Steele + Tomczak

Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak are best known for the video collaboration they have been involved in since 1983, but recently their media production is notably enlarged. We see this development in “Enregistrements,” an important five-year survey at the Wharf, Centre d’art contemporain de Basse-Normandie in Caen, France, parts of which had been glimpsed at Dazibao in Montreal, 2008, and last year at Diaz Contemporary in Toronto.

Three suites from their ongoing photo/text series, “Bump in the night,” form the centerpiece at the Wharf, beautifully installed in tall central galleries curving gently downwards from the foyer. The large-format, steel-mounted photographs show teens from Stuttgart, Caen and Toronto, their backs to the camera as they pause at the school door—a threshold. A series of statements in white is overlaid on each image, answers to questions framed by the artists but posed by friends as the school year ends. Inserted into the queries about favourite colours and funny memories are more revealing ones: What is your greatest fear? Tell me about a nightmare. Perhaps not surprisingly, the answers tend to repeat; many are looking forward to the holidays; they are afraid of dying or that they won’t do well in life, and they fear for the health and safety of their families. Nearly everyone likes blue or green.

“Facing Forward,” a related series in similar format, offers the responses of six successful business executives in Stuttgart to similar questions, the text superimposed on entrances to gleaming financial towers, their glass walls sparkling with reflections. Words and image are of equal value, both visually and intentionally. This time, comments are “off the record,” the speakers unseen and unidentified. They are asked what they wear to work, how they keep fit—but also about their regrets, whether their current life is what they had expected at the age of 21. What are their fears? What constitutes failure? There is no desire here to expose or embarrass. Nonetheless, it is clear that the speakers are reticent.

Video installations appear in two side galleries. Speak City, first shown in September 2009 at the Toronto International Film Festival, is a subtle and engaging 30-minute portrait of the artists’ home turf, a sequence of paired street signs recorded over a year and a half in each of the 140 “official” neighbourhoods of Toronto. Steele + Tomczak worked from official documents, choosing characteristic junctions for each neighbourhood in turn. The roar of traffic or suburban murmurs play against streetscapes and the changing seasons as the pairs of signs merge, then cut to the next unit in an ongoing flow. The pace is leisurely, the views engaging: battered old black-and-white steel or stark blue sans serif, a surprising variety of colours and formats. Here is The Bridle Path at Don Mills Rd, Civic Centre Ct. and The West Mall, Croatia St. and Brock Av., L’Estrange Pl. and Baby Point Cres. We find Stella St. and Rustic Rd, or Caribou Rd crossing Otter Cr, and Stillwater Cres. meeting Hidden Trail. There are forests of wires and notices: no parking, no trucks, no left turns, no standing and, for some, qualifying phrases with the street names: West Hill, Highland Creek, East York, Cabbagetown Heritage Conservation District. The words are uninflected, but a quiet sense of place takes hold, fond homage to a sprawling urban conglomerate, its lingering past revealed in these tokens of settlement and instruction.

The second gallery shows projections on three walls, Becoming V…, Becoming B…, Becoming T…, that is, views from Vancouver, Berlin and Toronto with striking juxtapositions of brash new buildings abutting traditional clusters of homes and offices. While the artists’ intentions are identical in each case, effects are strikingly diverse: the new additions play out very differently against the original city fabric now in transition. In each case, sequences of ha-ha riddles are inserted like inter-titles—jokes about economists for Vancouver, philosophers for Berlin and town planners for Toronto, on the assumption that these issues are most characteristic—or revealing—for each city. Anyone knowing the sites in question will enjoy the work’s wry humour. The trilogy will be part of the “Empire of Dreams” exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto, June–August 2010.

The exhibition is completed by three miniatures in the foyer area: tiny wall-hanging digital screens with brief, looped video images: Make Love, Not War, 2003, showing luscious lilies and aggressive, feeding ants, then Free Speech, 2007, and May ’68, 2009. A text fragment crawls slowly across the image as both commentary and directive, a clear politic for conscious thought and considered action.

The social environment is a recurrent theme for Steele + Tomczak. In earlier works, the human body was central, enacted in and acted upon by social forces. The family was considered, or work and government functions. In “Enregistrements,” we see evidence of their concern for the body politic, with the city as the centre of attention and concern. The passage of time, an unspoken constant for video recording, is noted here in questions and responses for teenagers ending a school year, or executives in a changing business world affecting us all. Cultural values are increasingly interconnected worldwide and open to both theoretical and practical scrutiny.

Steele + Tomczak have shown previously in France, most notably at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris in 2003, and at the Wharf in 2002. Through their hosting of Tranz<>Tech international film/video festivals, 2001–2003, and an ongoing British-Canadian video exchange, they have been in regular contact with artist and scholar Catherine Elwes and her colleagues in the United Kingdom. They were artists in residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany, in 2008–09. While the moving image continues to be fundamental for Steele + Tomczak, their renewed interest in photography, and such recent public sculptures as the LED light installation Watertable in downtown Toronto, are impressive evidence of the pair’s new vision, new energy, broadened horizons. ❚

“Enregistrements” was exhibited at the Wharf, Centre d’art contemporain de Basse-Normandie in Caen, France, from January 25 to March 13, 2010.

Peggy Gale is an independent curator and critic based in Toronto, specializing in time-related and media works by contemporary artists. She was curator of Tout le temps/Every Time for La Biennale de Montréal 2000, and editor for Artists Talk 1969-1977, from The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, 2004, among many other publications.