Ottawa
“Preternatural”
CANADIAN MUSEUM OF NATURE
240 McLeod Street
December 9–March 4

Marie-Jeanne Musiol, The Radiant Forest, 2011, electromagnetic photographic installation, back-lit positives, in two modules of 16 x 96" each. Installation view.

In “Preternatural,” curator Celina Jeffery addresses ways that contemporary art constructs epistemologies beyond the scientific; in so doing, she offers compelling counterexamples to the disconnect between spirituality and contemporary art that art historian James Elkins has observed. Fittingly for a show about unconventional perceptions, this exhibition is framed within three idiosyncratic spaces: a deconsecrated Catholic church, a gallery in a strip mall, and a natural history museum.

A performance installation at St. Brigid’s Centre for the Arts brings to mind spirit photography— Adrian Göllner conjured fleeting spectral emanations in Handel’s Cloud, 2011, an installation-performance (mounted in December) in which fog rushed from gothic vaulting. Equally elusive, the Patrick Mikhail Gallery’s white box space is interrupted only by the pressed lines of Shin il Kim’s Invisible Masterpiece, 2011. Embossed figure-outlines on colorless paper are animated in a three-channel video that shows these barely perceptible traces becoming even more ghostly as immaterial projections.

At the Canadian Museum of Nature, the artists focus on the sensuality and the sense of wonder in science. Sarah Walko’s installation It is very least what one ever sees, 2011, exists where scientific organization intersects with devotional practice, poetry, and romance. Wall-mounted test tubes become reliquaries for colorful collections of found objects, including bones, feathers, and text, all arranged according to Walko’s personal taxonomy. Live fish and plants in a central biosphere counter the dead, arranged objects. Through Nox Borealis, 2011, Andrew Wright rewrites the natural history diorama in “full-scale” photographic prints mounted on concave supports. His inverted arctic images purposefully disorient viewers; we aren’t exactly sure whether we are looking at minimal sculpture, snow, a heavenly cloudscape, or the lunar surface. In this confusion, he evokes the awe and terror of the arctic night—an environment without landmarks. Marie-Jeanne Musiol, a true believer in human spiritual potential, shows works that are far subtler but no less sublime. She displays electrophotographic light images of leaves—objective evidence of auratic energies discussed in Buddhism, Theosophy, and Scientology. In The Radiant Forest, 2011, she presents small transparencies backlit by a mysterious, dim bioluminescence that “develops” on viewers’ retinas—a metaphoric and demonstrative energy transference. Her works best manifest the exhibition’s theme of extraordinary natural experience.

This exhibition is also on view at St. Brigid’s Centre for the Arts, 302 St. Patrick Street, until February 17.

— William Ganis

Weird stuff in Preternatural exhibit

December 9, 2011. 11:47 am • Section: Arts

Ottawa artist Andrew Wright with, in background, two panels from Nox Borealis, at the Canadian Museum of Nature. (Photo by Peter Simpson, Ottawa Citizen)

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What: Preternatural

When: Dec. 9 to Feb. 12

Where: Canadian Museum of Nature, St. Brigid’s Centre for the Arts, Patrick Mikhail Gallery

Once, at 1 a.m. on the longest day of the year, I sat with a cigar and single malt on a friend’s patio in Whitehorse and felt disoriented. It was after midnight and yet bright as day, and the legendary “midnight sun” was deeply weird. Our Yukon hosts were accustomed to endless day, but to a southerner like me it was The Twilight Zone. That’s why I understand Andrew Wright when he describes being up in the Canadian north.

One of Marie-Jeanne Musiol's electromagnetic leaves, at the Canadian Museum of Nature. (Photo by Peter Simpson, Ottawa Citizen)

“It’s kind of a site where almost everything related to geographic position and one’s sense of place is in flux, or at least inverted,” Wright says during a preview of a new exhibition, Preternatural, now at the Canadian Museum of Nature and other venues. “You don’t know when days switch from night, you don’t know which direction is up sometimes, depending on the weather conditions. You don’t know what time it is.”

