Author Archives: Dominique Lepage

Around Lighthouses from Alice Jarry and Vincent Evrard

In LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE gallery, multiple light sources are paired with compositions of glass and dichroic prisms, mirrors and photographic lenses. Some items are stowed to randomly set engines in an unpredictable movement, at once relentless and delicate, to deploy light in a changing iridescence, accompanied by the sound of the engines and the clatter of the materials at work. Immersed in semidarkness, the gallery lights up with this series of installations projecting onto all surfaces of the space a polychromatic radiance that roams the room without invading it and continually redraws its contours, just as they react to the configuration of the space.

crédit photo: Carol-Ann Belzil-Normand

Alice Jarry and Vincent Evrard thus put the constitution material of the cinematographic image at the service of a diffractive game on several levels, composing this iridescent constellation significantly named Lighthouses. The phenomenon of light diffraction is here convened at the forefront. Even more, the logic of the diffraction, as a mode of interpretation and interaction with reality, permeates the entire work. Light itself is thus integrated to a dynamic of physical and semantic interactions suggested by its wavelike properties. It does not serve to show a picture or an object to be revealed: but rather, each of these small beacons is a source of light and sound deployments each occurring through others, dealing and interfering from the onset with all the components of the environment, and plunging the participant at the heart of its modulations.

Diffractions

Diffraction is the optical phenomenon in which light rays are deflected and disseminated when meeting the edges of an obstacle, which allows to separate the light into distinct beams of colour and recompose them in white light. Current image projection technologies operate the diffractive properties of the lenses and dichroic prisms, jointly with assemblies of mirrors and lenses. These components are here repeated at new expenses, to be assembled in an unusual, open and dynamic fashion. The installation thus presents itself as a series of deconstructed but functional small projectors, each piece operating according to its own logic in a new and unpredictable composition.

crédit photo: Carol-Ann Belzil-Normand

The diffraction process is thus at the centre of an installation that strips the light of its representative, or mimetic function to let it act in its own materiality, into the very components that daily lead it to our screens. In addition, the installation is not confined to the juxtaposition of a series of small lights spread out in the space. The whole is cohesive, not only according to a specific orchestration, but because the bright deployments circulating in space and the sounds produced by the installations intersect and interfere. Ultimately, the actual encounter of the artists can be understood in these terms: light entering in LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE through the intervention of Jarry and Evrard appears in points of meeting resulting from the interaction of their approaches.
A meeting, notably of a sensitivity toward the singularity and the power of action of the matter, and attention to the constitution process of the meaning and the narrative.

crédit photo: Carol-Ann Belzil-Normand

This approach is part of the method of diffractive reading developed over the past two decades, particularly by Donna Haraway and Karen Barad. While the optical phenomenon of reflection structures the classic paradigm of knowledge, according to which the truth of representation depends on its resemblance to the original, the diffractive approach lets us learn how to think following the logic of the deviation and the diffusion of light waves.
Indeed, these produce illustrative interferences, such as the objects encountered as well as movements of light itself. To the discourse on materiality, the diffractive reading prefers the entanglement of the materiality and the discourse. To the knowledge understood as the adequate reflection of objects kept at a distance, it prefers knowledge experienced as a concrete practice of commitment in the world. It seeks to account for the significant meeting points between the materiality of things and the sense with which they are invested¹.

The Reality of the Image

In this frame of mind, the film screening materials are here put in action in a way that dissolves the usual frontal quality of the image. This image is a statement of a reflective logic: the image must be a mirror of the original; either the most perfect representation of an idea, the faithful imitation of a reality, or at least some of the traits of said reality for the benefit of the success of an illusion. Thus, ultimately and perhaps paradoxically, the successful illusion– therefore the image resembling reality- tends to dissolve the identity of the viewer. This one, absorbed by the visual and sound show deployed in front of him, loses and forgets himself in it. That is not the only thing of course, but it must be clear that the omnipotence of contemporary film and video are of this order: they catalyze the viewer’s renunciation of his commitment in reality. Thus, the image is used to not see, to not take a stand.

Here, rather, the spectator necessarily becomes a participant in meeting with the materials that constitute the image itself. The staged light does not intervene as a neutral agent erasing itself in the revelation of the objects rendered visible. On the contrary, it reveals itself, shows itself at the same time as the bodies that it enlightens, and which in turn modulate the trajectories. The shadows, on the other hand, do not embody the simple negativity of the absence of the visible. The body as an obstacle acts not only to stop the light, which draws the negative silhouette of the obscured object encountered, but also by diffraction, as a sign of its wavelike and polychromatic properties. Similarly, the rattling and shocks underline the materiality of the image often associated with a kind of immateriality of the light. The light itself, beyond its ethereal nature, thus appears in the work of a materiality which acts upon the bodies that show themselves by reflecting it, absorbing it, by blocking it, etc. In addition, the technical devices implemented are visible. As much as the movements of the participants, the intervention of the artists is apparent: wire and engines are part of the whole. Present in these traces, they withdraw yet at the last moment to let chance decide the movements of the engines.

