explorations in toronto art.

had a great fall

Originally uploaded by hellojulia

Julia Martin calls this work “a fictive retrospective of an imagined childhood,” somewhat of a mouthful of a title; and certainly a loaded statement. Even this title shows Julia’s writerly prowess, which will come up again and again in the exhibition— viewers will see that text is an integral part of the meaning Julia teases out of her images. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

This is Not Your Life is a series of fictional family photographs, into which Julia has inserted herself. In the words of the artist, it is “a forgery of the quintessential happy childhood,” that began with the purpose of providing happy memories where none existed. But despite this ingenuous beginning, the work quickly took on a darker mood.

Using imagery appropriated from the family albums of others (via eBay, flea markets, and the like), Julia created these false snapshots by embedding her portrait into the images. This mask-like visage is repeated throughout the series, and can take on shifting expressions in the context of each image, adding to the overall eerie mood.

The portrait Julia selected for use in the series, is one taken at her fifth birthday party, in which she appears strained, uncertain— not the way children normally are at their birthday parties. With the addition of this disconcerting face, says Julia, “immediately everything was different, the scene was no longer happy and warm, but more sinister; my expression and the tension I bring to the image changes the tone of the photograph completely.” Applying this mask to the subjects in the photograph effectively changes each of them into a strange, shifted version of the artist herself.

Though the image of a child unhappy at her own birthday party  calls to mind the sad-clown cliché and thus would threaten to create a trite dichotomy, Julia’s deft use of irony, and simply bizarre images, sidesteps the hackneyed territory quite smoothly. Her addition of captions borrowed and altered from fairy tales and child lore show the sophistication of the work, that propels it beyond simple amends for an unhappy childhood.

When I mentioned my reading of the sad-clown connotations, Julia offered the following:

“I think it’s funny to be compared to the sad clown, as it is very much an image I associate with myself as a child. I felt as if I was giving a performance of a normal, happy child; questioning, testing and mimicking those around me. I watched for cues as to who I should be, how I should act, but never feeling how I imagined I should feel.”

In light of this statement, reading the inserted portrait as a mask becomes even richer. The repeated, insistent face pasted onto each figure, is crucial to the viewer’s grasp of the work. Repeated in this way, her face becomes a mask for her to hide behind. Julia has used this trope in a masterful way, despite stumbling on it in the initial creation of the work: “There was suddenly a level of distress and desperation that became palpable through the repetition. Which is a kind of insanity, repeating an act that bears the same result, over and over.”

Works in the series date back to 2006, so I was naturally curious about Julia’s feeling toward the deeply personal series now. She tells me she feels a deep fondness for the series, despite the horrific things it alludes to. At the same time, she acknowledges the strangeness of publicly revealing how an inner fantasy life allowed her to function.

“After finishing the series I began to pull away from that world, attempting to stop retreating to daydreams. This Is Not Your Life, like most of my work, became an exorcism of sorts. At the same time, I felt a great sense of loss and there are times still when I feel the need to retreat but that place isn’t what it used to be. In creating This Is Not Your Life I shed light on the illusion and in doing so, effectively dismantled it.”

This is Not Your Life opens at Alliance Française’s Galerie Pierre-Léon (24 Spadina Road) this Friday, February 19, from 6pm-9pm. The exhibition runs until March 2^nd.

More of Julia’s work can be found at www.theabsentgoodbye.com

Most of my photographer friends who still use film cite the happy accident as their primary reason for doing so. It’s a nicely romantic idea, and can help photographers create pleasantly random results. But as film seems to have begun its descent into “historical process,” it’s nice to see that artists are finding new and innovative ways to harness the power of the happy accident using digital technology. I’m not talking about mimicking film, even though those techniques have a certain following, and can be pretty fun (the Poladroid freeware in particular.) I’m referring to works that use only the scanner to create the image, like the ones I recently saw on my friend Leanne’s blog and photostream.

shoreline, by Leanne Eisen

Judging by the images on her blog, Leanne has been doing extensive experimenting with different techniques in scannography. Most of them have the feeling of abstract digital paintings or line drawings on black, but some, like the image above, almost have the look of the half-developed sheets of photographic paper that I used to scavenge from the darkroom wastebaskets because I thought they were so lovely.

But nostalgia for materials aside, these are seriously intriguing images. Some have an almost-scientific quality to them that turns me off a little, or at least doesn’t grab me in the same heart-pulling way that the soft, dreamy ones do. Even so, the mass of lines reminds me about how scanners actually pick up information from objects, flat surfaces, negatives, and the like. The tangles make me think that Leanne’s tricking the technology, forcing it to bend to her artistic will, and in the process, the software revolts and goes haywire. This could be part of the appeal for me—or it could be the fascination of not really knowing quite how the images are made.

More of Leanne Eisen’s work can be found on her website: www.leanneeisen.com

I recently saw the current exhibition at Toronto Image Works, a solo show of Mark Kasumovic. Since whenever I’m at Image works I am usually dropping off prints for work, I had printing on the brain.. and one of the first things that grabbed me about this show was the amazing colour and contrast in these images, somewhere between gritty-real and otherworldly.

I have to admit I had already seen this project in previous incarnations, and was hoping it wouldn’t just be more of the same. It certainly wasn’t: Mark struck a fine balance between making portraits of the structures, and describing their bizarre surroundings. We’ve all seen Becher-clone industrial-architecture pictures, as well as journalistic, didactic humanity-encroaching-on-nature pictures.

So I was glad that I Can Hear You Humming walked the perfect line down the middle between those two extremes. There was just the right level of ambiguity; awe at the structures themselves, and a subtle critical note, where the artist highlighted odd juxtapositions. After thinking about the space between the structures and society, which is where the images are situated, I felt the title couldn’t have been more apt. More than a case of clever anthropomorphizing, the phrase “I can hear you humming” probes into how these structures fit into the world of humans, hints at interruption or disturbance, and in context, is just a tiny bit funny— which is always a good thing.

