Solemnity within, solemnity without
DARLING FOUNDRY EXHIBITIONS suit the space perfectly
Jo celyne Alloucherie’s contemplative photographs and videos make a solemn space of the Darling Foundry’s large gallery, while in an adjoining room Yann Pocreau turns depictions of actual solemn places — cathedrals — into stage settings.
If you’ve never visited the industrial building that was turned into galleries, studios and artists’ residences, now is the time to see how well two exhibitions concerned with light and shadow, time, place and architecture can fit into the massive structure that is the Darling Foundry.
Alloucherie makes full use of the Darling’s expansive two-storey brick-walled gallery. Along one wall hang eight vertical photographs of buildings that loom like monoliths over both sides of unseen city streets. The sky is framed between the rows of dark buildings.
“The sun is just setting and people are not yet home from work to turn on the lights,” Alloucherie said in an interview.
In Climates, a 2012 catalogue for an exhibition of images of icebergs, also photographed from a low angle, Alloucherie wrote that she stripped the icebergs of overly precise details not to create abstract images, but to “broaden their interpretation.”
Alloucherie looks for the strangeness that can turn the landscape into a mirror that reflects the intensity of psychic experience, Climates curator Diana Nemiroff wrote in the catalogue.
For me, the psychic experience at the Darling was solemnity, abetted by a row of plain white architectural forms in the shapes of windows and benches. The viewer can sit on the benches, walk in the space between them and the photographs or look through them from behind.
Walking along the line of forms creates a kind of ambulatory cinema, Alloucherie said.
Or a promenade along a row of sculptures. In Climates, Alloucherie wrote about the architectural forms that are often part of her exhibitions: “They take on the role of a screen that opens onto several dimensions and perspectives.”
On another wall of the Darling is the piece that gives its name to the exhibition. Dédale consists of three videos of alleyways that are projected side by side. They reveal what curator Sylvain Campeau describes as relics of urban and architectural organization.
“They are no longer used for garbage collection and electric wires hardly hang there anymore,” Campeau writes in the gallery guide.
The videos show different alleys, but all are quiet places where the natural world seems to be reasserting itself. There are puddles and weeds, birds and squirrels. Dogs trot through as intruders, and pedestrians pass on the streets in the background.
Alloucherie writes that she tries to create a feeling of belonging to a precise moment or place, mixed with the tension between vague memories of singular spaces and an awareness of the architecture that is shaped by light.
Light needs the obstacle of a voluminous object to create the shadows that are necessary for sculpture, Campeau writes. It is “on this signifying ground of shadow that sculpture and photograph come to meet.”
In Pocreau’s exhibition, Projections, light is not natural, but a stage light that turns religious architecture into a theatre of sublimation and illusion.
Pocreau shows stacks of 1930s postcards of Paris’s gothic churches that he sawed through to reveal a shaft of light. Another piece is a 16mm projector showing views of churches in which individual frames of the film have been scratched to create bright white splotches.
Gothic churches were built to bring in light to illuminate the space within, Pocreau said in an interview.
The largest piece is a photograph of a church interior pasted onto a wall that has been broken, seemingly by a sledgehammer, letting in rays of light.
The acts of cutting, scratching and breaking might
“The sun is setting and people are not yet home to turn on the lights.”
JOCELYNE ALLOUCHERIE
imply vandalism or ruins, but Pocreau said he is trying to embody the strong light that is projected through the openings and creates a stage setting.
The “stone” wall is a stage prop. Lying on the gallery floor under the gashes in the wall are chunks of drywall. The debris is the apparent source of the dust that filters through the beams of light.
“It’s like a light ray in your living room that seems to be alive,” Pocreau said. Jocelyne Alloucherie: Dédale and Yann Pocreau:
Projections continue to Dec. 8 at Darling Foundry, 745 Ottawa St. Alloucherie and Pocreau will talk about their exhibitions Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m. at the gallery. For more information, visit fonderiedarling.org. Tyson Parks inhabits the
role of artist-inventor with a project involving a 3D printer that he developed during a residency at Eastern Bloc.
Parks is showing Squint — named after the common practice of squinting through a camera viewfinder — at pfoac221, Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain’s project room in the Belgo building.
Squint is a 3D print of a camera distorted by a software logarithm, which is mounted on a tripod. The scene is projected on a video screen on which a visitor examining the piece is distorted — or abstracted — by the same logarithm, while the camera regains its original shape.
For Parks, it is the first in a series of “mnetractoscopes” (“a viewer who draws from memory”). The name recognizes the contributions of 19th-century inventors of photographic processes like Eadweard Muybridge, whose zoopraxiscope featured a sequence of photographic images on a cylinder that was rotated to suggest motion. Tyson Parks’s installation
Squint can be viewed on Saturdays until Dec. 21 at pfoac221, 372 Ste-Catherine St. W., Suite 221. For more information, visit pfoac.com.
Pop/folk figuration is how Patricia Pink, owner of Espace Pink, describes Kate Walker’s paintings in her exhibition Domestic Bliss.
Walker’s titles are sardonic and her narratives ambiguous in paintings in which the central character is often a woman trying to keep her sanity amid the banalities and endless responsibilities of family life.
Walker’s approach is that of a folk artist — her scenes are clearly painted in pastel colours, perspective is flattened and if a leg has to be shortened to fit the composition, so be it.
She is Norman Rockwell with a bite.
Kate Walker: Domestic Bliss
continues until Friday at Es- pace Pink, 1399 St-Jacques St. W. For more information: pinkespaceart.tumblr.com.