Crédit photo: Pierre-Luc Lapointe

The play of the projections thus deployed does not favour the dissolution of the viewer in the image. In this dynamic where light, materials, shadows and people are moving together, no posture allows the participant to ignore its position. It is always immediately and visibly active. The passivity of the viewer that is assigned to a position of receptivity is undone to push him into the co-constitution of forms deployed in space. Indeed, it is impossible to access the installation without affecting it. Necessarily, the light beams meet the body of the participants, whose shadows interfere between the shapes projected on the walls. Similarly, the sound of their steps, the sound of their breaths, and even their words meet the rattling glass ringing in the space. The viewer becomes a participant while he meets the materiality of the cinematic image in a way that forces him to reinterpret and recompose his rapport to it, to respond to the movements in which the image works itself around and through him.

The Little Light

As he takes part in the installation through his body and gestures, the participant also enters inwardness areas. The installation, by the separation of the light and the effects of chiaroscuro, creates an intimate and reassuring space bringing him back to himself at the same time as it directs him in space. Here the show’s externality and the inwardness of the consciousness are crossing. The effect is not unlike the pages of Gaston Bachelard on what he called the musings of the little light. These are foremost, for the author, inspired by the flame of a candle, flickering fragment of fire, carrying the observer in the familiarity of a quiet reverie: “In all, the chiaroscuro of the psyche is daydreaming, a quiet, soothing reverie, which is faithful to its centre, lit in its centre, and not tightened around its content, but always somewhat overflowing, filtering its light into its dusk.”² The installations are reminiscent of such a description: light sources spread around themselves their soft iridescence, exercising a kind of force of attraction and fascination.

crédit photo: Pierre-Luc Lapointe

To Bachelard, in fact, the electrification of the lighting has resulted in the loss of this intimacy with the light once provided by the candle. Yet, here the bemoaned effect of the flame flickering in the night of a pre-industrial time is now met through technology itself. Material vectors of the flight into the image thus bring the participant back from the distant to the close, from the externality of a represented world to the proximity of an inhabited world—or one to be inhabited.

Horizons…

If the Lighthouses of Jarry and Evrard guide us, it is not in a way to indicate a destination. This technological constellation shifting and deployed in the same space we roam does not offer a stable and distant landmark dictating the direction to take. It rather accompanies us in our movements in a way that etches them at all times in the materiality of the visible: at all times our place is shown to us in the changing configuration of the space. Lighthouses thereby makes us meet the traces of our participation in the reality of the cinematographic image, precisely at the point where we have the habit of forgetting ourselves. Through these paths there is a consolidating experience revealing that the cinematographic illusion is not in the projected image, but in the separation of the passive viewer who would remain a neutral observer.

Barad, Karen. 2007, Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham and London : Duke University Press, p. 86 et suiv.
Bachelard, Gaston. 1961, La Flamme d’une chandelle. Paris : Les Presses Universitaires de France, p. 17.

Thoughts on Pablo Rasgado’s Phantoms

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Invited to LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE, Pablo Rasgado chose not simply to perform in the gallery but to turn first to the historical riches that have accumulated within these same walls. Thus, he explored the files in the documentation centre to discover LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE’s history: all that has happened in this huge white gallery that at first glance reveals nothing of previous encounters with so many artists. However, Rasgado finds traces and brings them to light straight from the exhibition space, through its very materiality.

Beneath the white paint, he discovers layer after layer of mural paintings created by various artists and then covered over. In the centre of the gallery, where a partition sometimes was installed, a structure stands like a skeleton of a wall in which the proportions abide not by the constraints of construction but as a measure of time when the wall was present there. Finally, a portion of wall set up at the back of the space is arranged as a resonance chamber that vibrates with the sound and musical interventions presented in performance.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Rasgado gives his installation the evocative title of Phantoms. They are, in brief, LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE’s phantoms that he makes resurface and emerge in an ethereal, ghostly form. The appearance of the distant is close at hand, the past in the present. In this, one finds what Walter Benjamin called the “aura.” Works that can be reproduced are stripped down: their link to their distinctive history is no longer essential when they are freed from their origin in order to get closer to the viewer (whether one uses this copy rather than another does not change the experience that one has of a film, for example). The aura, ultimately linked to the cultural function of art in times gone by, belongs to a unique work that, through its presence, carries an historical weight within it, and everything that makes up this object. There is no equivalent in any reproduction, however much it conforms to the original. The in-situ work acquires such uniqueness by taking root in the place in which it is formed. Here, Rasgado has made visible the aura of LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE itself, both as a building and as an institution.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

It is indeed the institution’s uniqueness as a physical space, as the place of an artistic event that the artist presents. LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE (The White Room) as the name says so well is a pristine space made available for artistic interventions. Always freshly painted white to receive new works, new encounters, new events; it is not however really pristine. The gallery has an extensive history and this can be covered up physically with layers of paint and by restructuring the space and so on. But only by forgetting can this history be eliminated.

