The Distance Between You and Me: Remote Controls
Gonzalo Lebrija The Distance Between You and Me 15 2009 Film still Courtesy the artist and Galerie Laurent Godin Paris
While things like biennials and social media have done much to shrink distances between artists, curators and viewers, ideas of distance—emotional, physical and semiotic—have, arguably, never been so important to contemporary practices.
Vancouver Art Gallery senior curator Bruce Grenville airs the ironies and confluences of this phenomenon in “The Distance Between You and Me,” a new show of three moving-image works, and part of the gallery’s “Next” series, which highlights artists from the Pacific Rim.
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Isabelle Pauwels June 30 2009 Video still Courtesy the artist and Catriona Jeffries Gallery |
Vancouver is represented by Isabelle Pauwels, whose personal history—inevitably reflected in her art, though often not directly—is itself emblematic of Grenville’s theme: she is Belgian, and her extended family spent time in the former Belgian Congo. This latter detail provides the basis for such works as June 30, a projection installation combining images of her suburban Vancouver home with footage shot by her grandfather overseas.
LA-based artist Kerry Tribe’s two-channel video Here and Elsewhere—shown at Montreal’s DHC/ART in 2008—also pertains to family. Here, a father slyly quizzes his 10-year-old daughter on a range of existential concepts to which there are no easy answers. The daughter’s answers are consistently precocious: in response to the question, “Have you been alive for a short time or a long time?” she says, “Compared to some people, a short time; compared to some people, a long time.” As much as the two’s confab underlines the elusiveness of concrete truth in philosophy and aesthetics, it also creates an intimacy between them, and with their viewers.
Guadalajara artist Gonzalo Lebrija displays the title work, four 16-mm black-and-white films that play simultaneously and show Lebrija running from the camera in Yosemite and Joshua Tree National Parks. The simple poetry of Lebrija’s flight becomes a metaphor for art consumption—where, so often, meaning is made through an artist’s highly constructed, self-imposed remoteness.
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Kerry Tribe Here and Elsewhere 2002 Video still Courtesy the artist and 1301PE Los Angeles |
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