 1-17, 2010
The MVS (Masters of Visual Studies) is a graduate programme in stu-dio art within the Department of Art, University of Toronto.
Catalogue of an exhibition held at University of Toronto Art Centre,
Apr. 1-17, 2010.ISBN 978-0-7727-2440-7
Catalogue essays by Michelle Jacques Vladimir Spicanovic
Alison Syme
Edited by Lisa Steele
Catalogue design by Linseed Projects www.linseedprojects.com
Printed by Print Maximum
UNMOORING THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF IMAGE MAKING
