Road Runners: The Fast and the Fortuitous
Hans-Peter Feldmann Pictures of car radios taken while good music was playing 2004 Detail Courtesy of 303 Gallery New York
“The running of the cows” might not have quite the ring to it that “the running of the bulls” does, but in Roman Signer’s Kayak video, it’s an arresting vision nevertheless. It’s not exactly as if Signer’s risking a trampling, but there is danger involved; it just happens to have more to do with his butt getting burned off by the friction of fibreglass and gravel.
You see, Signer is in the titular kayak, which is tied to a rope and being dragged across the Swiss countryside by a van. The experiment had to do with seeing how long he could go before the road bore a hole through the kayak (about 10 minutes, it turns out). Witnesses to this unnatural scene, a herd of blond bovines hanging in a nearby field, couldn’t help but run alongside the kayak for a while, thus stressing the oddity of this most unusual road trip.
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Roman Signer Kayak 2000 Video still Courtesy of Videoart.ch Zofingen |
While the kayak is a running theme in Signer’s work, roads and the romantic relationships we have to them is the one that propels the “Road Runners” exhibition forward. On at Vox, and for the first few weeks of its run at the Cinémathèque québécoise, too, where it was accompanied by a film program called “Sur les routes,” the exhibition mines a rich symbolic territory.
Roads, certainly since Jack Kerouac but also before, have represented not only freedom but also, as curator Marie-Josée Jean puts it, the process of seeking it. Travel creates a series of non-spaces, undefined culturally, spatially, and temporally; and as this exhibition proves through a varied and entertainingly selected array of international artworks and archival documents spanning the last half-century, non-space is a particularly fruitful site for creation.
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Jon Sasaki The Destination and the Journey 2007 Video still Courtesy of the artist |
What’s most special about the show is the sense of humour that prevails throughout the Vox space. A few of the video works are the main culprits: Signer’s is one of them, along with its neighbour on the gallery’s second floor, a hilarious short work by Toronto artist Jon Sasaki titled The Destination and the Journey, featuring a man who’s reading a road map while driving. Kerry Tribe’s Near Miss is not so much funny as scary and mysterious upon first impression, until you read about it after—this 35mm film of a snowy night drive as seen through a car’s windshield is actually not a documentary but a directed recreation, in-studio, of a “near miss,” which tinges the final product with wit.
These works and many others—Hans-Peter Feldmann’s quirky Pictures of car radios taken while good music was playing, Simon Morris’ multilayered Re-writing Freud—imbue the show with the carefree enjoyment that’s intrinsic to road trips. Despite the sterile coup d’œil Vox exhibitions generally give, most, and this one in particular, reveal a great warmth underneath the surface. The overall tone of “Road Runners”—established by the looped “Road Runner” cartoon playing right next to the front door (oh, that poor Wile E. Coyote!)—is fun, genial, and ferociously intelligent. (1211 boul St-Laurent, Montreal QC)
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Kerry Tribe Near Miss 2005 Video still Courtesy of 1301PE Gallery Los Angeles |
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