A gallery that exhibits in-situ works must also be concerned with the ephemeral. The works appear here but then nothing is left in the end… except that when a work disappears in order to make room for another, the memory of it remains and there are traces that vouch for it. By summoning up the gallery’s history through the materiality of the space, the artist reveals the hidden past. He extracts the walls from the passivity in which he finds them, transforming them to make them speak (this is what the performance on “prepared wall” produces in a very concrete way, because it is the wall that produces its own resonances).

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

The past is also present but in a different form: its presence passes through memory. We could recall Saint Augustin, who in his Confessions questions the nature of time in order to find not three phases of time there but three kinds of present or presence. The past is thus the present time in memory – which differs from the present attention corresponding to what we call “the present”, and that of the waiting that corresponds to the future. This memory is fragile and to persist, it must be attached to more stable supports such as the narratives that one passes on of events, the literal documents, photographs and videos, monuments and so on: thus, the files conserved at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE. These represent the continuity of the place, acting as a counterweight to the ephemeral space that is the exhibition gallery itself.

These are two aspects of LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE that Rasgado brought into dialogue, using the building’s materiality, the gallery walls, to reveal the institution’s duration. Here are the phantoms that he summons. In his installations, the past is present in a ghostly way: it appears, so to speak, in the presence of another kind than that of the present. This sends us back to the origin of the word “phantom”, derived from the Greek phantasma, which refers to an apparition, an image or an illusion, in this sense, the apparition has an unreal, even an immaterial nature. This is to say that by making LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE’s phantoms appear, the artist is not content to reveal the works and structures intact in their original form. They appear both again and in a new form, which shows the previous presence of these works as well as the passage of time that separates us from them. Today’s imaginary phantom also has this aspect: the presence of another kind, immateriality, light, reflection… More than unreal, it is of another reality, more diffuse and unstable as well. Nevertheless, the phantom moves in reality, and its presence intervenes here only by the fact of being perceived. Like the past that, in the vaporous form of memory, moves among us without always being noticed and emerges in broad daylight when it is attached to an appropriate support.

The sanded wall area –– fresco that, like an engraving, emerges from what the artist removes and not what he adds –– reveals under layers of recent paint the mural works produced earlier by Robbin Deyo (2009), Brad Buckley (2005) and the participants of Residence Story (2005) to name a few. The result is a visually poetic surface in which the fragile forms and colours of these meticulously recovered works are brought to light and come together. The image evokes a spectacular scene from Fellini’s film Roma, relating the archaeological discoveries that took place when the Rome subway was being constructed. Here the summoned group of archaeologists discover an underground hall decorated with wonderfully preserved ancient frescos but almost as soon as it is discovered, it started to crumble through contact with the air entering into the hall. As if the past is only preserved if kept from sight, as if the trace always threatens to evaporate. A terrible dilemma: either let the works keep their secret and preserve them by giving up the idea of seeing them, or else look at them on the condition of fully accepting their ephemeral nature. Orphic dilemma in short, Orpheus is allowed to bring back his beloved Eurydice from the Underworld on the condition of not looking at her before getting out of there, or he will loose her for good. Orpheus succumbed to the temptation and gave Eurydice a loving but fatal look. What can be said? Without a doubt, one cannot regain what is lost: that is to say, one cannot revive the past without altering it. And precisely, Rasgado makes the works from the past resurface in a gesture that uncovers them while avoiding their destruction, in a movement that reveals the past and the works’ fragility at the same time.

The wall structure evokes similar themes in other ways: one does not know when looking at it whether it is an unfinished construction or one in ruins. It is surely both, a construction in which the elements belong to right away to the past, a collection of bits of history, this time in symbolic form. It stands as a complex monument, offered in memory of earlier appearances of the place, to a wall that at times, is erected precisely on this spot and then again, is often not there. Once more, the past is expressed in its fragility through memory and its trace.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

This fragility, moreover, is fully achieved when Rasgado’s installations in turn disappear. Was his memory work not right away doomed to vanish by its own destiny? Let us consider instead that it becomes part of the history of LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE and the signs of its ephemeral appearance are placed in the archives, as is the nature of all the works presented in situ. Rasgado’s work becomes part of the spirit of LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE in the awareness of its own temporality. But this will resonate only in those who accept the responsibility that memory involves. Here is one of the strong impressions that the installation leaves us with: the past is a delicate matter. In order not to be mutilated, perverted or lost, it requires serious study, patient and meticulous handling, and an alert and committed engagement. Rasgado succeeded in communicating this not only conceptually but also aesthetically. His work on time goes as far as making feelings resonate and through this, incites viewers think about the fragility of their existence. This is one of the work’s distinct qualities. On departing LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE after this visit, the installation is left behind but phantoms remain to haunt one.