Corin Sworn: Late Modern
Corin Sworn E.G./J.D. 2008
There is a doctoral dissertation waiting to be written about Vancouver art’s engagement with the modern. From Wall to Wallace, from Lum to Graham, and into the generations that have followed, modernism has been a rewarding lure that by declaiming its own construction (via “form follows function”) finds longevity as a rich postmodern subject.
The natural setting of Vancouver against coastal mountains, sea and delta may help in raising sensitivities to the fabricated nature of social reality. The city’s landscape is a landscape naturally framed and photography, with its inherent trade in mediated, repositioned views, is its extension. Vancouver artists have made the medium and the terrain an analogue for reflexive subjectivity. As represented, it is a landscape steeped in a consciousness of discontinuity and difference, a place where the mediated nature of photography parallels the social shaping of history and identity that was modernism’s overarching goal.
Corin Sworn (im)possible 2008
Corin Sworn is a young Vancouver artist who continues to mine this territory. Her exhibition “Back in 5: Accessing the Back Story,” which closes this weekend, offers sculptural and photo-based works that stand as meditations on how fixed modernist models find new life as time travellers into an age of indeterminacy. Taking the modernist Irish designer and architect Eileen Grey as muse and model, Sworn works with an editioned side table by Grey as a centrepiece for an exhibition that fuses the casual, adaptive presence of modernist objects with the memory of their original high-order theoretical form and encompassing idealism. Paperback books, a walking cane and simple cork memo boards are put to use recalling a range of themes and artworks from behavioural psychology and epistemology to John McCracken and Donald Judd.
As Sworn says in an email, “Generally, I am interested in the ‘just past’ as a moment that we may feel we know but in fact is just out of reach. We face an alterity but don’t see it as one. I constantly return to this in my work as it affords the ability to display something that appears familiar as more foreign than assumed. I think being confronted with momentary lapses in understanding can drive people in the desire to know more.”
In E.G./J.D. two curtains on the north window of the gallery have been silkscreened with a personal letterhead design by Eileen Grey that links her initials together with those of her male pseudonym, Jean Desert. With the curtains, Sworn casts shadows of Grey’s professional self and personal secrecy into the gallery space and onto the other objects. It’s an elegiac light for a modernism more complicated than we remember, a modernism that continues to press a weight onto Vancouver’s here and now. (6-758 Alexander St, Vancouver BC)
Corin Sworn “Back in 5: Accessing the Back Story” 2008 Installation view
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