Rewind: ReCollect
Rewind: ReCollect
La Centrale/galerie powerhouse, Montreal
The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard said, "Our past is situated elsewhere and both time and place are impregnated with a sense of unreality." Mary Kavanagh and Carol Sawyer reconstruct this place that is the past with differing actions and effect. They tread upon the concept of reality, or truth, in their employment of archival strategies that involve the photographic image, the collection and the souvenir. Alongside curator Corinna Ghaznavi, the artists illuminate a place for the interpretation of the everyday and assert female presence within socially constructed histories.
The exhibition acts as an archaeological dig. It seeks evidence of lives lived and proof of active subjects. Work titles, such as Kavanagh's Shadow Archive and Sawyer's Memory Games, are smart and serve the viewer well. Both artists employ representational modes as layers from which to construct meaning. Embedded emotion is removed as the rational is overlaid. Ultimately, the medium in use is time itself.
The gathering of objects, their display and the use of museological practices have become accepted methodologies in contemporary art. "ReCollect" reveals a different effect by performing the rational with documentary images, analytical investigation and historical texts, bringing the very tools of rational understanding into question.
Among Sawyer's fictional documentary photographs of surrealist artist Natalie Brettschneider's performances is one called Natalie Brettschneider Performs 'Jacket' c. 1929. The notion of enacting clothing—that richly symbolic civilizing stuff of presentation, representation and identity—offers a point of entry that clarifies the project. Sawyer is showing her cards; her work documents the construction of history, not one woman's work. In Shadow Archive, Kavanagh presents a carefully ordered grid of small plastic bags arranged three high and 34 across. Inside is the detritus of inhabitation, what's left behind when people have gone: dust, gum wrappers, a four-cent Canadian stamp and oh-so-many ladybugs, indicators of time and seasons past. These traces require an investment of time in looking, which allows the density of the constructions to resonate into a state of affect.
This is abundantly clear in Kavanagh's video projection Vignette series #1-9. The first vignette is shot from inside a dark basement. The frame of the video is the frame of a window being washed by a woman outside the house. She clears away the layers of dirt that have accumulated over time. Her everyday labour epitomizes the exhibition project, which is undertaken in an equally care-filled and considered manner. To clean is a reparative act that often takes more time than the creation of the dirt itself—thus time, in all its measures, shifts and complexities, is laid bare with the artists and curator as subjects within it.
Summer 2004
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