Ingenious3
"Ingenious3" by Cameron Skene, Summer 2007, pp. 84-85
Ingenious3 (Jean-Pierre Gauthier, Guy Ben-Ner and Jérôme Fortin) is a curatorial oddity. Less an overview of aesthetic affinities than a grouping of artists who exemplify cleverness, this suite of three exhibitions exceeds expectations by showcasing the poetic prowess of dedicated tinkerers. Each artist exhibits a neo-Dadaist enthusiasm for turning the dross of modern mass production into works that sing, twitch, amuse and mesmerize.
Jean-Pierre Gauthier (recipient of the 2004 Sobey Art Award), in a nod to Italian Futurist sound experiments, takes his Radio-Shack-and-robotic-flotsam aesthetic into a set of rooms that are each protected from what Gauthier coyly terms “contamination sonore,” allowing the viewer to hear the unique noise of each of his kinetic sound-based installations. For Échotriste (2002) the viewer passes through a glass door into a room filled with cord-tangled machines rigged to motion sensors. As people enter, the work twitches into action and seven mirrors rotate on the floor. Metal coils scrape against their surfaces, each creating a strangely pathetic drone that is echoed by the others in chorus. The works ooze pathos, the result of objects brought to life out of context. They are a freak show of displaced utility and provoke a strange sympathy for the once-useful object now trapped and twitching in a museum setting.
Jérôme Fortin dazzles the viewer with his labour-intensive works. Even the painstaking installation of his larger pieces, showcased in a video in a side room, makes for compelling viewing. For his Écrans (2006) series, made specifically for the exhibition, the artist strung together countless pieces of found paper, like maps and pages from the phone book, to create high-impact works of simulated modernism. As one steps back, the carefully folded rows of paper blend into what resembles television snow or the staccato, pixellated crash of a computer on a giant scale. Other works made from reassembled found objects, containing allusions to modernists like the Quebec Automatiste Jean-Paul Mousseau, demonstrate Fortin’s rigorous working method and its visually luscious results.
Guy Ben-Ner, an Israeli artist, has produced his own version of an assembly-instruction video to accompany his IKEA-like installation Treehouse Kit (2005). The work was assembled in his living room as a kind of Robinson Crusoe–style shipwreck of modern detritus, and the artist teaches the viewer how to disassemble the treehouse and make the chairs and other furniture from which it was originally built. His reach is broad in terms of both the aesthetic traditions he draws on and the materials he uses. His easy appropriation of both the Dadaist aesthetic and surrealist filmmaking in his video Moby Dick (a silent film he made with his children that recreates the famous novel) makes it apparent that he has the ability to effectively beachcomb the jetsam and flotsam of modernity.
Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
