Montreal Exhibitions

Robyn Cumming: Sunrise Portrait 5:48 a.m., 2010. C-print, edition of 5. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Push, Montreal.

Robyn Cumming: Frisette
Galerie Push
September 16 to October 16, 2010

Since 2002, Toronto-based photographer Robyn Cumming’s work has focused on the mundane or grimly humorous aspects of being human. Her work also displays an interest in identifying what makes people individuals — hobbies, physical characteristics or behaviours. The title of her first solo show at Galerie Push, Frisette, refers to an old-fashioned hairpiece once worn by women. For the photographer, the frisette is ornament and artefact, and is the sort of object that says something about the person who wears it even when they are not. Cumming corresponded with Magenta Magazine Online Executive Editor Bill Clarke about how Ren & Stimpy influenced her decision to pick up a camera, how her work has therapeutic value for some viewers, and the images she‘s produced for her upcoming exhibition.

BC: When did you first start taking photographs and why?

RC: Unfortunately, I don't have a romantic story about inheriting an old Rolleiflex from my grandfather when I was 13. But, I did have a pretty amazing photography teacher, Mr. Ainslie, in high school. He would always repeat this Ren & Stimpy quote from the episode where they're in a tent on another planet. There is a knock, and Ren tells Stimpy to "go answer de flap". Every time there was a knock at the classroom door, Mr. Ainslie would say "go answer de flap".

I wasn't passionate about photography, though. I could just do it reasonably well and it was fun. I had yet to equate photography with fine art. Photography was Vanity Fair or National Geographic. I understood it as editorial or journalistic. It wasn't until second-year university that I realized I could construct things and use the camera as a tool to document those constructions. That was a pretty special realization. I became really fascinated by what I could do with the medium.

BC: Much of your work, for me, seems to strike a balance between the dark and the comic. How would you characterize your work?

RC: I'm beginning to realize that everything I do, and everything I like, is always a little bit funny. If something isn't a little bit funny, I find it difficult to relate to. But, the really beautiful and excruciating things are a little bit of funny mixed with a little bit of something not-so-funny. That's almost what makes the funny…funny. Something can be so awful, horrific or disgusting that you have to laugh at how amazing it is. That is the type of stuff I really love. I suppose I cannot help but make things that hover in this sort of unsettling space.

BC: What is the most memorable reaction you've ever received about a piece of your work?

RC: Once, a woman purchased a piece only to tell me she had to hide it under her bed because she perceived its content as terrifying. She actually discussed it with her therapist, who decided she should use it as a sort of therapeutic device. Every morning she would stare at it and make peace with the subject matter. There is a strangeness to how my work is experienced by viewers. They are often simultaneously seduced and repelled.

BC: Can you tell us a bit about the photograph accompanying this Q&A and how it relates to other works in the show?

RC: About a year ago, I was watching a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode with friends. At one point during the episode, I asked a question that indicated I was not really visually differentiating between the various men in the show very well. They seemed like the same person to me. I realized that I tend to experience people in fragments. This has proved an ongoing issue with recognizing people I have met, or even recalling what a person actually looks like. I tend to only look at individual features intently, rather than focusing on the body or the face as whole. Weird, I know. My friends thought I was nuts. I bring this up in relation to the work because it’s got me thinking about how my work has evolved, and how the individual has become more and more transparent. My subjects were becoming objects. Perhaps this was mirroring the way I was experiencing people — as individual fragments, atomized. I became enamoured with this idea of the self as object, but also how this relates to our own materiality and the very notion of photography's ability to be able to document anybody accurately.

Then, I made this image. At 4:00 a.m., I took a wig to a beach and I strung it up and aimed it towards the water. So it's this fully formed wig watching the sunrise. There were all these early risers looking at me like I was nuts and a dog started barking at the hovering hair, blowing in the breeze. Although it describes my own experience, there are these other layers at work; this idea of taking the cliché of a sunrise photograph, but subverting and re-animating it. Presenting it in an oval to remind the viewer of classic modes of portrait presentation. Speaking to the idea of memory and how we often only have that fragmented souvenir... that dark hair flanked by water.

BC: Do you have some other ideas, themes or motifs in the work you’re pursuing currently?

RC: I have some other projects on the go, but they are still in that state where they could be ruined, easily, like a baby's soft spot.

More Montreal exhibitions

Alana Riley: Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Grey, 2009-10. Courtesy Joyce Yahouda Gallery, Montreal.

Painting Under Siege
Joyce Yahouda Gallery
To September 25, 2010

This past summer, several of Montreal’s galleries got together and mounted shows featuring new directions in Canadian painting under the banner of Peinture Extreme/Extreme Painting. The works on view at Joyce Yahouda push the idea of painting to the limits; in fact, there is little painting here, which is not surprising given the subtitle they’ve appended to the exhibition. Rather, there is video, sculpture and photography by artists such as Mathieu Beausejour, Adrian Norvid, Simon Bilodeau and Amelie Guerin. Several of the works assay the idea of ‘painterliness’ while others, such as a charming video by Alana Riley, in which a camera slowly tracks a woman from above mopping a floor and, in the process, changing a dull maroon stripe into a vibrant red one, take the gestures of painting in interesting directions.

Jenny Holzer: For Chicago, 2007 (detail). © Jenny Holzer/Artists Rights Society, New York. Photo: Attilio Maranzano

Jenny Holzer
DHC Art Foundation
To November 14, 2010

For more than 30 years, Holzer’s text-based works have critiqued political, social and personal realities. The exhibition at DHC draws on works from 1995 to the present, including her large silkscreen paintings based on declassified government documents about the war in Iraq. The centrepiece of the show, For Chicago, is a large, LED-screen on the floor of the gallery displaying her constantly pulsing, scrolling and seemingly cryptic, but pertinent texts.

Rick Leong: Hush, 2010. Oil on canvas. Courtesy Parisian Laundry, Montreal.

Michael Robinson & Rick Leong
Parisian Laundry
September 9 to October 9, 2010

Parisian Laundry kicks off their fall exhibition schedule with two special projects. For the first exhibition, the gallery has invited Montreal-based artist Michael A. Robinson to create an installation (titled Even When Bombs are Gone) for the gallery’s main space, which will consider the ‘formal aspects of bombings and their residue’. The second is by painter/gallery artist Rick Leong.