What: Transformer: The Body Remixed
When & where: At SAW Gallery, 67 Nicholas St. in Arts Court, to Nov. 2.
Late into Nuit Blanche last month, after I’d already been walking around the city and looking at art of all kinds for six hours, a trio of photographs still had the power to stop me in my tracks.
The photographs were at SAW Gallery, in a group exhibition titled Transformer: The Body Remixed, and they were created by a Japanese artist with the incongruous name of Photographer Hal. When I looked at Photographer Hal’s photos, it was as if the throng of Nuit Blanchers briefly vanished, and I was alone with the works before me.
Ichika & Arisa, photograph by Photographer Hal, in Transformer: The Body Remixed at SAW Gallery in Ottawa.
Each of the three photographs shows two people completely sealed in plastic wrap. They are dressed in neon red and pinks and yellows, like a commercial strip at night in Tokyo. The people do not look alarmed, rather they look as if they’re sleeping peacefully. They are couples, lovers, bundled together as one living unit, squeezed into one confined space, legs twisted, backs curved, almost embryonically conjoined. In two photos, the people hold hands. In one photo a man’s eye is open, as if to say, yes, I’m alive.
“People have strong reactions to that work in general,” says Jason St-Laurent, the exhibition curator, who first saw Hal’s work in the United States and sought it out for inclusion in Transformer, which he describes as “a show around the body as a metaphor for anxiety and angst in contemporary times.”
Anxiety, indeed. Just what is going on in Hal’s photographs? They can be perceived as violent, with the models cast as helpless victims of some sadistic killer, bound and packaged and ready for cruel exploitation.
Or maybe it’s something else, not violent but oppressive in a different way. I saw the photographs as a statement on the commodification of the body as a canvas for transitory fashion and rampant advertising. Here are our bodies, wrapped in our plastic, superficial, and inescapable culture.
It’s a powerful statement from Hal, who is showing his work in Canada for the first time. Please, show us more.
The exhibition is truly an international affair, with art from Asger Carlsen (New York), Anne McGuire (San Francisco), Bjørn Melhus (Berlin), Susy Oliveira (Toronto), Beth Frey (Montréal), and the Ottawa artists Raheleh Saneie and Peter Shmelzer.
Time Is Never Wasted, photographic sculpture by Susy Oliveira at SAW Gallery in Ottawa. (Photo courtesy SAW Gallery)
Carlsen’s photographs are surreal and enigmatic distortions of the body, which is also a suitable description of Shmelzer’s work (more on him later). Saneie uses multiple exposures and lightbox to show the body in various positions, as if struggling to find something, perhaps comfort.
Oliveira combines photography and sculpture into a unique form, a sort of photographic sculpture. On the floor of the gallery lies the body of a man, a three-dimensional form covered in triangular shapes. Each shape is a photograph, and they jut upward and outward, creating an illusory effect, as if the body is distorted, pixillated, breaking up. Here again, St-Laurent has found an artist whose work makes sharp comment about being alive in a world where the global imagery of advertising is like a relentless assault on self-image.
SHMELZER, REDUX
Meanwhile, Peter Shmelzer also has his annual solo show over at La Petite Mort Gallery (306 Cumberland St.), and it’s like walking through a funhouse full of mirrors that distort and reinvent the human form.
The people captured in Shmelzer’s hyperrealist portraits are more surreal than real. In Portrait #2 a woman with an oddly large head sits with a miniature version of herself on her lap. In Portrait One another woman shares a hearty laugh with the bald, miniature adult she’s holding.
Shmelzer’s paintings are exquisitely done, and they are both hilarious and disturbing. These people are weird mutations but, hey, they all look happy enough. The freaks are having fun.
The exhibition, titled Never Alone, continues at La Petite Mort to Oct. 28.
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Portrait #2 (oil on canvas, 18 by 24 inches) by Peter Shmelzer at La Petite Mort Gallery in Ottawa.
