Mother Knows Best

Immediately on entering the gallery of the Nickle Art Museum, the viewer is welcomed by four composite images (digital photo-based collages) of women performing symbolic rituals. These women, although dressed like stereotypical “housewives” and set in serene landscapes, are engaged in unusual activities such as brandishing a sword or serving a skull on a plate. They are surrounded by a puzzling array of disparate elements. The attributes of kitchen activities—recipes, appliances and baked goods—are juxtaposed with icons of Celtic origin—deities and other stone-carved symbols.

Following that first encounter, the viewer enters a darkened room and comes upon a row of four, sparkling white, enamel cooking stoves, neatly aligned along one of the walls. Mesmerizing flames are burning in each oven; the artist has embedded monitors in the stoves to simulate burning hearths. Looking away from the flames, the viewer sees, in the middle of the room, a table atop a piece of 1940s linoleum flooring. On the table are two “virtual” place-settings also constructed from embedded video monitors, portraying the cycle of food preparation and consumption. The table is paired with a picture window displaying ever-changing videotaped views of sacred Celtic sites combined with Celtic artefacts, the most intriguing one being a statuette of a fierce and assertive woman opening her vagina (a sheela-na-gig). These videotaped views, along with images of forests and wildlife, are accompanied by a soundtrack of women’s voices singing Celtic work songs. On the wall opposite the four stoves, four 1940s housedresses, with aprons, hang in tidy order. In front of them, four ceramic bowls, reminiscent of Celtic domestic ware, contain food representing the four elements: earth, fire, air and water. On the remaining wall, an old radio is set on a cabinet. A soundtrack plays an overlay of recipes, home journal advertisements and housekeeping hints.

Sandra Vida’s “Kitchen Freedom” was presented as part of “Series,” a new program of exhibitions curated by Christine Sowiak in response to the dynamic and accomplished community of artists living and working in Calgary. Vida’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, but there is no doubt that she has taken to heart her responsibility as a Calgary artist and has been a driving force in the community for close to 20 years. She has facilitated a wide variety of projects, many of them associated with the artist-run network.

Sandra Vida’s work and life are tightly interwoven, and this entanglement is used as a form of art-making and art analysis. Her work, whatever form it takes, explores the means women and other marginalized groups use to find alternative systems of validation. These strategies include ways of working, such as photo-based collage, performance, video and installation. They also seem to encourage recurring themes such as “the housewives.” Sandra Vida’s most recent installation, “Kitchen Freedom,” is an example of many strategies used in previous works. The concepts of “preposterous history,” “remediation” and “possible worlds” are helpful in understanding these strategies.

Mieke Bal, a feminist cultural theorist, develops the concept of “preposterous history” in her recent book Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. She explains that in the traditional view, past art is always seen as a source, but in fact, it is how we deal with the past today that becomes our way of constructing history. By reversing what came chronologically first, “pre,” as an after-effect of “post,” “preposterous history” becomes a strategy of re-visioning histories. Or stated differently, it is art now that illuminates the past. Consequently, quoting the past can be the embodiment of a new historical agency. Quotes become shifters, allowing the presence of multiple realities. This notion is of particular interest in understanding Vida’s recent interest in her Scottish Celtic heritage.

The artist explains that in “Kitchen Freedom,” “40s and 50s kitchen objects and images of ‘typical housewives’ are combined with ‘subversive’ Celtic images to suggest contradictory ancient associations—Woman as Leader, Sorceress, Healer, Warrior.” At the same time, the installation is an homage to women of the present like Vida’s mother, Betty Gibb, and her aunt Nan Innes. Betty Gibb worked for the Canadian Western Natural Gas Company for several years when the “home service department” ran a cooking school, and distributed recipes and household hints. They also produced a radio program, hosted by Betty Gibb, titled “The Voice that Brings You Kitchen Freedom.” As mentioned previously, Vida’s work and life are tightly interwoven and this historical entanglement is a form of art analysis. “Kitchen Freedom” is an active intervention in the material handed down. It theorizes history as an alternative, an integrative cultural agency where women of the past and present are joining forces, cooking up disingenuous feminist tales.

The concept of “remediation” is defined as media paraphrasing each other. It is used by, among others, Katherine Hayles in her analysis of hypertext and artists’ books as rhetorical forms celebrating transgression through the multiplication of reading paths (Linking Bodies: Hypertext Fiction in Print and New Media, forthcoming). The multiplication of reading paths implies that everything could have been different and already is. From this definition, I suggest that many installations including “Kitchen Freedom” are “remediated” spaces. I also like to think that many artists’ books are installations performing “bookishness” or that many installations are spacio-temporal artists’ books. In “Kitchen Freedom” the various elements do paraphrase each other, resonating among themselves. Video and audio tapes, along with digital, photo-based collages, are juxtaposed with “real” objects (stoves, radio, dresses, table) to form a “possible world,” a world inbetween, made of simulated window watching, cooking and eating. The concept of “possible worlds,” an idea developed by G.W Leibniz (1646-1716), informs the logic of ramification. It claims that what passes as the “real world” is always only a “possible world.” Relationships are complex and mutable because they are enfolded, entrapped, entangled and engaged with many other associations. It is easy to understand why the German philosopher and mathematician has many recent followers, including French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. “Kitchen Freedom” opens the door to a myriad of “possible worlds.”

Since the physical being of most readers cannot be directly engaged while reading a text, we enter as a compensation into a discussion with thinkers who are also not present. Many installations are no longer articulated as responsive to the place where the work appears (site-specificity), because they are more concerned with the construction of alternative identities. Perhaps the richness and versatility of concepts like “preposterous history,” “remediation” and “possible worlds” can help us make sense of how these identities can function. ■

“Kitchen Freedom” was on exhibition at the Nickle Art Museum, Calgary, from January 21 to March 4, 2000.

Mireille Perron is an interdisciplinary artist. Born in Montréal, she now lives and works in Calgary. She is Academic Head of Liberal Studies at the Alberta College of Arts and Design.