| Sylvia Safdie at Peak Gallery
Until Nov. 25,
23 Morrow Ave., Toronto;
416-537-8108
If Montreal-based artist Sylvia Safdie gets any more exquisite, she's
going to dematerialize. This latest exhibition of three video works,
four drawings, and one sculptural installation, is her strongest to
date, and it's her strongest to date despite the fact that it's so morphologically
ethereal you have to look hard to find it.
The largest, most theatrically imminent work in the exhibition is her
Act /Shadow, an exquisite dual-screen video projection, as large as
a movie screen on the gallery wall. In the video, a violinist -- who
is, in fact, the New York-based, New Music violinist-composer Malcolm
Goldstein -- performs stunning improvisations, albeit from somewhere
below the camera, so that only his bow can be seen, repeatedly thrust
up into the picture-plane.
The dual-ness of the dual-screen projection accommodates Safdie's having
composed the work as a simultaneous negative-positive projection, so
that on the left screen, Goldstein's bow is black against a white ground,
while on the right screen, it's a ghostly white bow moving through a
shadowy black ground. Seen together, they incarnate all the important
dualities: left-right, black-white, day-night, and, most profoundly,
what poet William Blake called a being's shadow and "emanation"
-- its positive or negative meaning in the world.
Safdie's beautiful little video work called Reed, is perhaps less spectacular
than Act/Shadow, but is no less thoughtful. Here, in this ostensibly
simple, extraordinarily clarified, 30-minute video loop, a dark stick
rises from the surface of a body of water, lifting from it at about
a 45 degree angle from the middle of the screen. Its reflection heads
off across the water beneath it, at a 45 degree angle down to the lower
right of the screen. So, there are two "lines" that meet at
the surface of the water. But because the upper "line" is
a solid stick, it doesn't move, and because the lower "line"
is only a reflection, it does: it ripples and shimmers in the living
water, undergoing the distortions and visual dislocations the solid
stick rises above. How simple this is as an arrangement! And how searching
and suggestive in the production of meaning! There isn't space here
to discuss either Safdie's installation called, simply, Line (a ribbon
of black granite gravel that stretches along the floor and stops at
the foot of a tilted mirror, in the fictive space of which the line
"continues"), or her four big graphite and oil drawings on
Mylar. Suffice it to say, everything is powerfully understated, brilliantly
subtle, and relentlessly memorable.
|
video still: Reed, 2006 (30 min loop)
| Reading Toronto
www.readingt.readingcities.com
Angle of Incident #29:
by Gary Michael Dault
This is a still from a video titled Reed by Montreal-based artist Sylvia
Safdie. The video is one of three new video works that, along with one
installation-scaled sculpture (Line) and four large new drawings on
Mylar, make up her current exhibition at Toronto’s Peak Gallery.
I wrote about the exhibition in The Globe & Mail last Saturday. I began the piece, rather jauntily, I thought, by stating that “If
Montreal-based artist Sylvia Safdie gets any more exquisite, she’s
going to dematerialize.” It’s possible that Safdie felt
this dandified assertion made her seem less present-to-the-world than
she actually is. I hope not. We emailed each other afterwards—we’ve
been friends for years—and the tremulous dematerialization was
never mentioned. I did tell her, in the email, however, that if I’d
had the space, I would have written a lot more about Reed—which
I love. |
So here is more. Reed is one of those delicious video-works in which
nothing much seems to be happening. And we all know how relentlessly
untrue that always turns out to be.
The 30 minute video loop shows a stick (or “reed” in the
water. The stick rises at—what? A thirty degree angle?—from
the surface of the water, which gently brims and flows past it (and
the camera) and beneath it. The stick, of course, generates a reflection,
which heads off across the water at the same angle, but in “negative
“ space, heading downwards—or rather across the water towards
the viewer.
So there are two “lines” that meet at the surface of the
water: two “lines” inhabiting two mediums—the upper
one being a line in air, the lower one, a line in water.
The upper line, the stick (or reed), stays still—because it is
a stick (or reed). The upper line doesn’t move, and the water
flows sweetly past it (or around it). The lower line is “in”
the water, is ”made” of water, and therefore—regardless
of its conventional ambitions as a reflection—moves. It ripples,
heaves, bobs and gurgles, and generally carries on like the morphologically
insubstantial thing it is. If the upper reed—the real one—is
a thinking reed, the lower reed—its reflection—is a feeling
reed. The upper one is Will. The lower one is Idea.
The dichotomies pile up. The fact that the real reed inhabits the upper
air of the screen allows it to function as a meaningful diagonal, as
a structural element (the beginnings of the architectural?)—as
something to depend on (or from). The fact that the fictive or illusory
reed inhabits (or is drawn across or projected upon) the watery lower
half of the screen, heads it towards some role as pure (and imperfect)
concept—the yearning, ineffectual idea of a diagonal, an essay
in attempted diagonality, in incompetent obliqueness.
The upper or real reed has graphic authority. The lower or fictive reed
incarnates tentativeness, imprecision, approximation, estimation, possibility;
it possesses a fleeting presentness.
Here’s the thing: is the upper reed some surrogate for us? For
our there-ness, our resoluteness, our touching determination to be real
(with attendant display)? Or is the wavering lower reed some surrogate
for us? For our bounded, limited, poignant yearning to be as solid and
as effectual as the “ideal” hard reed shooting up from the
water’s surface and arcing out of the picture-plane?
Which—to use Blakean terms—is shadow, and which is emanation?
Are we solid, musing upon poetic ethereality? Or are we insubstantial,
musing upon Platonic perfection sited up there in another realm?
The Sylvia Safdie exhibition continues at Peak Galley, 23 Morrow Avenue,
until November 25. 416-537-8108.
about the exhibition |
