Mark Igloliorte

Apparently benign and even unprepossessing upon first inspection, the modest-scale diptychs exhibited here harboured precipices that we were encouraged to leap over—into the untidy stuff of perception itself. In fact, they shed light not only on the dynamics of perception but also on empowered seeing.

Mark Igloliorte’s “Two Ways of Seeing” contained eight diptychs of observational paintings. These binary works betrayed subtle differences in perspective and field of view, encouraging and undermining at the same time a sort of double vision and binocular rivalry. Each pairing demonstrated a subtle shift in angle and cropping of the same subject. Sometimes the shift is so subtle that the differences read as imperceptible. In other pairs, the shift is more radical and trackable in scope. But reconciliation is often elusive and the implications for seeing profoundly multiple.

Diplopia, commonly known as double vision, refers to the simultaneous perception of two images of a single object. In Igloliorte’s work, images of ordinary, immediately recognizable things are displaced horizontally in relation to one another and inspire in us a sort of completion fever as we try to keep track of exactly what one image contains and what its neighbour does not. And it is as though the painter forces a sort of strabismus upon us, and we superimpose the two different images on each other (aptly referred to as “confusion” in the literature apropos the visual system and acquired strabismus).

Comparing the contents of the two panels, moving back and forth between them or simply staying put in front of them, I optically weighed the shift in perspective and variation in content and made a curious discovery. Seeking out all the commonalities and disparities, and with the prospect of a full resolution forever withheld, as a viewer I found I could make accommodation for difference. This work encourages a kind of visual plasticity most of us have long since lost in adulthood.

Igloliorte has arguably done for painting what a photographic artist like Denis Farley has done for photography: sought to test the epistemological underpinnings and definitional limits of contemporary painting practice while interrogating his viewers’ perceptual mores. Clearly, Igloliorte’s project is not just to offer up worthy painted integers of his world, however banal the actual objects depicted are, but to leap fearlessly and methodically into the largely still-uncharted territory of vision itself.

It is no exaggeration to suggest that he imports into his painting practice the issue of stereoscopy from the history of the photographic medium. He specifically brings back into the order of painting discourse not only binocular drawings but also 19th-century “stereo-views.”In these two copies of a given photograph were produced on a letter-sized oblong card and viewed through a hand-held viewer so that the binary image in question could be seen to true 3D effect. (The stereo-view is still a ubiquitous artifact at flea markets and antique stores worldwide. I collect them myself and spend many happy hours with the viewer.)

Igloliorte invokes both the stereo-view and the phenomenon of double vision as a useful means to displacing the viewer, withholding certainty subject to verification, and thus slowing down our perception and leavening it with a decidedly contemplative value. We must suture the contents of his panels together as though we were looking through a stereoscope and having two images become one in 3d. But, of course, there is no such instrument at hand. The eyes must perform all the necessary calisthenics on their own. These works demand real retinal rigour.

He says that his work as a painter foregrounds concerns of depiction: how perceptions are recreated upon or within surfaces. This is, as we have seen, undeniably true but not quite the whole story. In point of fact, he is being overly modest. In addition to his ongoing perceptual interrogation, there is also the issue of his paint. I would be remiss not to note the inordinately tasty nature of these pairings in terms of the paint and its application.

Igloliorte has often spoken of what he does as the gift of a shared experience in paint, and in the works exhibited now this was certainly true for all of us intoxicated with the matter of paint and excited by the phenomenology of perception. ❚

“Two Ways of Seeing” was exhibited at Galerie Donald Browne in Montreal from January 22 to March 5, 2011.

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