Monstra

Review: More and Less, Eyelevel Gallery, Halifax, NS, Canada

Robin Peck and Sophie Pilipczuk, 2006

"The only works of art America has given her are her plumbing and her (electrical wiring)" ((misquoting) Bearice Wood on Marcel Duchamp's Urinal of 1912.)

"(Monsters are) a powerfl expression of a human fear of the uncategorizable, of that which is betwixt and between" (Lucy Hughes-Hallett. Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions. 1990. pp. 146-147.)

(It is snowing for the first time this year. Small hard complex ice formations melt and disappear nearly instantly on contact with the glass window panes. We watch through separate windows. Do you remember the sticky end of summer?)

The back space of the Eyelevel Gallery glows fluorescent green and we are drawn in as bugs to a lamp. Michelle Allard’s green pipes lunge out from a side wall and then turn straight down to merge with boulder like forms. The color and the form of the sculpture as well as its awkward off-centre placement recall the work of minimalist Donald Judd, but the construction method does not:

The technique humorously recalls that of Frederic Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty: copper sheets molded over wooden forms. Allard’s sculpture glistens moistly at the edges, corners, joints and seams. At first glance, this seems to be a glossy painted surface, but it is actually a reflection from the transparent packing tape that has been used to attach the sheets of fluorescent green photo-copy paper, each molded and taped to the next.

Copper becomes superficially green with a verdigris patina characterized by “…historic piety and a longing for ruins” (Oswald Spengler. The Decline of the West. VI Music and Plastic: The Arts of Form, Patina. 1918 (Oxford, 1991) p.134.). Allard’s sheets of photo-copy paper are the opposite. Their color is not the consequence of an applied surface. They are solid color, monoliths of a sort. Allard’s “longing” is not for the past, but for a future time.

Michelle Allard’s sculpture is as attractive and repulsive as a boulder of kryptonite. Its acidic glowing green is appropriate to a toxic spill in Metropolis or Gotham City. The down turned pipes become gigantic insect knees with ankles trapped in vegetal pods that recall the organic and deadly Venus fly trap plant. The pipes become a monster’s tentacles.

We back away from the acid dreams that radiate from the work. Our “spidey senses” go on high alert as heads brush against one of the thousand threads Kate Terry has strung from evenly spaced rows of pins, above and through the same gallery space.

Terry has tied up a large portion of the architecture. Taut bright orange threads connect the gallery spaces from front to back. They call attention to, follow and then deviate from the curvilinear interior architectural detailing of the gallery. The rows of threads begin by following the architectural order, then twist and turn, spiralling like mutating strands of DNA and spread ray-like into a moiré patterned spider web of wiring. The orange color is transparent in places and where the threads overlap the color becomes progressively more opaque. It’s complex and delicate in contrast to the steady intensity of Allard’s green. Peacock blue thread completes the color triad, mutated primaries.

The threads also recall the harmonic strings of a musical instrument, perhaps a harp. This evokes sound and touch, with the architecture of the gallery becoming a fingerboard. We imagine Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo meeting with Fred Sandback in Heaven to play “string art” (symmography) games. Historically Terry’s work also recalls the nearly forgotten proto-psychedelic ambitions of Rayonism and Italian Futurism’s “lines of force” (Giacomo Balla, Lines of Force in Boccioni’s Fist, 1916-17). Yet still we expect Shelob. There seems danger in these overhead power lines.

As Terry’s spinning threads can be likened to the nervous system (electrical wiring) of the body and as Allard’s sculptural plumbing can be likened to the interior organs, so this exhibition has the characteristics of an autopsy, a dissection of the art body. (Consider conventional doublespeak: Cervical cancer euphemized into ‘something wrong with her plumbing” and a psychosis explained away as "bad wiring”. ) Terry's work then becomes the more cerebral, sparking thought, and Allard's becomes the more organic, evoking a physical or emotional response.

But is it the fluid of violent authority as imagined by Deleuze and Guattari, (Nomadology, The War Machine, 1986) that is being circulated through these paper pipes? And are the strictures of a similarly imagined art authority embodied within the threaded gallery architecture. It seems unlikely. The specificity of both works argues against too paranoid a social semiotic except as they are the characteristics of a sculptural monster.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s monster are social commentaries, representations of the horrifying aspects of their respective contemporary societies. (We can update both Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula: the glowing green of the Frankenstein monster-like The Hulk and the Draculean hemophage Ultraviolet. Both are comic book characters and the subjects of recent films.) Monsters are mearcstappa (O.E. “border-steppers”). They are hybrids: centaurs, gorgons and sphinxes, all mutation and adaptation, projections of the fear of the anomalous. Monsters are portents (from Latin monstros, monstrum, from the root of moneo, "to warn") of the evolving future.

The Eye Level exhibition is not so much a dissection as it is a projected construction of a new art body, a new monster. The frail paper and thread temporality of Allard and Terry’s work is a sign of discontent with present time. It is a “longing” (Spengler) for a future time in which the present monstrousness: the toxic fluorescent green paper and the unraveling threads of DNA, may find redemption and some material respite.

The sculpture of Michelle Allard and Kate Terry do not actually touch each other. Yet as the imagined circulatory and nervous systems of a projected new body of art they are necessarily conjoined by the viewer. We met at the gallery and have since been suspended as copulae between Allard's kryptonite-green plumbing and Terry's ultraviolet wiring. This text is an unwinding of that viscous conversation between the two works, directly maintained by the spectatorship of two authors.

Robin Peck and Sophie Pilipczuk 2006

This review of the two person exhibition 'More and Less' by Kate Terry and Michelle Allard was published in Espace-Sculpture, Winter 2007. 'More and Less' was exhibited at Eyelevel Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, 9 September - 21 October 2006.