[The following notes were cooked up rather extemporaneously, by way of text for a catalogue for Marlene Bouchard’s 'Analog' show at the Slide Room Gallery (runs through December 12th) They represent a game correspondence with the works involved, as with Bouchard’s own sensibility as a curator. - J.L.]
Analog(ue) represents the most dramatic use so far of not only the space of the Slide Room Gallery but also its palpable contexts: the parochially-tongue-in-groove-panelled walls of a schoolroom that have become both an exhibition space and a lecture hall. Sculptural works share in common an idiomatic foregrounding of material – inflated fabric, clustered light bulbs, cast wax, spooling magnetic tape, heterogeneously homogenous flotsam and jetsam- with modes of presentation that sag, spill, lean, press, tangle, tip, amass and clump. Each piece subjects its motifs to multiplicity and difference, establishing within its formal economy a circuit of social implications.
Marcia Huyer’s massive, inflated sculpture sets this process in motion with the intrusive spread of the organization (a word my computer’s thesaurus has supplied in place of the rather overused ‘body’), and its many appendages. There is something gothic about its structure, that is to say the logic of a form whose interior has dictated the anomalous and irregular spread of its exterior. Here the inside has been turned out, and in its immediate presence we feel the suspension –like an intake of breath- between spaces, real and virtual.
Nearby, Rebekah Johnson’s arrangement of light bulbs and neon tubing clambers toward the window as if for a literal and figurative frame of reference. Rather than being forbiddingly fragile, the triangular spread of the bulbs reads as sociable, chattily populous in their invitation to counting sameness and difference. The fractious passing around of illumination suggests a party, reflecting our own celebratory, compulsive, delimiting addiction to light.
Megan Dickie’s cantilevered wax forms hover somewhere between confection and confession. The silhouettes of the artists’ body are aspirational, asserting her independence amid clouds of domesticity. The narrative is of the ‘outfit’, a suit of clothes that grants their wearer the momentary wholeness of a profile. Charged with both positive and negative spatial tension, they drift forward into tactility like cartoon tropes for figure and ground. Some are only drifts of parts like pattern remnants; one wonders if it is the clothes that are dreaming, of their ideal body.
A similar feeling of agglomeration governs Scott Evans’ miniature masses. Here a seemingly common currency of fancifully surreal forms in recreationally psychedelic colours is undermined by the facture of the materials themselves: sponginess, stained-ness, absorbency, frangibility…the fragile pomp of the presentations masks the intense passivity of their culture. Dynamically credulous, they assemble a richly germy infancy.
Tyler Hodgins’ floor pieces are lengths of ‘blank time’, empty sixty and ninety-minute audiotape sandwiched between slabs of tempered glass. The contrast between the curls of tape as loose and wayward or pressed and graphically liquid is vaguely uncanny: from loose time to gripped viscera. The ‘tape presses’ succinctly sum a relationship suggested throughout the exhibition: the nostalgic fetish of the analog...The wish or apprehension that forms might animate themselves, in their seeming hypostasis mirroring our own life-force. This shows up in sharp relief against the backdrop of digital relations, as a beauty of duress, of the pain and the ticklish humour of metamorphosis.
