FOFA GALLERY

October 11 to November 5, 2010
Vernissage: Thursday, October 14, 5 to 7 p.m.

BLACK BOX
Cheryl Kolak Dudek: Tableaux Vivants & Other Narrative Strategies

MAIN GALLERY
Cliff Caines: The King + I
ARTIST’S TALK: Thursday, October 14, 3:00

YORK CORRIDOR VITRINES
Fiona Annis: The After-Image (into the cold)
presented in part by In Transit Images

STE.CATHERINE STREET VITRINE
Matthew Evans: James_(underscore)_Brown

++++++++++++++++++++++

This exhibition of four separate but related installations carries two threads between its constituent parts – vision and beauty – that establish a complex relationship with the beholder. Each artist uses the reproducible image in equal parts analysis and display that foreground the viewer as critical participant in the construction not only of meaning but also of the piece itself.

Cheryl Kolak Dudek: Tableaux Vivants & Other Narrative Strategies
While the tableau vivant predates our media saturated culture, its narrative conventions represent the profound cultural impulse to recreate and reinterpret shared stories.
Tableaux Vivants & Other Narrative Strategies explores contemporary pictorial narrative framed by the conventions of the theatrical tableau. In this series of images, in contrast to tableaus usually occupied by costumed actors, turkey and chicken wishbones are reconfigured in varying arrangements that accumulate meaning through cross-references and reiterations. In Tableaux Vivants, narrative is defined by structural relationships, logic, pictorial recursions and visual rhythm throughout the series of images.
Here the bones operate as gaming pieces, interacting with the conventions and implied narrative
structure of the tableau. Although tableaus are commonly defined as spectacles and contrived arrangements, these images are solemn and mostly asymmetrical, which does not necessarily ! contradict the viewer’s narrative assumptions. Overall, the reliance on structural and pictorial relationships for meaning leaves the narratives in Tableaux Vivants abstract, textual and poetic.

Cliff Caines: The King + I
The King + I is a portrait of Cliff Caines’ uncle and friend, Derrick Caines (born with Down Syndrome, later diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease). The project is a video installation presented as a custom-built, 19th century-inspired stereoscopic cabinet. Viewable from within the mahogany cabinet is a 21-
minute stereoscopic 3D video. The soundtrack emission from the cabinet is Derrick’s a-capella
version of “Love Me Tender” by Elvis Presley. Says Caines: “I spent much of my adolescent life
with Derrick by my side, as uncle and friend. He taught me the value of acceptance, humility
and Elvis Presley. (He loved Elvis). Part tribute, part philosophical inquiry, The King + I is a portrait
of Derrick, his fleeting awareness, and my assent to the unknowable aspects of his stereo-condition.”

Fiona Annis: The After-Image (into the cold)
The After-Image (into the cold), the first chapter of the Swan Song cycle, is a romantic conceptual
rendering of the slippage between fact and fiction within a documentary framework. The expression
‘swan song,’ is derived from the Greek myth that swans are mute, but burst into song just before they die.
Over the ages the legend was embraced by poets, and led to the use of the term to mean a person’s last eloquent words or performance: a final farewell appearance. In the context of The After-Image (into the cold), Annis explores the swan songs of a sequence of historical, infamous, or otherwise atypical people, who produced final works intimately connected with their remarkable, if not uncanny deaths. The body of work is realized as a cycle of photographic encounters of the landscapes and architectural sites connected with these particular swan songs. To this regard, The After-Image (into the cold) seeks to render echoes etched in landscape, and acts to engage the physical locations of these swan songs as a point of departure for a sustained meditation on final acts and their sites of articulation.

Matthew Evans: James_(underscore)_Brown
In James_(underscore)_Brown, Matthew Evans has created a work that is immediately accessible and
simultaneously confounding. Two monitors with the words, “James” and “Brown” flash intermittently in different fonts and colours, notably, without sound. A rhythm then is suggested by the absence or
presence of image, and one’s association with the singer, “the godfather of soul”, or his myth. The meaning of the piece becomes actively constructed by the viewer and their memory of Brown’s activities, be it his influence on popular music, the 1970’s, funk, cocaine, firearms or spousal abuse. The two-monitor/two-word then, create an intersubjectivity that volleys into the discursive realm, performing beautifully the role of the shop window, where passersby are invited to “buy in”.

The FOFA Gallery would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of In Transit Images in the realization of the Fiona Annis exhibition.