Kelly Mark

You couldn’t help bump­ing into work by Kelly Mark in Toronto this spring. Even non-gallery goers got a taste of Canada’s hardest­-working artist, as the Power Plant and Images Festival co-presented Glow House #3, an off-site instal­lation in a three-storey house on Palmerston Boulevard, an upper-­middle-class residential street in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood. When the sun went down, Glow House #3 sprang to life, as an eerie light emanated from the uncur­tained windows of the spacious home. A master of finding the art under our noses, Mark had long been attracted to the nighttime spectacle of windows illuminated by the flickering light thrown off by TV sets. In “Glow House,” seen in two previous incarnations in Winnipeg and Glasgow, she ap­plies her trademark strategy of taking an everyday item and multiplying/framing it, as she has done with knives, salt shak­ers, subway transfers, rusted pipe and paper napkins. For Glow House #3 Mark installed 50 tele­vision sets throughout the rooms on the street side of the house, each set tuned to the same sta­tion. From the street, only the light of the sets was visible, flick­ering and changing colour as the scenes change. Modulating tones of blue, explosions of orange, red and pink, and sudden flashes of brilliant white illuminated the interior, which, from a certain viewpoint on the street, ap­peared hollow, as if the walls had been dissolved by an alien force within. On a more prosaic level, the commercials rocked, popping in the dark like fireworks, under­lining the attention-grabbing tac­tics of the advertising world. The effect was TV at its most elemen­tally mesmerizing-even after you’d figured out the rhythm of the lights, Glow House remained magnetic.

At YYZ, Mark’s horror/suspense/romance/porn/kung-fu installation offered a more intimate variation on this theme. Fifteen monitors installed in a ring on the floor displayed video footage of the reflection cast on a wall by films of each of the genres named in the title, shown at YYZ one genre per day. In kung-fu, TV’s cool blue was punctuated by sudden rapid bursts and swells, as might be expected from an action-packed form. The gallery attendant re­ported that romance was the slowest. The installation, set alone in a darkened, curtained-­off room, had the atmosphere of a futuristic shrine or control room where the true seat of power is shown to be what we most suspected and feared-the machine.

Wynick/Tuck Gallery exhibited three groups of work that are on­going series for Mark. Hiccup #3, Houston, 2004, is a two-channel VD that carries on the strategy first presented in Hiccup #l of 2000, in which we see footage of the artist sitting on the steps of a public building, engaging in nondescript activities such as drinking a cup of coffee, having a smoke, generally just hanging out. At first glance the two images in Hiccup #3 appear identical, but then a passerby appears in one but not the other, and we real­ize that while the artist’s actions are the same, the people moving around her don’t correspond. Initially, you suspect some deft digital manipulation; however, closer inspection reveals very slight variations in Mark’s move­ments, and eventually it be­comes evident that these are, in fact, two separate events—the same, but different. The artist pulled off the illusion by fol­lowing an audio track of timed instructions that synchronized her every action so that each day her performance was the same. By videotaping the performance over several days and showing them together, Mark creates both a documentation of the real-time performance and a new work by virtue of the multiple screens and weird déjà vu quality that catches the viewer by surprise.

Confounding expectations is a speciality of Mark’s and re-emerges in her “Graphite Drawings” series, which, at first glance, appears to be sculptures. In fact, the artist “draws” on pre­cut wooden forms with graph­ite, transforming the original, dull wood grain into deep black surfaces that shimmer as light careens off pencil marks caress­ing the planes in all directions. At Wynick/Tuck five generic vase forms on plinths, three plates on a shelf and a large wooden panel entitled Drawing of a Study of a Masterpiece undergo this meta­morphosis to become pieces that combine the aesthetic of Minimalism with endurance­-based art practice, in which process is an integral part of the product.

Also on view at Wynick/Tuck were Mark’s latest Letraset draw­ings, a series in which this now obsolete graphic tool is subvert­ed/freed from its text-based role and put to work as a drawing tool that is used to build fanci­ful, densely packed designs that are abstract, but contain sugges­tions of machines and creatures in motion. In Letraset Drawing #1, the drawing prances along train-like over five framed panels extending 17-plus feet in total, but cheekily occupying only the horizontal centre of each panel, thus forcing the viewer to come in closer. There’s a child­like playfulness about these images, as if the text were told to take a day off from meaning something, and just have fun. Although clearly very labour­intensive (imagine sticking down all those tiny bits!), the Letraset drawings strike a lighter note and, while pleasing, don’t reso­nate for as long as Mark’s more visually sparse work.

The common element in all these pieces is time, both the artist’s and the viewer’s. A key factor in Mark’s art is her com­mitment, over the long haul, to her ideas and the work it takes to execute them. Mark’s pieces don’t hit in a flash. You have to look long enough to appreciate what’s going on—exactly what we busy North Americans tend not to do, as we hurry past life on our way to work, home, fun. Mark’s genius is to frame what we’re missing with her dead-on artist’s eye, and we benefit by taking a peek through her lens once in a while. ■

Kelly Mark’s Glow House #3 appeared at 323 Palmerston Boulevard in Toronto from April 7 to 23, 2005, from dusk to dawn. horror/suspense/romance/porn/kung-fu exhibited at yyz Artists’ Outlet, Toronto, from April 9 to May 21, 2005. “New Graphite Drawings, Letraset Drawings and Video” exhibited at Wynick/Tuck Gallery in Toronto from April 2 to 30,2005.

Barbara Isherwood is a Toronto­-based writer specializing in visual arts and contemporary craft.