id’s its — Installations by Deirdre Logue

Human beings are physical objects.

The human body occupies and animates space.

What do you do with your body everyday?

Eat. Move stuff around. Drink. Work. Function. Fail. Desire. Walk. Sleep.

Logue is inclined to examine what we do with and how our bodies motivate us.

She performs voluntary physical tasks using her body as device and subject. She records her body’s motions and momentum on video and replays the actions in the public gallery space. The work is physically sculptural, visual and aural and viscerally atmospheric, dreamy and oral. Logue’s gestures, throwing, eating, hefting, caressing resonate in scale with the screens. Logue’s videos are a self-portrait and also “our” personal experienced ecstasy, pain, shame and lust; in Logue’s video mirror you see yourself, your self-consciousness self looking at yourself.

The gestures, habits, everything the body needs, the accidents, the eventualities of age, gendered subjectivities, and the inclination to live– caught in struggle Logue says “between comfort and trauma”.

Hobbs Obliques, 2012 [8 mins] Single channel video projection and laminate flooring (photo by Deirdre Logue) “Taking place at 3841 Hobbs Street in Victoria, BC, this work investigates duality, geometry and domestication. Hobbs Obliques is an immersive and mildly disorienting work, experienced from the perspective of the camera as it is pulled, at ankle level, on a three-legged dolly through the artist’s almost empty and mostly unfamiliar new home. As the camera collides with the domestic, the performercelebrates the unpredictable.” -Deirdre Logue

Velvet Crease, 2012 [2 mins. 23 sec.] Deirdre Logue Three channel video (photo by Garth Rankin). “The Velvet Crease takes place over three large screens representing the Id, Ego and Superego. Each channel is spinning a revision of Freuds’ psychic apparatus by placing, front and centre, not the artist’s genital anxieties and castrated woes but rather a refractive and empowered disco portrait of her mastery.”-Deirdre Logue

Dual Lunch, 2012 [11 mins. 44 sec.] Deirdre Logue Two channel video (photo by Garth Rankin). “The eating of the same meal is seen from 2 different yet relative camera perspectives. Like watching a grasshopper at the grass blade, each image is a distinct reflection on the labour of existence and the monotony of survival.”-Deirdre Logue

Opening: Friday, July 13, 7 p.m. Exhibition: July 13 to August 4, 2012 Open Space Artist Run Centre

a year’s worth of beer cans

I am on my knees, a penitent.

I view as if drunk with this solution from the past, intentional, willed, chosen until the place where I am now has become amended; and then I can leave it, and then it was.

Christine Clark  a year’s worth of beer cans at The Ministry of Casual Living March 2011; collected and converted aluminum beer cans cut into eucharist sized flakes.

monkey boutique

These monkeys, which are grown in wooly cradles, are pink, brown, small, thin, long, red, grey, and lumpy with bulges, holes, genitalia and other branching appendages.

Tracy Nelson has furnished a room with sock monkeys and dressed the furniture with blankets and sweaters. There is considerable activity here: each monkey doll has received the same careful attention with needle and thread, each has its own inked portrait and morphing video. You’ll notice: color, texture, scale, selection, multiplication, repetitions, deformations, hybridization…like this monkey’s mouth is a pocket, I can put my hand inside, it is red and deep, animal and sensual. This one looks like it has uncut toenails how gross. That monkey’s head is ears only. Another has the face of an eminently qualified district attorney.

Are they rebellious Monkey Kings wanting to take us on criminal journey? Or soft surrogates of comfort replacing all the absent mothers and lovers that have left us? Or is this a padded cell and these are my cellmates?

Maybe simplistic ancestors? Or evolved spawn? Nelson’s monkeys do seem interested in the diversity of the individual and the interaction between genetics, sexual selection and behavior. It is how the earth ended up so rich a mixture of life after all.

Tracey Nelson Walls of Intrigue and Cabinets of Curiosity May 28 Victoria BC

Architectural doppelgänger

Bamberton: Contested Landscapes 2010, Nathan and Cedric Bomford

The entrance to the Bamberton: Contested Landscapes exhibit is through a door that is usually boarded shut, once inside the gallery, the familiar expansive space is full to the ceiling with wood construction. Right away one feels Lilliputian in a Gulliver size fantasy dream home. Or BIG like Alice in an upelkuchen cake induced 12:1 scale 3d movie set.

The Bomfords’ construction, made from salvaged dimensional lumber, conflates rooms with furniture, interiors with exterior. The parts include: a cabin, picket fence, lookout tower, a boardroom, a pulpit, bleachers, silos, gangplanks, ladders, rails, cross and support beams. These mixed spaces compare to sites of work, home, playgrounds, fortifications, redneck huts, abandoned industrial sheds, courtrooms and carnivals.

Occupy the pulpit, from there one can observe and judge the Court of Bamberton and imagine the stories from a common place about a war between landowners and land-developers. Listen, the low-slung boardroom under the bleachers, resonates with the sinister plans of fools and diabolical men. Scramble up to the lookout tower pretend to be a guard watching other people. Practice your anti-social survival skills in a remote cabin in the woods. Stumble upon an intimate nook nested within a phallic silo. Even with this fluid shift-change between place/narrative the installation is stable in its insistence on debate and conversation to the differences in geographic-environmental perceptions and values between individuals and groups; human modification vs. natural environment, wilderness vs. built environment. Equally a cloud of dialogue on architecture and spectatorship (looking and receiving a look, positions of power) surrounds the structure.

Topophilia* is the affectionate bond joining a person and a place; topophobia is the fear of certain places; Nathan and Cedric Bomford with imagination and historical reference build a location somewhere in-between.

* The Poetics of Space. 1958. Gaston Bachelard