Catherine Telford-Keogh

A rhyme takes form in the mouth. Rhyming is a relationship of correspondence between the sounds of words. A rhyme is likeness orally materialized. In Catherine Telford- Keogh’s “Source Supplements,” on view at Evans Contemporary in Peterborough, Ontario, earlier this year, the mouth is a site where likenesses commingle, where mutable matter is chewed on and chewed together. The show engages alimentary function as metaphor and methodological approach, partially merging edible and toxic materials in looping, oblique rhymes.

The device of an oblique or slant rhyme, also known as a partial or imperfect rhyme, drifts in and out of the exhibition, much like the shifting scents of dish soap, liquid laundry detergent and surface cleaner emanating from three wallmounted, shallow, Plexiglas box sculptures. Telford-Keogh attributes the sources of these disinfectant fragrances, with attentive brand specificity, on her lengthy and idiosyncratic materials lists, which are dotted with partial rhymes such as “Bick’s® Dill Pickles,” “Froot Loops®,” “Forbo Flooring” or “cast ash tray.” Like the sculptures they describe, the lists present heavy, saturated blocks of material to be worked through. They contain objects lodged within other objects whose trademarked names impel comical contortions of the mouth when read aloud.

Telford-Keogh also includes bits of literally slanting, italic-set text in her sculptures. There are one- or two-letter traces of words (which might have once formed a brand name or catchphrase) set as loose cut-outs or adhered as vinyl stickers to the glass and Plexiglas surfaces of four floor-works. Other letters are incised and painted directly into these same surfaces or are embedded within the resin and expanding foam innards of the sculptures. In emphatic italics, the letters evoke the dialled-up happiness of an overzealous voice-over for a detergent ad, but instead stutter “er” or wail “wa a” or “A ay” in halting, guttural expressions. The oblique orientation of these text fragments exceeds the upright and vertical, careening into the horizontal and pressing downward with the force of gravity, like the squat, horizontal sculptures. Bounded on the sides by a surface covered in imitation-stone contact paper, these works appear at once as enormous ashtrays. At one foot deep, three and half feet in diameter, their enlarged scale frees them up to promiscuously recall low-lying tables as much as mouths or stomachs filled with contents in the acrid, hyperreal colours of product advertisement.

In “Source Supplements,” mouths, stomachs and ashtrays are receptacles that house and cultivate rhyming objects. Telford-Keogh further pursues the material-spatial construction of a related but distinct form of receptacle, which she calls the “space-saving” storage device. She uses such storage devices within her sculptures to orient and organize much of the resin-saturated content into rows and sections. In the intensely magenta-hued sculpture named The BaByliss series institutionalized all human functions in the form of low, flat intensities, Telford- Keogh arranges physically similar pickles and asparagus stalks in storage-container-formed rows. The pickles and asparagus formally echo one another while also resonating like bloated digits, escaped from the two-dimensional white-gloved cartoon hands pressing at the surface of nearby sister sculptures. These white gloves, like so much of the ephemera Telford-Keogh assembles in her work, inhabit an exaggeratedly cheerful guise, veiling an anxious desire to protect against the unclean.

In her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Ursula K Le Guin posits the food bag or storage device as the first tool used by prehistoric peoples, extending and externalizing the primary container of the stomach so that sustenance might be shared. Le Guin’s carrier bag presents an alternative and flexible material framework in contrast to the aggressive weapon of domination. In “Source Supplements,” Telford- Keogh explores the receptacle as structured through the ethos of capitalist, neo-liberal production and imbued with the violence of sanitation. Redesigned as the space-saving storage container, the receptacle is co-opted by the logic of hygiene in pursuit of economical, clean, ordered space. Telford- Keogh’s sculptures deftly gather and chew on these toxic containers, suggesting they cannot be easily digested. The work instead exults in the material pleasure of messy intermingling, while insistently pointing to the noxious structures of product consumption.

The flat, circular faces of Telford- Keogh’s smart and sensually beguiling floor sculptures gleam like ossified puddles pushed out of the earth, or like strange kiddie pools, abandoned and marinating with many seasons’ worth of collected debris. While such a sense of matter’s chance synthesis is at play, Telford-Keogh is also keenly particular about which objects become candidates for this mixing. Many of the materials she includes in the work are food items and cleaning solutions produced through mechanized, industrial processes and ubiquitously available at discount retailers. She preserves and submerges these products in a toxic bath of resin and dyed expanding foam—materials that function like plastic packaging to produce desire for the objects they encase and display. Set in proximity with each other, Telford-Keogh’s objects rhyme in an oblique object language of material companionship. Cheerios are nearly indistinguishable from scented beads, and a red Lego block engages in a reciprocally imitative relationship with Swedish Berries—the protrusions and hollows of each suggesting a latent interlocking that will never quite click. Such partial rhymes activate partial connections between the objects. In the show, this notion of partial connection does not equate to lesser connection. Rather, partial connections abound here in the way Donna Haraway describes how different species inflect one another at the molecular level: a co-involvement or “partial eating” between ostensibly separate bodies that results in “quite a lot of indigestion.” Telford-Keogh’s sculptures embody such partial eating, as a complex material eroticism in which distinct objects and bodies maintain their autonomy, but also come to inhabit the same space, come to inhabit one another. “Source Supplements” perversely and seductively opens the space of indigestion for viewing, laying bare the co-inhabited structures of consumer and consumed. ❚

“Source Supplements” was exhibited at Evans Contemporary, Peterborough, ON, from February 2 to February 24, 2018.

Shannon Garden-Smith is an artist based in Toronto.