The other works more directly hearken to Cronenberg by using film as their main medium. Candice Brei

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Instead of exhibiting works from Cronenberg himself, the exhibit consists of artists whose personal work has been influenced by the director. As the useful and refreshingly concise introduction to the show puts it, the title of the show has two meanings: first, Cronenberg s preoccupation with transformation, and second, how his work has in turn transformed the work of other artists.
Laurel Woodcock s piece, “walkthrough,” is a series of adhesive vinyl phrases stuck to the walls throughout the exhibition space, sets the tone nicely with phrases how to make coffee seemingly plucked from generic B-movie screenplays, such as DEADLY SERIOUS and, my favourite, The room goes totally silent. There s the feeling that something terrible is going to happen. Standing in a room full of Cronenberg-inspired works, it’s easy to get that delightfully tingling how to make coffee sensation of vague fear after reading that phrase, and it manages to make the standard modern art exhibition space (concrete floors, bare white walls) suddenly feel much more eerie.
The other works more directly hearken to Cronenberg by using film as their main medium. Candice Breitz s “Treatment” is an eight-minute, dual-screen video; the two films run simultaneously, how to make coffee but their projects are opposite each other in a small room, which makes it difficult to watch both at the same time. While one projection displays how to make coffee a scene from Cronenberg s early work The Brood (1979), the other shows voice actors recording how to make coffee lines in a sound studio. The audio is the same for both, unifying the separate images. Seeing this piece, I thought of the increasing tendency to consume how to make coffee entertainment on multiple screens, such as browsing the internet on a laptop or tablet while watching television, a practice often actively encouraged by TV channels with the advent of second screen features. how to make coffee Can our brains truly handle that kind of divided attention? Is Breitz encouraging us to try to watch both simultaneously, or forcing us to take in one at a time?
While the show can be explored as you please, I happened to view James Coupe s “Swarm” last, and it felt like a fitting end. A series of monitors, placed high enough so you have to actively look up to see them, show the very room you re standing in. Instead of showing you, they show people just like you people who look like average gallery-goers, slowly wandering through the room. The poles holding the monitors up are ringed with what look like cameras just about at eye level, with a bright green light making it seem as though they re switched on and recording you, so that you might just end up on the monitors later for future viewers to watch. We re watching the monitors, but they re watching us right back this an appropriate message given the pervasiveness of recording in society, from CCTV and the NSA to Vine and Snapchat.
I couldn t help but find it amusingly apt that one of the pieces, Jeremy Shaw s, wasn t working when I visited the exhibition due to a technical problem. As the show so well demonstrates, technology is everywhere but we re not very good at controlling it, despite being its creators.
10 October, 2013 0 Comments
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