“Here Now or Nowhere”

Grande Prairie, Alberta. In January? It seemed like an unlikely place and time to encounter an innovative exhibition of temporary public art. Once there, however, skepticism evaporated into the chinook winds and wide blue sky. “Here Now Or Nowhere,” curated by Toronto artist Micah Lexier and presented by the Prairie Art Gallery, was engaging and thought provoking. It was also an outstanding example of how to sustain an exhibition program beyond the physical walls of the institution. (The roof of the Prairie Gallery collapsed two years ago; a new facility is slated to open in April. In the meantime, director/curator Robert Steven has overseen inventive ways to bring visual art to the community.) The show comprised video projections in storefront windows, a film montage in an old movie theatre, an installation of flickering light in an empty house, an interactive telephone work, three newspaper projects, a comic-format book of drawings, and a series of magazine ads in a hand-drawn font.

The artists represented— Edward Bader, Deb Davidovits, Michael Dumontier, Neil Goldberg, Adad Hannah, Kristan Horton, Michael Klein, Germaine Koh, Kelly Mark, Kim Moodie, Jan Peacock, Jon Sasaki, Erica Van Horn and Julie Voyce—are diverse in both practice and geographical location. Lexier, whose own art unites rigorous conceptualism with compelling visuals, assembled a coherent exhibition without dictating a curatorial theme or premise. In an impromptu interview, Lexier said very simply that he chose artists he thought would work well within the given context, which was mostly the modest retail environment in Grande Prairie’s downtown core. Indeed, their diverse undertakings spoke eloquently to each other, to the sites in which they were mounted, and to our shared humanity.

The video projections, two of them site-specific, four of them shifting location weekly through the run of the show, embrace a variety of themes and subjects, from the institutional experience of historical art to our benighted focus on the destination rather than the journey. At the same time, they all succeeded in expanding our awareness of the built environment in which they were shown, especially of low-rise, vernacular architecture and unprepossessing retail displays.

Jan Peacock’s site-specific Bystander, a performance for scanner realized here as a multichannel video installation in a jewellery store window, addressed the elegant form and romantic metaphors of the string of pearls displayed along with it. The artist’s hands are seen scrunching up small pieces of paper, on each of which is written fragments of phrases descriptive of, and addressed to, an unseen “you.” Eventually, the crumpled pearl-size pieces of paper were assembled into a kind of “necklace,” a “gift” mimicking the real thing. The intense and conflicted condition of love is revealed in the disjunct passages of text, some of them passionate praise, others oblique accusation. Contradiction is also seen in the process of making the necklace in which the poetry of love is crushed, almost nullified. The formal qualities of Peacock’s medium, in which actions take place directly on the scanner, are themselves compelling. Hands are lightly pressed against the glass, subtly distorting their form. It seemed that the uv film on the store window, through which we viewed the video monitors, also distorted light and colour, bestowing an accidental but appropriate opalescent sheen upon the performance.

Kristan Horton’s dvd, Cig2Coke2Tin2Coff2Milk, comprises six minutes of stop-motion animation in which the branded packages, tins and containers of the title are transformed into each other. For instance, Horton ingeniously takes apart an empty du Maurier cigarette package and produces a simulated Coke tin out of it. The herky-jerky nature of the stop-motion technique and the occasional intrusion of the artist’s hands create breaches in what might have been a magical illusion. Brechtian principles, such as the alienation effect, are relevant here. At the same time, they point up treacheries and inconsistencies in the creation of meaning. Horton has spoken about his interest in the process of assembling incoherent “debris” into coherent form—and then dissolving it into incoherence again. Here, the packaging and branding of cigarettes, coffee, and cola suggest the malleability of message and medium within the context of advertising and overconsumption— Freudian orality as exploited by Madison Avenue.

Kelly Mark’s Glow House was the most spectacular work in the show. Earlier incarnations had occurred in Winnipeg, Toronto and Birmingham, England; in Grande Prairie, Glow House was installed for three nights in a highly visible home located at the interface between the city’s downtown and residential districts. It reiterates and amplifies the common urban experience of walking along a nighttime street, past dark houses in which certain rooms are illuminated solely by the flickering blue light of a television set.

Mark mounted some three dozen tv sets inside an apparently empty house. Rather than tuning them all to the same television channel, as she had done previously, she set them up to play simultaneously the same dvd version of Run Lola Run. The effect was, as earlier, of a coordinated shifting of colour and light, as if the entire house were a single open space in which these elements were playing. In addition to invoking the queasy formal beauty of our shared television culture, the work also suggested a sense of the supernatural. This was not Mark’s intention, nor was it known to her that the house she chose for her installation was locally reputed to be haunted. It was as if not simply one building but an entire culture was also being haunted by a certain form of technology, prompting us to think about how lighted screens have become the portals between us and the vast worlds of knowledge and communication. And how, in contemporary popular culture, especially in horror films, all the flickering screens of the electronic age represent new conduits for haunting, demonic possession, untimely death. Lighted screens are our age’s sites of seductive endangerment, points of access for malign spirits determined to suck the life right out of us. Happily, Mark’s work, like others in this exuberant show, pour the life back in. ❚

“Here Now or Nowhere,” a temporary exhibition of public art curated by Micah Lexier and presented by the Prairie Art Gallery, took place in downtown Grande Prairie from January 6 to February 2, 2009.

Robin Laurence is a writer, curator and a Contributing Editor to Border Crossings from Vancouver.