Review: Marcel Dzama: Behind Every Curtain

David Zwirner, New York February 17 - March 18, 2011 Review by Gabrielle Mose

Synaesthetics

While Cohene's earlier works sometimes made the spectator feel like a voyeur onto an intimate relationship, her new works draw us into the action, offering us a seat in the therapist's office. Comprised of two video installations depicting two different therapy sessions, "I Know You Know" takes psychoanalysis as the inspiration for its format, but the dialogue that unfolds between the therapist (or analyst) and patient (analysand) also concerns itself with one of psychoanalysis's fundamental questions: the problem of freedom-our desire for it, and the complicated, sometimes violent, repercussions of attaining and exercising it. In the first video, Hate You (2014), a female analyst appears on screen, reacting to and conversing with her female patient, who is represented only through the audio track provided by a pair of headphones. The second set of videos, That's Why We End (2012-14), show the same composite female analyst, this time treating a male patient who struggles to remember a recent dream. In both scenarios, the viewer is being asked to take the position of the analysand: to not just submerse ourselves into Cohene's cinematic narrative, but to relate to it as another composite character. Looking beyond her usual source materials (movies she saw or could have seen as a child), the new works draw from the catalogue of films mentioned in Gilles Deleuze's Cinema books from the mid-1980s, a list of more than 230 movies that the French theorist often wrote about from memory, sometimes mistaking details or recalling the wrong character or dialogue from his time in the movie house. Cohene immediately saw the links between Deleuze's idiosyncratic research process and the tenets of psychoanalysis, where the patient's memories and associations, however partial, can be interpreted as symptoms of larger, unconscious psychic processes. Deleuze's approach to film is in many ways mimicked by Cohene's, insisting that our interpretations of cinema are just as-or perhaps even more-significant than the script's original intent. Working in this way not only allowed Cohene a greater variety of found footage to work with, but also freed her to experiment with media outside of the screen, producing sculptures, a painting and even choreographing a dance piece performed throughout the run of the exhibition. "Trying things I've never done before, like making a painting, became a theme for this body of work without me realizing it," she says. Then, among the Hollywood starlets, and the references to French film theory and psychoanalysis, there are always elements of Cohene's installations that are distinctly personal. Her scents, for instance, are custom-made combinations based on her own smell memories. The nebulizer in Like, Like contains, among its ingredients, amber, bergamot, black pepper, Lenor "April Fresh" fabric softener, neroli and a smell derived from a tiny patch of Cohene's childhood security blanket. In You, Dear(2014), the enormous cluster of onyx grapes at Oakville Galleries, it is the Smell of Real Ass(TM)-a specialty scent Cohene learned of from a friend in Japan-that provides the acrid undertone to a combination of cumin, Cyprus, frankincense and aluminum. "Every detail has tobe accounted for," she says. "The goal is to overwhelm the viewer's senses in order to make sense of them.

Lenscraft: Jessica Eaton asks us to think about how we see

If Jessica Eaton has some trepidation about her success, it is with good reason. Studio time has been at a premium over the past two years, a period that has signalled a watershed moment in the 35-year-old photographer's career. Since graduating with a BFA from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2006, the Regina-born artist has gone on to show her work in exhibitions across North America, including the Québec Triennial 2011, Toronto's CONTACT Photography Festival and a solo show at New York's Higher Pictures gallery. But, in the last year, the demand for her photographs and her time has increased dramatically. This spring, for instance, Eaton was in France for the 27th International Festival of Fashion \& Photography in Hyères, where she took home the prestigious Photography Jury Grand Prize for her Cubes for Albers and Lewitt series (2010- ongoing). The summer saw her fly to Vancouver to install her work in Presentation House Gallery's critically acclaimed survey of Canadian photographers, "Phantasmagoria," then head to Toronto to participate in the "New Meditations" exhibition at Daniel Faria Gallery, and finally go on to LA to visit M+B, her newest dealer and the venue for one of her upcoming solo shows. In September, Eaton opened another solo show at Toronto's Clint Roenisch gallery before taking part in the main exhibition of Korea's Daegu Photo Biennale, curated by photo historian Charlotte Cotton and aptly titled "Photography is Magic!" As a way to try to get a handle on the elusive qualities of her photographs, most writing about Eaton's work inevitably turns to an explanation of her process. While the effects she achieves at first seem the product of Photoshop, they are in fact created within the mechanism of the camera, using large-format, four-by-five- or eight-by-ten-inch analogue film. The cfaal series is the result of several basic manipulations of the photographic process, such as multiple exposures and the use of lens filters. To achieve the nested cubes, for instance, Eaton uses one negative to photograph several cubes in succession. Some are painted a dark black, which reflects the least amount of light and therefore leaves space on the negative, while others are painted in shades of grey or even in a bright white, reflecting the greatest amount of light and maxing out the negative's ability to register images. By carefully tracking her exposures, Eaton builds up her compositions, testing the film's potential to hold information (in this case, light). She calls it a "strategy game" of trying to keep track of how previous exposures will be affected (or obliterated) by a future one. The premise is simple, but it yields a remarkable range of results. Eaton need only to invert a cube between exposures to shift the entire spatial arrangement, turning the familiar squares into overlapping diamonds, trapezoids and parallelograms. Eaton's finished objects seem restrained, even cool, in their careful execution, but in her studio, explaining her working methods and walking me through her discoveries, the artist is warm and talkative, handing me polarized lenses and 3-D glasses, plastic prisms and custom-made steel plates: the simple materials of her practice, with which she seems to work magic. She often sketches her ideas using computer software, then tests her experiments in-camera. The result entails dozens of "failed" images for every successful photograph that ends up printed and hanging on a gallery wall. Though Eaton is a self-described perfectionist, she is most excited by her accidental discoveries: the experiments that "go wrong," but in the process reveal something new about photography, light and vision that she could not have otherwise seen. She describes these images as "photographs I wasn't able to see before they existed.

Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins

Review of the exhibition 'Formulation Articulation Pixelation' at Georgia Schermann Projects (23 Oct.-8 Dec. 2012) presenting work by Toronto art duo Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins

Do curators need university curatorial programs?

How possible is it to train curators when their work is not exclusively based on craft? WhUe defining what an artist does is always tricky, we can mosdy agree that artists create artworks: they produce objects or experiences that are in some way distinct from commodities produced in the mass market. Pinning down what a curator does, though, is more complicated. Aside from exhibitions and the occasional catalogue, there are few tangible finished products that result from a curator's practice. The type of activities that can be classified as "curatorial" are also increasingly diverse. Organizing and mounting exhibitions, writing and publishing critical essays, programming screenings and performances, coordinating fundraisers, conducting studio visits and even speaking in public about their work and lobbying for changes in cultural policy are now all considered within the purview of a curatorial position. The Power Plant's Helena Reckitt says this diversification results from the boom in public interest in contemporary art that has occurred worldwide over the past 2$ years, which has prompted many contemporary galleries to emphasize authence interaction and participation, and adopt Kunsthalle-style institutional models that do not have a perma- nent coUection. As the Power Plant's senior cu- rator of programs, Reckitt works on all aspects of the gaUery's programs: from developing ex- hibitions and artists' projects, to devising talks, education series, film screenings and perform- ances, and co-editing the gallery's new con- temporary art magazine. In her words, "It's a broad job description that reflects the diversity of skills demanded by curatorial work today."2 This uncertainty about what it is to practice as a curator is not only reflected in the profession- al curator's ever-expanding job description, but is also evident in the wide array of pedagogical tools used by Toronto's university programs to try and teach the profession of curation. Clement Greenberg's claims not only ignore the ways economic and social capital influence an arts worker's access to jobs in arts organizations, but they abo overlook the fact that access to education continues to be crucial to gaining any kind of access to the art world.11 Despite the obvious nearsightedness of Greenberg's claims, the notion that curators should play professional roles in museums and galleries as mediators between art and its public has stuck. In fact, in Toronto the notion of the curator as professional has had a renaissance over the past five years thanks to the adoption of Richard Florida's theories about the importance of the Creative Class' contribution to the city's economy. Not only have Florida's ideas been taken up in public discussions about the future of Toronto's cultural landscape, but they have also been explicitly cited in the City's Cultural Renaissance program. Adopted in 2003, this program provided financial support to eight major cultural construction projects, including now-completed renovations at the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art GaUery of Ontario and ocad.12 Although these buddings have architectural importance, political scientist Barbara Jenkins argues that they are "better understood as both participants in, and reflections of, contemporary patterns of global economic competition and the changing role of culture in capitalist production."1

Don Blanche House of yes

Though it recalls the artistic hangouts of the 1960s and 1970s - such as the Maplewood Mudflats squats in North Vancouver, or Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov's Babyland retreat at Robert's Creek, BC - 1DoIi Blanche is less an idealistic hippie haven than an open-air artist-run centre. In an "office" space that Christine Swintak has carved out inside the Fraukenbarn, three large blackboards keep the residency organized, charting arrivals and departures, a list of programs and projects started on the property, and participants' material and equipment requests. Funding for materials comes largely from ah Ontario Arts Council grant and is given out on a first-come, first-served basis from two tin boxes on Swintak's desk. On labour Day weekend, Don Miller and Swintak present a public open house that marks the end of the residency. In a pithy turn of phrase that could easily work as Don Blanche's motto, Swintak says, "Our curatorial premise is 'yes.'