From/To
by Lorne Roberts
Plug In ICA, Winnipeg
In the math of the exhibition's title, "from" is lesser than "to." While this could be an allusion to a regional inferiority complex, the work itself centres on themes of transmission, movement and distance, all of which form a distinct, if unconscious, part of the prairie dweller's identity. In this case, the transmission consists of an exchange between Winnipeg and Minneapolis/St. Paul, cities linked by their isolation as major centres in overwhelmingly rural areas.
Kevin Friedrich's oil paintings use a deliberately bizarre mix of characters and ideas, combining neo-gothic excess with a wry sense of humour. In Hot Rod, a car is about to turn a blissfully ignorant cow into hot-rod jerky, and a physics-class line diagram of the car and driver gives the work a sense of movement and speed.
Piotr Szyhalski's work Your Time is Up!, painted directly onto the gallery wall, combines an image of a house tilted on its side with a projection that alternates between two phrases drawn from leaflets scattered by the U.S. Army during the first Gulf War: "Flee and preserve your life" is followed by "Or stay and face certain death." Here, the idea of movement is expressed by the juxtaposition of peaceful domesticity with terrified flight in the face of war.
In Mike Marth's Still Life, five telephones sit encased in concrete blocks. Marth dials their numbers intermittently, and each time one rings, the viewer is made aware of distance and disconnection, and of someone, hundreds of kilometres away, connected to the same impotent sound.
The work of Paul Zacharias complements Marth's. In his piece Information, paint has been applied using graffiti-style stencil patterns, and we see a bright window in a shadowy room, with a phone cord stretching towards the viewer and running off the canvas. There is a sense of the viewer holding the phone to their own ear, as though whatever information is being conveyed is intended for them directly.
If from is truly less than to, the origin less than the destination, then perhaps the transference that matters most in this exhibit is that which occurs between the artist and the viewer. The prairie-centred themes of the show are often concealed, and a closer look is required for a sense of how the artists engage with ideas of distance, movement and transmission. The artists have provided the from of creation, and the viewer completes the equation by providing the to of interpretation—a journey, it would seem, that is ongoing.
Winter 2004
