jake moore

What does it mean to be haunted by space? Imagine a spatial habitat so powerfully alien yet hauntingly familiar in resonance that, rather than lead to estrangement, it stakes a lasting claim upon us, summoning up the uncanny and capturing us in its web. Over long years, there are few exhibitions that evoked for me a prevailing sense of the uncanny and marked me long after. One was an exhibition of Rothko’s late paintings I experienced in NYC 20 years ago, where the atmosphere of the exhibition halls fairly crackled with the hair-raising, ice-cold buzz of the Bellevue hospital psychiatric ward—an unforgettable and unexpectedly exalting experience. Another was Sophie Jodoin’s inaugural exhibition at Battat Contemporary in Montreal last year, where her exotic headgear locked me claustrophobically inside with darkness all about. Now, jake moore essays a surpassingly strange environmental volume, a plenum of psychic atmospherics and an uncanny game of hopscotch, and I am haunted once again.

Entering the subterranean space of the Parisian Laundry, aka the Bunker, I felt like Alice descending the rabbit hole into an otherworldly reality. A wonderfully modelled, lifelike hare sat on the edge of a wood plinth, ready to spring away. Made from fabric and wax, it was mesmerizingly alert and frisky. Poised in front of a huge looking glass, I stood beside it and our reflections cast shadows. We were face to face and a strange morphing took place: I was the hare and the hare was me, and our respective body images were themselves blurred.

As I reluctantly left the hare behind, I registered the passage as umbilicus. It was lined with a reflective silver material that connected the dots to notions of fecundity and potential—and a truly Artaudian marriage of the physical and the spiritual.

In the principal space, a huge ovoid-shaped form (full of helium, I learned later) hovered near the ceiling like an emissary. Under a halo of blue light, dead white roses splayed out on the floor and a leash hanging from the floating ovoid, which rested on the floor, suggested that a tether with a mind at its end. A video projection on the upper wall of a flock of birds suggested that something like transcendence was still possible. Moore says that an earlier iteration of the “dirigible” was called “ornis,” the Latin term for bird.

In this haunting environmental volume, the idea of “pet” was a conflation of hare, passage, roses (the pet’s food, perhaps, or a tribute?), the huge feathered dirigible (as egg or entity or palpable icon of the uncanny) and the open window of the video. Moore achieved something remarkable here. On the one hand, she led us back to an old, animistic conception of the universe. On the other, she ushered us into a future undreamt of by Freud where thought is omnipotent, the imaginal omnivorous and rapture still possible. If moore successfully unveiled what Freud called “the secret nature of the uncanny,” and if the linguistic transition between das Heimliche (“homely”) into its polar opposite, das Unheimliche, was seamlessly bridged, then moore called forth a shadowy imago from within us; and like a memory suddenly unearthed from an archive still latent and true, she transfixed us with numinous supplementarity. Not surprisingly, after all, for moore’s primary sculptural medium is space.

Anthony Vidler, writing on the sculptor Antony Gormley’s Blind Light, 2007, argued that the sculptor had tested and contested the definitional limits of sculptural installation, effectively transferring the uncanny effects onto the nature of space itself. As Gormley did in Blind Light, so, too, does moore construct space itself as a living sculptural idiom.

Vidler held that Gormley opened up a space for the manifestation of the uncanny that was no longer marked by anxiety but by a focus of individuated and social projection beyond the confines of the real. Moore, like Gormley, like Artaud, takes us on a journey and presents us with an incarnation of our own nameless other in the form of the so-called “pet” that inhabits the Bunker of the Parisian Laundry, one that, even after the installation is removed, will presumably haunt that space for months and years to come. ❚

“pet” was exhibited at Parisian Laundry in Montreal from March 12 to April 10, 2010.

James D Campbell is a writer and curator in Montreal who contributes regularly to Border Crossings.