Local artist and dancer sets up shack for ominous new exhibit
The process of creating her latest exhibit felt like a master’s degree to Jen Mesch.
The local artist and dancer took film classes at Film and Video Arts Alberta, film studies courses at the University of Alberta and graphic design courses through Coursera to create Soft Red/ Hard White, the end result of her residency at Harcourt House.
The exhibit uses many artistic traditions — dance, video, graphic design, installation work — to craft a vague but ominous narrative, one she leaves deliberately open to interpretation but is centred around an image which fascinated her.
Mesch recalls driving down a dark prairie road and seeing a woman walking down its shoulder two summers ago.
“This is just a vision that I had that wasn’t real. It haunted me,” she said.
“There was that kind of fear that I was losing my mind … I actually turned back to see if I could see her again, but she wasn’t there.” It stuck with her.
Mesch is a dancer, by trade, and naturally shies away from defined narratives.
But there’s a skeleton of one nonetheless, the artist said, and she’s found it interesting how people fill in the gaps.
Some look at it through a supernatural lens, that the women walking through the exhibit’s various pieces are ghosts, while others see it as a commentary on the potential dangers women face while walking alone at night.
Still, others interpret it as a commentary on missing and murdered Indigenous women.
Perhaps the most impressive piece Soft Red/ Hard White’s puzzle is the full-scale grain bin the artist and her colleagues have set up in the gallery space. Last summer, Mesch went out to the rural home of Gerry Morita’s (Mile Zero Dance) parents and set about deconstructing the entire 20-feet long, eight-feet wide structure.
They trucked it back to Edmonton where it sat in Mesch’s studio until this weekend when she and her colleagues began rebuilding it. Aside from adding another layer to the exhibit’s imagery, the shack acts as a centrepiece, with the video, dance and visual pieces being set up in or around its wooden frame.
Soft Red/ Hard White features video work Mesch took while studying the field, which will be played on monitors set up in the small shack. Each video in the piece shows a different version of the exhibit’s core image.
Mesch, while studying graphic design, created books and embroidered fabric with vague, but related, images in an attempt to create “graphic scores” for the dancers in the piece.
There’s no real notation for dancers, the artist said. Musicians have a standard notation to tell them what to play, and experimental musicians have used graphic scores as a means to inspire musicians what to play without set notes or pitches associated, but dancers have no such tools.
“There’s a rich history of graphic scores for music, but dance doesn’t have a codified practical score system for recording choreography,” she said.
“It’s sort of passed down from generation to generation, from dancer to dancer, through demonstration and descriptions.”
Mesch has lined up musicians to play while the dancers perform, but, when there are no performances scheduled, a piece of sound art by Edmonton’s Scott Smallwood will play. Smallwood created the piece for the exhibit; it mixes ambient notes with nature sounds and steady human footsteps.
Soft Red/ Hard White runs until Nov. 25. Its opening performance and artist talk takes place Thursday (today) at Harcourt House starting at 7 p.m.
Future dance performances will take place Saturdays around noon until the exhibit closes.