The other impressive aspect of these prints was the deep space depicted in most of them. The strongest images were the ones that reminded me of the vastness of the whole system, like those moments driving down the 401, passing under the hydro towers, and there’s one fleeting second where the whole row aligns. In a few images, there was a flattening of space, and while they didn’t excite me as much as the others,  I’m glad they were there to represent the less-obviously stunning views of these structures. Kudos to Mark for finding all the angles and making them look great together.

Here is some other press about the show: Torontoist, and Flight + Hotel.

I Can Hear You Humming continues until January 30 at Toronto Image Works, 80 Spadina.

There is nothing like having an out-of-town guest to help you appreciate the city in which you live.

In addition to having a good excuse to do fun touristy stuff like going to museums and shopping, you get to see the city through fresh eyes. How many times have I walked down my neighbourhood’s main drag? So many that I don’t even really see it anymore. So all the neat things that I’ve overlooked get called to my attention by my visitor, from hilarious signage, to neat little bookshops,  cafés and bars I meant to try shortly after I moved to the neighbourhood and never got around to.. all good things like these.

When we were deliberating where to go for dinner, a dear visiting pal from Ottawa asked me which of the many nearby Korean restaurants was my favourite. On my revelation that I hadn’t been to a single one, she chided me— “you’ve lived here for six months already, how have you not been to a single one?” Needless to say, she (being a big kimchee lover) picked the restaurant. Another visiting BFF from Ottawa reminded me of the pleasures of vegan eats, thrift shopping, and Queen West walks. Her perceptions of the neighbourhood, not having visited Toronto for five years, were really interesting. That street has gone through so many changes and I liked hearing her talk about what it was like before.

A friend visiting from Montreal last winter took a different approach to acquainting me with my neighbourhood. A few hours before the Christmas party that was taking place at my apartment that night, she headed out to get a few things.. and came back with peanut cookies and seaweed cookies (!) from a nearby bakery. It was eye-opening, to say the least. Her whims also gave me a good reason to explore parts of the city I had never been before (this led to somewhat of a wild goose chase in search of little Malta, but I think that’s another story.)

I’m thinking this probably has something to do with why I look forward to visiting Ottawa: in addition longing for visits with friends, as well as the rosy nostalgia that one can only feel about a hometown left in the past, I get to become a visitor, to pick and choose the best parts, as well as enjoying the local knowledge of, well, a local.

Yet another “How have I lived in Toronto for four years and never been here!?” moment happened this weekend: I ventured eastward to the Leslie Street Spit.

On the beyond-unseasonably-warm afternoon that we were blessed with on Sunday, I met up with a good friend of mine (an explorer and wanderer extraordinaire) and together we biked  into the hazy sun at the lake. The light was incredible, in the way it can only be at changing seasons, when the sun is close to the earth but there are barely any leaves to block out all the light. Between this, the bizarrely warm weather, the quiet and breeze, and the long path stretching ahead of us with no visible end, there was a definitely otherworldly feeling to the whole place. My companion remarked that it felt like we were walking toward the afterlife, and it was a pretty apt description.

We came upon a place that looked like, for lack of better description, a prehistoric swamp. I half expected to see some dinosaurs come stomping by, like no big deal. These formations of logs and little rounds of wooden fence were so bizarre-looking, and it wasn’t until I began to edit these pictures that I realized that combined with the skyline in the background, they really throw off the sense of scale. Check out my tiny friend, who is definitely not tiny in real life.

In case you didn’t know, the spit is a man-made extension of land that extends out into Lake Ontario. It goes out even farther than the islands, and it’s made of clean fill and construction materials. Much of it is covered by grass and soil and growing things, but at the water’s edge, its humble and odd origins are made visible. The shores are scattered with weathered, rounded bricks, rebar, and a wide selection of excellent skipping stones.

It was such a magical place— I can’t wait to make more visits in all seasons.

thanks to my wonderful film-loving roommate, I was reminded of the Free Friday Films series at U of T. Last friday, when we went, it was a Jim Jarmusch double feature, and the movies were Stranger than Paradise and Night on Earth.

Stranger than Paradise, despite having been made in 1984, had the slow pace and deadpan humour of some 60s New Wave films, especially Breathless. It also shared the endless running around and driving around, the male-male-female trio dynamic, and the unconventional narrative arc of Bande À Part (one of my favourite movies ever.) I don’t know what it is that’s so magnetic about these elements, but the trio I just described is one of my favourite storytelling tropes. In some ways it mirrors my own adolescence, and the more volatile of social situations I have found myself in and around during the past few years. It’s a bizarre chemistry, in any case, that makes for a good story.

It was described to me as “a movie about cool dudes just driving around, playing cards, drinking, and being cool… just doing nothing.” This was a pretty apt description, yet the film held a strange power over me as I watched it. Because the two main guys (the cool dudes) had their own little word to which Eva, the other main character, was an outsider, it was easy to identify with her as she misunderstood, mocked and fumbled her way through getting to know them.

The scenes were sparse and austere, so it was easy to tune in to every detail. Also, this made for some really beautiful shots. Enough said.

Night on Earth, the second movie, was enjoyable in a completely different way. I suppose this is the curse of a double feature (besides the simple fact that it can be hard to sit through two movies in a row), that one will be thoughtful and cold, yet somehow touching; and the other will be sillier, more disjointed.. it somehow spoiled the aftertaste of the first. Still, like some of the classics of new wave and italian neorealism, it tasted even better the day after seeing it.