“Screen and Decor”

That the layout of “Screen and Décor” at Justina M. Barnicke Gallery is the product of the joint efforts of curator Rosemary Heather, artist Rodney LaTourelle and exhibition designer Louise Witthöft should come as no surprise. Key to grasping the exhibition’s thematic presentation is the recognition of the collaborative turn in contemporary image production. As our gestures, behaviours and thoughts are increasingly mediated by a reliance on “the screen”—most ubiquitously those of the iPod/Pad/Phone—the files that we access through these devices are commonly the over-handled, poor, degraded, fifth-generation cousins of a now dead link. The ease and speed at which these low-res images can be transmitted (in service of both radical and reactionary ends) allows a multitude of authors/users the opportunity to modify, compress and extract, each time leaving a cloud of virtual data strewn across the desktop. “Screen and Décor” attempts to organize this noisy, visual debris into pattern while laying claim to the screen as image source.

The simplest form of pattern is the grid, and LaTourelle and Witthöft’s effort amounts to the installation of a series of translucent, coloured Plexiglas panels arranged into a grid-like formation vertically suspended throughout the exhibition. The coloured “screens” not only insist on their presence by dividing the gallery in such a way that you must constantly reorient yourself in order to navigate between works, but visually, too, they assert their inescapability, as screen after screen is animated by your gaze, haunted by the coloured copy of an original across the room. This spatial mediation is a striking addition to the works presented, and although no digital screens are included, the panels are easily substituted in their place as they operate in a similar manner, incessantly repeating a loop of competing static images, while adhering to the grid’s rigid structure.

Once a strategy around the Plexi had been devised, the work of the six artists included in the exhibition certainly speaks to a life lived “on the grid.” Danish artist Kristine Roepstorff’s Gardeners, 2010, and Slough off Gardens I, 2010, are wall-height collages to the scale of a bedsheet or living room curtain, upon which she loosely tacks fabric, photocopies and foil with various other collected detritus to form densely layered, hanging tapestries. The equal treatment of found images and materials, regardless of source, neutralizes the original meaning/function of each, destabilizing any assigned history so that each may now assume a history that is new, more mobile and easily transmitted.

To similar ends, Berhard Kahrmann’s laser print facsimiles of re-photographed photos compromise the rigidity of the static image. Two Doors, 2013, applied directly to the wall, extends the gallery space out toward the image of the eponymous two doors. Installed across one corner, the lower of the two is placed directly in front of a now covered-over window. The layered photos (and wall) are cut along the edge of the door, cracking it open just enough to reveal a sliver of outside, natural light. The other door, still firmly fixed in its position as an image, exists only as a potential door—unlikely to be opened—waiting to be re-activated by a future virtual user.

Because the screen is now used equally for both the access and capture of digital images, its position as image source is one that is difficult to fix. This is made evident in the work of Simone Gilges, whose subjects defy easy categorization. Presented as framed manipulations of fabrics—batik on cotton chiffon and silk, varnish on synthetics—and photo prints, her investigation of the textural quality of images is visible in her revisitation of the motif of tropical foliage, included in three of her six works. Though Gilges’s technique varies (one an analogue photograph, another batiked graffiti applied to ruched cotton chiffon and the last a photo print on fabric), each iteration acknowledges a related, though unavailable original source, constructing a fiction in its place to be played off against the multitude of other possible virtual representations waiting to be authored by some other user in the network.

The ubiquity of the screen in contemporary life has made its status as the de facto mediator of human experience nearly insurmountable. In expanding the scope of the search for evidence of digital media’s effects on contemporary artistic practice beyond only digital artworks, Screen and Décor makes a compelling case against the screen by avoiding its presence altogether in the exhibition. By reducing the screen’s reach to its geometric dimensions, the likelihood of being captured in it is undermined and its function becomes one of simple data organization. From there, the screen as image source can be layered upon itself, allowing room for a collaborative, digital pattern to emerge; one that is mobile and shifting each time it is refreshed. ❚

“Screen and Décor” was exhibited at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto, from June 8 to August 17, 2013.

Aryen Hoekstra is an artist currently based in Toronto.