We’re standing before Nox Borealis, a piece created by Wright, an artist and assistant professor at the University of Ottawa. It consists of four large photo panels, each subtly curved as if blowing in a wind. The two bottom panels are entirely filled with the pitch black Arctic night – a blackness “full of information but devoid of imagery,” he says – and the top photos show the empty land, covered in snow by nature and turned upside down by Wright. “The images here are inverted,” he says in the exhibition press kit, “a gesture that acknowledges the profound sense of disorientation one experiences when confronted with spaces so vast that they are difficult to behold, let alone understand.”

That “profound sense of disorientation” is what links the works of conceptual art in Preternatural, an exhibition that, over three months, will expand from the Museum of Nature to St. Brigid’s Centre for the Arts and Patrick Mikhail Gallery. Each of the eight artists involved attempts to play with your sense of what is natural, what is normal, and what we think when what we see is not what we expect to see.

German-British artist Mariele Neudecker with her glass spheres at the Canadian Museum of Nature. (Photo by Peter Simpson, Ottawa Citizen)

“I had this idea for an exhibition called Preternatural,” says curator Celina Jeffrey, the chair of visual arts at Ottawa U, “which deals with this conception of the world as being neither natural nor supernatural, but perhaps something in between.”

This preternaturalness is easy to see in most of the artworks that make up the main body of the exhibition, at the Museum of Nature. Gatineau artist Marie-Jeanne Musiol’s electromagnetic photographs of leaves are other-worldly, their edges aglow with brilliant light against the darkness. At quick glance they could be taken for bioluminescent creatures that swim in the ocean’s black depths. I only wish the small prints were larger, which could enhance their impact.

The German-British artist Mariele Neudecker creates an enigmatic effect with two pieces. A photograph, titled Much Was Decided Before You Were Born, shows a small pine tree inverted and immersed in murky water, creating a puzzling and spooky image. Another piece consists of two glass spheres with tiny, inverted lighthouses in water. A thick salt solution in the spheres will gradually mix with the water, so what you see in the spheres will change during the exhibition.

White smoke comes from vaults in the ceiling of St. Brigid's in Ottawa, part of Adrian Gollner's 'Handel's Clouds. (Photo courtesy Adrian Gollner)

New York City artist Sarah Walko has a wall installation built around dozens of test tubes filled with all sorts of items – pieces of texts, feathers, rusted bolts, bones. Its relevance to the “preternatural” theme escapes me, and it brings to mind the screed that renowned British collector Charles Saatchi wrote earlier this week in The Guardian, where, among other things, he slagged “those incomprehensible post-conceptual installations . . .”

Elsewhere in the exhibition, Ottawa artist Adrian Gollner will debut a site-specific piece titled Handel’s Cloud at the St. Brigid’s centre in the Byward Market on Saturday (Dec. 10). Plumes of white smoke will be released from the deconsecrated church’s vaulted ceilings, synchronized with a very, very slow version of music that is a perennial Christmas favourite.

“The smoke jets,” Gollner says, “are a transcription of a short passage from Handel’s Messiah: ‘Thy Rebuke hath broken his Heart.’ The two-minute, four-second passage is stretched to 12 minutes, 24 seconds, with one of each of the three jets portraying the violins, harpsichord and voice.What the audience witnesses is a music-less rendition of the passage rendered in smoke. My hopes are for it to be mysterious, intentional and beautiful.” You can see it on Dec. 10, 15 and 17 at 2 p.m. – a time, Jeffrey says, when the mid-December light will best illuminate the smoke.

Washington artist Avantika Bawa will launch another installation at St. Brigid’s on Jan. 7, and Korean artist Shin Il Kim will open a video installation at Patrick Mikhail Gallery on Jan. 6.

