Alisha Piercy:
YOU HAVE
HAIR LIKE FLAGS,
FLAGS THAT POINT
IN MANY DIRECTIONS
AT ONCE BUT CANNOT
PINPOINT LAND
WHEN LOST
AT SEA

Vitrines
January 5-February 5

Piercy’s wall drawings combine the formal aspects of Chinese mist-in-the-mountains brushwork paintings with texts that evoke double meanings. The cheer-like title in Barcelona or Death refers to a current Senegalese pop song and is about the exodus of young Senegalese men to Spain, who make their journey in small boats with the dream of re-making their lives. In the drawing installation, daredevilry and sport becomes the symbolic focal point for a recasting of vocabulary around 21st-century notions of transcendence. The drawing makes an ambiguous but provocative link between the stowaways’ will-to live and the faith and reverence in western culture towards sporting events.

The installation of current wall drawings entitled Campfire Float brings the stowaway into the collective imaginary through a series of landscapes of a vanishing present. In the central drawing, Piercy carries out a drawing performance, a time-based narrative which depicts a boat that is lost-at-sea for 30 days. Over the course of the exhibition, Piercy communes with the stowaways’ sense of isolation. Remoteness is expressed through drawing the finite actions of the stowaway who has very little on board and very little power over his/her situation. On any given day nothing much happens: A flare goes off. A flag is raised. Something floats by. Typically the stowaway stares all day at the horizon. In this near-dead time of uneventfulness and unknowability everything is perceived in ritualistic terms. The relationship to survival is dramatized by the ritual of maintaining a bonfire in the middle of the ocean. In all these works, images fold over images; smoke, glitter, mirages and migratory patterns culminate to form trompe d’oeils of Kabuki dancers, firecrackers and campfire heraldry. The sensation of objects and the spirit rising is counterbalanced by the equivalent sensation of the potential to crash or go-under.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $37.8 million in the arts in Quebec.