Pepper’s Ghost brings together works by Connor Bokovay and Isabella Kressin, whose distinct practices converge through shared symbolic and material concerns, alternating between collaborative and individual works, yet seamlessly unfolding. There is a high level of theatricality in this exhibition… one might begin, almost without noticing, to read a story…
Miss Dr. Pepper is a brilliant but withdrawn thinker. Burdened by memories she cannot escape that echo through her solitude. On a cold night, she is visited by a spectral double of herself, a ghost born from remembrance & personalized goods;
The translucent silhouette alight
Carrying a set of beautiful 3D pressed powders in shiny boxes
Their reflective packaging never looks the same twice
They behave like living things
Just like glistening water
It’s so eventful
Opening one of the boxes
The Ghost offers Miss Dr. Pepper a bargain:
Freedom from pain through the erasure of sorrowful memory.
Prompted by a vague sense of urgency rather than by any definite resolution, Miss Dr. Pepper accepts. Her grief disappears, but so does her tenderness and devotion. As she moves through the world untroubled, those around her begin to mirror her condition, infected by an emotional vacancy.
Coined by John Henry Pepper, the Pepper’s Ghost effect is a 19th-century illusion in which a figure or object, hidden from the viewer, is reflected from a mirror onto a pane of glass, producing a spectral presence. This logic of apparition permeates the exhibition: in recurring silhouettes of female protagonists, in translucent materials, collages, and the eerie suspension of objects. Seeing two artists collaborate on a single work is a rare sight and a joy to witness. When meeting them, Bokovay and Kressin exchanged a piece of fur and colorful plastics, sometimes drawn from their personal archives, sometimes sourced from a Québécois secondhand store named Renaissance. These reworked materials, neither refined nor concealed, are presented as much as they were gathered. What might have been dismissed becomes charged anew. A kind of magic emerges in this accumulation; consumption operates as choreography rather than an endpoint. Objects persist as ghosts within circuits of exchange: hat pins, insects, feathers, rusted metal, window film, and tinsel coexist as cherished relics. In Kressin’s work Shimmering Information, the Sphinx is less of an ancient colossal monument than a Victorian Era apparition: born of early photography, a spectral presence. It is a figure produced through reflection, reproduction, circulation, and anachronism, made visible again and again. As in Pepper’s Ghost itself, what appears immaterial reveals the apparatus that sustains it, binding illusion to matter.
–Sophie Latouche