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Weird stuff...

Getty Images; Robert Cadloff; Nicholas Di Genova; Alex Mcleod; Indigo; Photo illustration by Taylor Shute

Vancouver artist Indigo quit her secretarial job last year, and has been able to support herself thanks in part to income generated on Cargoh.com, a Canadian-based website for buying and selling art. Robyn McCallum’s work was spotted on Eyebuyart.com, prompting her inclusion in an exhibition at Toronto’s Drake Hotel. And Montreal photographer Robert Cadloff makes more than 200 sales a month on Etsy.com, earning “just a little less” than he did in engineering. “Ten years ago, this kind of career change and all the sales wouldn’t have been possible,” says Cadloff. “You needed to schlep your portfolio around to galleries and beg people to exhibit your work. I wasn’t born with that pushy gene.”

Luckily for Cadloff, and a growing number of artists—both emerging and well-known photographers and painters looking to further raise their profile and tap a new market of less-affluent collectors—selling art online is gaining momentum. New Yorker Jen Bekman is credited with starting the trend in 2007 when she launched 20×200.com—her site features limited-edition prints and photographs starting at $20. Others have instituted a similar curatorial policy. Claire Sykes, co-founder of Toronto-based Circuitgallery.com, says she “keeps the quality high” by featuring prints of established Canadian contemporary artists, including Robert Bean and Andrew Wright. “Earlier sites were more like clearing houses,” she says, “and artists were worried, quite rightly, about damaging their reputations by being associated with uncurated spaces and cheaply produced prints.”

Many of those concerns are alleviated with the next-generation online galleries. “To be able to buy a beautiful Andrew Wright [photograph] for $120 is really quite remarkable,” says Canadian Art editor Richard Rhodes, while browsing Circuit Gallery. “And I see Sharon Switzer here, too.” Switzer, a photographer and video artist, is represented by Toronto’s renowned Corkin Gallery. But doesn’t selling inexpensive prints online devalue Switzer’s originals? “No! Our world is changing!” enthused owner Jane Corkin, one of 138 gallerists—the only Canadian—in last month’s inaugural online VIP Art Fair. “Sharon is one of those artists who straddles both worlds.”

Some see the Web market as a game changer. “Art consultants and agents become less relevant,” says Jeff Hamada, the Vancouver artist behind Booooooom.com, which gets more than three million page views a month. “Even mediocre artists who harness the power of Tumblr.com and ffffound.com will feast, while talented artists without URLs will starve. A search-engine-friendly blog can be exponentially more powerful than gallery representation, especially for an emerging artist.”

Someone like Nicholas Di Genova, for instance, who graduated from art school five years ago but already has a piece in the Whitney Museum of American Art. “I knew my kind of art wouldn’t do well in a more traditional gallery format, so I needed to get it out there,” says the Toronto artist, whose work is at Mediumphobic.com. “I made cheaper prints, T-shirts and posters for online sales to get noticed. Now I’m represented by three galleries, including one in New York.” A strong Web presence also launched fellow Toronto artist Alex McLeod: “My biggest validation came when my work was featured on the Kanye West blog—then I got a dealer.”

Not everyone is thrilled with the demo­cratization of art. “It’s a shopping mart for the masses. High art is relationship selling,” says Barrie Mowatt of Vancouver’s Buschlen Mowatt Galleries. “Online sales is for the Costco and Zellers market.” Toronto artist Thrush Holmes got his start selling work on eBay in 2003, but has since changed his tune about direct sales. “It’s cheap to have a ‘buy now’ button on your website,” said Holmes, who opened his own gallery and has American representation. Miriam Shiell, a Toronto art dealer for more than 30 years, is even more critical. “It doesn’t build credibility,” she says. “Everything commercial online is just not part of the fine art market.” Corkin, meanwhile, sees a long-term payoff. “People who buy prints online today,” she says, “will graduate to my gallery one day.”

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