To escape reality, circumvent it or challenge it, there are a thousand paths. Dancing and other collective rituals, as filmed by Jeremy Shaw, are one. Introspection exercises, such as those leading to Richard Purdy’s drawings, are another. A priori, there is little in common between the exhibitions of these two artists. However, both in the hyper-sophisticated video installation of one and in the DIY “dental primer” of the other, we find a healthy relationship with the body and a penchant for non-conformist practices.
A first and… a last?
The first exhibition that the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montreal (MAC) presents at the Darling Foundry does not open up any prospects. Rather than a token of renewal, it represents the last ten years of the state museum. At best, it could be considered as a farewell to John Zeppetelli, its director since 2013, who plays the role of commissioner here.
Phase Shifting Index, a seven-screen installation by Jeremy Shaw, was inaugurated a week before the announcement of the departure of the man who also serves as chief curator. The cinematographic nature of the work, its immersive scope, its musical content, its English title… These are characteristics of what John Zeppetelli often promoted, including when he worked at the DHC Foundation (now PHI).
Since the MAC exhibitions were moved to Place Ville Marie due to non-existent construction, the excessive presence of video installations has continued to be highlighted. The addition of the Darling Foundry changes nothing to this monoculture. Another bad habit: the great discretion of Quebec art.
Born in Vancouver and based in Berlin, Jeremy Shaw is not to be discredited. Winner of the Sobey Prize in 2016, participant in renowned European events (such as the Venice Biennale in 2017), he creates conceptual works of great content where the cerebral and the emotional come together.
Created in 2020 for the Pompidou center in Paris, Phase Shifting Index is a multisensory and dystopian installation, of such intensity that it is difficult to remain indifferent to it — you have to take off your shoes to experience it. A crescendoing story ends up making the narrative disparity of the seven videos a harmonious and hypnotic whole.
The work is beautifully complex. The artist features seven groups who practice a variety of movements (from meditation exercises to physical conditioning, including dance). Nothing is explicit, except that these are historical documents: grainy images, muddled sound, more or less retro clothing. Above all, a voice-over describes these gatherings as events of the past. However, the era is not that of the 1960s or 1980s as one would think. The narration occasionally specifies that it is about the XXIe or XIIe centuries.
Between its documentary nature and its futuristic subject, the work interweaves cognitive sciences, spiritual trances, alternative cultures… Jeremy Shaw underlines the relentlessness of crazy theories in opposing scientific truth. You have to understand English well to understand all the nuances, but Phase Shifting Index also speaks differently. As it is impossible to follow the seven screens at the same time, you have to choose, agree to take fragments here and there and assume that it is a question of protesting communities, on the path to transcendence. When the characters from the seven screens come together in a single choreography, then dissolve, it is both the extreme manifestation of ecstasy and the implosion of reality that these followers of strange rituals are fleeing.
Sound teeth
Richard Purdy does not play the role of distant observer. Drawings from the exhibition A dental primer, presented at the Bellemare Lambert galleries (at Belgo), come from the artist’s experiences. Of exploring one’s own teeth.
Each work has three elements, connected by an inverted c-shaped support — open to the left. The upper and lower parts are white pencil drawings on black paper. In the middle, the radio image of the artist’s mouth becomes the reference source.
Behind their medical appearance, the triptychs reveal themselves to be unrealistic, coming from the expression of the unconscious. In the publication that accompanies the exhibition, an author, Antoinette Lafarge, describes Richard Purdy as a “practicing pataphysician” because he rejects the real world and opens up hypothetical perspectives. This unclassifiable artist, for whom everything is possible, from stripped-down performance to rich esoteric iconography, this time unveils an intimate ensemble, linked to his health.
Caught with repeated tinnitus, Richard Purdy used it as a source of wealth. “In the absence of available medical avenues,” he writes, “I decided to explore my oral cavity through drawing. I noticed that when I touched different teeth with my tongue, the tinnitus sounds changed subtly. »
With his eyes closed, in deep interaction with his mouth and his inner world, he drew, tooth by tooth, what he heard. The varied result includes lines, strokes and spots and results in compositions that are sometimes grid-shaped, sometimes sparse.
The very personal escape from reality that Richard Purdy adopts has something of the meditative exercise, or second state, that others achieve through the repetition of grueling dance movements. A dental primer And Phase Shifting Index nevertheless differ on one crucial point: one describes an individual, benign imagination, and the other, collective and dangerous.