Spring ‘20: Ritual Union
By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism. In short, we are all cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility...
~Donna Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto
In this group exhibition featuring the video, projection, and mixed installation work of Cailee Seifried, Sydney Pickering, Ada Dragomir, and Eric Tkaczyk, the artists are considering the political nature of the digital on the body.
When we pick up our smartphones to check the time, post daily selfies, or scroll instagram on the toilet, we are enacting a ritual union—a union between machine and flesh, between an instrument and a being. Ritual is a complicated thing; so is fitting human logic into mechanic analytics. This exhibition invites viewers into the physical and digital space of the RBC Media Gallery in order to be with uneasy contradictions. In the space between Haraway’s transhuman techno-utopia and our possible technologically totalitarian future, there must be a place for uncanniness, possibility, and reflective subjectivity. Without being stuck in the totalizing space of a digital heaven or hell, art offers us an invitation to be thinking, feeling entities; to be here in the middle, in the strangeness of right now.
Upon entering the RBC Media Gallery, viewers are immersed in an eerie quiet, surrounded by intentional silence. The space of ritual takes many shapes: sometimes it exists as hushed circumambulation, a walking meditation through a space where we seek solace. Other times, it is a symbolic sequence of gestures performed with pointed intent or practiced care. Ritual can also be mindless utterance and senseless repetition—an unreflective dance performed in accordance with nothing but habit. “Ritual Union” invokes our everyday digital rites with thoughtful impertinence as it aims to address such diverse concerns as sleep, labour, identity, fragmentation, and the politics of YouTube videos.
The work of “Ritual Union'' ranges from the reverent to the ironic. Viewers are insinuated into Cailee Seifried’s silent video Lucid— displayed on the central screen—by witnessing their field of view slowly covered over with grey ooze. As Seifried’s face is slowly obscured by wiping motions reminiscent of swiping gestures used to manipulate smart screens, viewers are invited into a dream space governed by dream logic. Inspired by the science of REM brain-patterns, as well as images and emotions which are foregrounded by our unconscious during sleep, this work functions like a digital dream—making the familiar into the strange. Seifried’s video melds personal narrative with established histories of feminist video and performance art which legitimize intuition, interiority, and care.
In Sydney Pickering and Ada Dragomir’s work, overt materiality and repetitive labour is made manifest through the digital. Pickering’s two minute video, Skin Off My Back, is soundlessly projected onto a brain-tanned hide. Informed viewers are given enough clues to invoke Robert Morris’ Box With the Sound of Its Own Making (1961). However, the minimalist negation of artistic mystery in favour of industrially machined simplicity is turned on its head in Pickerings video—a work whose central anchor is a return to ancestral territories and reclamation of cultural labour on her own terms. Simultaneously grounded in contemporary art discourses, Skin Off My Back points to Indigenous practices of generative refusal—giving viewers limited vision into the sacred. Within the context of contemporary Indigenous art, Skin Off My Back merges cultural production, digital processes, Indigenous feminisms, and complex histories of labour.
Addressing the encroaching capitalist managerialization of sleep, Dragomir’s satirical ASMR videos emanate from three tiny smartphone screens attached to corresponding headphones. Viewed from their characteristically handheld surfaces, the Carla Marks series constitutes the space of sleep as the final frontier—the last remaining segment of the day from which no labour, economic value, or shopping experience can be extracted. Carla Mark’s Anti-Capitalist ASMR r epositions the ASMR video—a now thousand dollar youtube industry predicated on getting us to sleep—as a kind of work refusal, as well as being sisyphean in nature and anticapitalist in politic. Dragomir’s satirical logic and looped repetition points to the connections between labour, sleep, and technology.
Eric Tkaczyk’s wire and nylon sculpture, Withering, serves as a strange skin-and-bones surface for projections of isolated and fragmented orifices—sexy disincarnate lips, ears, and eyes. Bodily segments once corporeal but now made of light are divorced from their owner and imposed on another form. However, as light, they barely impress themselves on the squat emaciated nylon body resting low to the ground. Withering brings to mind ascetic rituals of deprivation—a denial of the self that is easily mapped back onto our world through religious ritual, gendered performance, and beauty rite. In a world flooded with ubiquitous non-stop visual enticements, the uncanny power of ugliness forces us to interrogate hyper-mediated “truths” about the human body.
Cailee Seifried, Lucid (film still)
Sydney Pickering, Skin Off My Back
Sydney Pickering, Skin Off My Back (detail)
Eric Tkaczyk, Withering
Eric Tkaczyk, Withering (detail)
Ada Dragomir, Carla Mark’s Anti-Capitalist ASMR (film still)
Video viewable at: https://youtu.be/Z7nb6hBZdtc
Ada Dragomir, Carla Mark’s Beauty Routine ASMR (Film Still)
Video viewable at: https://youtu.be/fXfOQ1KRx5g
Ada Dragomir, Tea Strainer Mechanics with Carla Mark (film still)
Video viewable at: https://youtu.be/PrMYT1q-WJk
