Retro-Techno on Display

Yesterday I went to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in downtown Halifax. It had been a while since I'd paid the gallery a visit, so it was nice to reacquaint myself with the place and explore the exhibits.

The place is vast, and there are usually several exhibits going on at any given time, along with the paintings from the permanent collection on the main floor. One can literally spend hours there, taking in the incredible variety of individual artistic expressions.

One of the exhibits was a natural for a blog entry, and if you examine the visual design of this blog, it won't be too hard to figure out why. The exhibit is called Sometimes Always, and it's a unique look at old and outmoded technology.

Here's the first paragraph of the curatorial essay on the exhibit:

"Partnering with a vibrant community of arts organizations has always been part of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia’s mandate. This spring, the AGNS presents a prime example of collaboration with a Centre for Art Tapes co-production. An exhibition concept by CFAT’s John Mathews, Sometimes Always brings together artists from Canada, Germany, Northern Ireland and the United States. This multi-media exhibition addresses technological obsolescence and processes by which outmoded media are collected, conserved and archived. Artists will present works that deconstruct ‘obsolete’ formats while exploring our relationship with technology. Participating artists include: The Artifact Institute (Montreal/Halifax), Sadie Benning (Chicago), Factotum (Belfast), Russ Forster (Chicago), Eleanor King (Halifax), Felix Kubin (Hamburg), Craig Leonard (Halifax) and Clive Murphy (Belfast/Brooklyn, NY)."

When you first walk into this exhibit, you're confronted with what looks like an absurdist filmmaker's idea of someone's basement. This room, which sports piles of VCRs, CD players, VHS tape boxes, and LP sleeves along with various turntables, video cameras, monitors, and an old piano, is in actuality a single work, an installation entitled Obso-less-sense by Halifax artist Eleanor King.

I kept coming back to this room, simply because there was so much in it. The arrangement of old tech "junk" was at once bizarre, mildly disturbing, and oddly fascinating. The LP sleeves are stacked to form a slightly twisted pillar with a progression of colors that begins with blacks and darks on the bottom, moves through the spectrum, and ends with whites at the top.

When I looked closely at the video monitors, I realized that they were showing me another part of the same room, at which point I began scanning the installation to find the cameras. When I spotted them, I then had to find out which camera was connected to which set of monitors, so I moved in front of them, keeping an eye on the screens to see when I would appear. For a few brief minutes, I became part of the exhibit.

The next room contains bicycle wheels. That's right, you read correctly. Bicycle wheels. This is an installation by another Halifax artist, Craig Leonard, entitled Adventures on the Wheels of Steel. Each of the wheels hung on the walls has a different pattern of duct tape patches on its spokes. Visitors can take these wheels off the walls and place them on two "turntables" in the center of the room. When one spins the wheels, the duct tape patterns interact with photoresistors (mounted in the wooden base) that control oscillators. A few knobs and switches between the two "turntables" also affect the sound, but the controls are unlabeled, so the visitor just has to experiment.

Another exhibit of note is Untitled (Never Gonna Be Alone) by New York/Belfast artist Clive Murphy, in which a long strand of audio cassette tape, assembled from found fragments, extends from a player mechanism on a wooden stand to the wall, where it loops over and under a number of rollers, forming the shape of either a mountain range or a statistical graph of some kind, and then loops back to the player mechanism.

Probably one of the most curious installations is the room devoted to the Artifact Institute, who have basically relocated their entire Halifax facilty to the gallery for the duration of the exhibit. The room looks like a warehouse: banks of shelves bearing rows and rows of tagged items, all of them discarded technology from art institutions, ready to be repurposed. Basically, the organization is the art in this particular case.

Sometimes Always was another timely sighting for me, what with my fondness for "retro-techno" and all. It was also a real eye-opener in terms of seeing what creative people can do with things that are, for most folks, obselete.

I enjoyed this walk through techno-history. If you're in the area before August 30th, I'd suggest having a look. If you're not local, or you won't be visiting in that time frame, here are some articles and reviews you might want to check out:

• The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia's Curatorial Essay
• An article from Canadian Art
• An article from Turbulence

Gesundheit.

(While checking links for this post, I came across this video of Clive Murphy's inflatable trash bag cube. I think it's kinda cool.)