Artists: Alan Belcher, Simon Belleau, Julian Garcia, Kelly Jazvac, Puppies Puppies, UV Production House, Andrew Norman Wilson
Exhibition title: Vie D’ange
Venue: VIE D’ANGE, Montréal, Canada
Date: October 7 – November 7, 2016
Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artists and VIE D’ANGE, Montréal
Vie D’ange is pleased to present it’s inaugural exhibition Vie D’ange, a group show including Alan Belcher, Simon Belleau, Julian Garcia, Kelly Jazvac, Puppies Puppies, UV Production House and Andrew Norman Wilson. The self titled exhibition navigates a clashing opposition between the vital and the material, converging towards an environment in flux—a state of animal, material and human conditions, where the sentient and the animate melt, dissolve, adapt and harden into one another.
An anthropomorphized turtle in the form of a robot vacuum, a sculpture, terrorizes yet relegates the exhibition through labouring and cleaning its gravity bound surface. The turtle turned robot, an object that can think but cannot feel, territorializes space, pushing around and recomposing other works in its path. The passive physicality of Kelly Jazvac’s work enunciates the perennial nature of plasticity. The idea of material life cycles is an anthropomorphized approach to managing supply chains—the divine notion of cyclical processes of re- becoming, yet never disappearing.
The potential of transcending gravity, whether through elevating to the skies or floating to the top comes into tension with the real limitations of floor based media. This sense of gravity is framed by an instructional wall drawing that was purchased from UV Production House off of their Etsy store. The drawing indicates sea level rise predictions over the next 100 years based upon the gallery’s GPS coordinates. Online shopping venues were instrumental in the production of the artworks in this exhibition. Both Simon Belleau’s Turtle shell and Roomba Vacuum were purchased off Ebay as were Julian Garcia’s souvenir bottles of recuperated oil from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. Garcia then re-spilled the bottles across stretched canvas and framed with a spill containing oil boom. The archery arrow in Puppies Puppies’ sculpture ? was purchased from Amazon,a distant jungle where encounters with objects of alienation occur in a new nature; surfacing via Fedex next day as if through thin air.
The works both reflect upon and enact experimentation. Deep sea oil drilling and organ transplants between pigs and baboons come into direct dialog with lab mice. The animal subjects are instrumentalized as the canvases for which human health sciences experiment and innovate upon. These are experiments which are conducted in the name of progress. Sometimes experiments become accidents, accidents sometimes take to the scale of catastrophes.
In Andrew Norman Wilson’s Ode to Seekers 2012 (2016), a mosquito guides through an abandoned paediatric psych ward before revealing itself as an animated form which alternates between pumping blood from flesh and oil from earth. The intensity of the video’s soundtrack bleeds onto the solitary context of each work. In the midst of the video’s visceral score a metronome reminiscent of a heart beat establishes itself in a tense moment.
A still heart sits on the oil stained concrete floor. The turtle pushes the heart, then redirects itself toward a shoebox containing Alan Belcher’s Untitled (Self Portrait) an effigy made from the artist’s own bedsheets, stuffed with his used socks, adorned with his blood, finger nails, hair, and identified with his own passport photo. The representation of subjecthood is formed through material encounters; the relic is forever caught in a choreography of objects.
The dance continues in jovial perpetuity towards an ever changing position that animates the still. Yet its sequence of gestures become a recognizable pattern that emerges through a process of cross-encounter, collision and recalibration.
Notes:
1 Vie d’ange translates into ‘The life of an Angel’, whereas predominately in Québec ‘vidange’ is a colloquialism for common street trash and domestic detritus.
2 In the larger Francophone world, ‘vidange’ means a process of emptying, or draining a container of liquids (an oil change in France is a vidange huile.)
3 As the gallery is located in a former garage which has been drained of fluids (and thus economic fluidity) the void space becomes a dry container. A space in this exhibition where works which have congealed as material aftermaths, or as outputs responding to anthropism and its discontents.
Puppies Puppies, ?, 2016
Anodized Archery Arrow, Pig’s Heart., Dimensions Variable
Alan Belcher, Oil, 1989
Black & white photograph laminated to canvas, stapled to plywood, mouse. 24 x 24 x 2 inches (61cm x 61cm x 5cm), #5 from series of 10
Alan Belcher, Oil, 1989
Black & white photograph laminated to canvas, stapled to plywood, mouse. 24 x 24 x 2 inches (61cm x 61cm x 5cm), #10 from series of 10
Julian Garcia, FOMO (Stuffed Chair), 2016
Found wooden pallet, multiple news screengrabs, found graphics, UV print on wood, 40 x 48 x 6 inches
Alan Belcher, Untitled (Self Portrait), 1993
Hand-made from the artist’s bedsheets, stuffed with his used socks, his hair, his fingernails, his blood, his passport photo, match book, razor-blade, pins, thread, (included with artist’s shoebox for installation), 10.5 x 5 x 1.5 inches (26.6cm x 12.7cm x 3.8cm). 1993.
Kelly Jazvac, Haze, 2010
Salvaged adhesive vinyl, cardboard, adhesive, 31 x 18 x 7 inches
Julian Garcia, New Spill No.5, 2014
Petroleum from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill on canvas, acrylic medium, PIG-brand oil engulfing boom, water sealing pouch. 24 x 36 inches
Julian Garcia, New Spill No.5, 2014 (detail)
Petroleum from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill on canvas, acrylic medium, PIG-brand oil engulfing boom, water sealing pouch. 24 x 36 inches
Kelly Jazvac, Deflationary Club, 2018 (detail)
Salvaged adhesive vinyl, T square, 22.5 x 40 x 8 5/8 Inches
Kelly Jazvac, Deflationary Club, 2018
Salvaged adhesive vinyl, T square, 22.5 x 40 x 8 5/8 Inches
Alan Belcher, Gum, 1989
Laminated color photograph, plywood, bubble gum, 24 x 24 x .75 inches (61cm x 61cm x 2cm), #11 of a series of 15
Alan Belcher, Untitled (Pearl), 2016
Oil on linen, broken glass, 8” x 8 inches (20.3cm x 20.3cm), #4 from a series of 15
Alan Belcher, Untitled (Pearl), 2016
Oil on linen, broken glass, 8” x 8 inches (20.3cm x 20.3cm), #4 from a series of 15
Julian Garcia, FOMO (Fighting at the Dam), 2014
Found wooden pallet, CNN screengrabs, UV print on wood, 40 x 48 x 6 inches
Andrew Norman Wilson, Ode to Seekers 2012, 2016 (video still)
HD video, color, sound, 8 minutes 30 seconds
Andrew Norman Wilson, Ode to Seekers 2012, 2016 (video excerpt)
HD video, color, sound, 8 minutes 30 seconds
Andrew Norman Wilson, Ode to Seekers 2012, 2016 (video still)
HD video, color, sound, 8 minutes 30 seconds
Simon Belleau, Untitled, 2016
Turtle Shell, Robot Vacuum, Artists Socks and Sleeping Pills, 12.5 x 15 x 6 inches
