Mediated Memory 

Matthew Brower 

Mediated Memory brings together the work of 10 Canadian artists whose practice examines the role of memories and dreams in contemporary society. Using range of approaches, the artists foreground the role of mediation in the experience of remembrance as a cultural phenomenon. The selected artists explore facets of their personal and social experiences and identities in artworks that foreground the material and cultural processes which shape how those memories and dreams are available to them and how they can be shared with others. In this exploration, the artists reveal what Marshall McLuhan suggested in his prescient analysis of the role of technology in shaping culture: “The Medium is the Message.”  

Foregrounding analogue photography’s obsolescence in the digital age, Sara Angelucci’s works explore the medium’s ability to hold memories that can no longer be decoded through her manipulation of orphaned photographs. In Aviary, by enlarging the images from the handheld carte-de-visite size popular in the 19th century,  Angelucci creates funerary portraits that mourn the loss of memory. In her manipulated photographs, Angelucci digitally overlays scans of the original portraits with images of extinct birds. She combines personal, cultural, and ecological loss to create strange images that attempt to revive the memories embedded in the photographs while remaining aware that they, like the birds depicted, are irretrievably lost. Her video projection The Anonymous Chorus animates an anonymous American family photograph. Following the rhythms of Charles Ives’ choral work, Angelucci momentarily re-invigorates the individuals depicted in the group portrait. Her animation subtly speaks to the nature of attention and its role in memory. How the focus on the parts can change our relation to the whole. 

Douglas Coupland's works are about mediation and about the changes in memories and dreams brought about by the emergence of the internet. His works are reflections on the possibility of memory in contemporary society. His painting Magic Hour explores the collapse of spatial and temporal differences in the circulation of bodies and objects around the world. The work speaks to the flattening of sensation brought about by these changes. In his stacking sculptures (A Meditation on Plastic and Stacking Studies), Coupland embraces banal objects as part of his engagement with everyday life in the context of technological change. His globe sculptures (Optimism & Pessimism) embodied desire to map and know the world in tension with our capacity to deface and destroy it thereby suggesting an existential limit to our technological dreams of mastery. 

Wally Dion’s Thunderbird presents traditional First Nations iconography using the components of contemporary digital technology. The large scale relief sculpture has been assembled from the circuit boards that underlie our digital age. In this work, the Thunderbird, a complex mythic figure of North America’s traditional peoples, is a spiritual personification of natural energies; in many tellings, its wingclaps cause thunder and its eyes shoot lighting. Dion’s work treats the traditional memory as a contemporary icon. As a being of energy Thunderbird’s emergence from the surface of the work speaks to the reopening of the possibilities of seeing the world as a sacred and interconnected space brought about by networked realities.  

Pierre Dorion’s paintings take up questions raised by contemporary imaging technologies through his practice of depicting snapshots taken of small architectural details he encounters in galleries and museums. Hovering at the edge of abstraction, the images in the exhibition are figurative representations of complex spaces that have been composed by the flattening effect of being captured photographically. By focusing on architectural moments that would normally remain unperceived the paintings make visible both the structuring effects of imaging technologies and the extent to which these structures have become part of cultural vocabulary. 

Angela Grossmann’s works similarly take up the question of orphaned photography but responds differently to the abandoned images. She intervenes materially in the found photographs. This violent intervention speaks to different aspects of the relationship between personal and cultural memory. The photos which have been severed from their context in personal lived memory are somewhat violently reinserted into larger cultural narratives by Grossmann through collage and paint. 

Yam Lau’s video Between the Past and the Present: Lived Moments in Beijing examines the tensions between representation and reality through its investigation of the dream world of the traditional Chinese literati scholar. By mapping out the space of the scholar’s studio, Lau creates an imaginary place for his own practice which opens the possibility of escaping his current constraints. The cultural memory of the studio acts as the source materials for the artist’s dream while remaining in tension with the artist’s lived experience of the actuality of Beijing. 

Gord Peteran's sculptures probe the boundaries of objects to test the limits of the human. His three works in the exhibition make use of the memories embodied in cultural forms through the manipulation of discarded objects. Duchess combines a dressmaker’s Judy with a found table sown into a pink blanket.  His simple yet evocative combination reactivates the figure’s relationship to cultural memory. Mantable is a wooden assemblage that has been covered in white, roughly stitched leather. It makes visible and literal the implied human body in every piece of furniture by evoking the human body through the sculpted feet and hands of the table’s legs.  Articulated Form is composed of a disassembled traditional American rocking chair that has been threaded through with string and hung on a stand beneath a brass halo. No longer an instrument for sitting and thinking, through Peteran’s intervention the chair invites us to understand the deeply embodied nature of the material memory invested in cultural forms.   

Ed Pien’s Spectral Drawings is an installation piece built up out of a series of drawings in white ink on black paper. The ghostly figures float and dissolve into the ground of the paper which slowly erases itself from the viewer’s perception. Produced using random effects which Pien then builds into figures, the overall effect is dreamlike in its access to the artist’s unconscious processes. The sometimes violent and visceral interactions of the figures suggest an ecosystem of cultural traces in which forms live, breed, and die yet remain eternal.  

Max Streicher’s inflatable sculpture Dream of Guernica presents a tableaux consisting of two horses, two riders, and a bull that pays homage to Picasso’s anti-war painting.  The awe-inspiring effect of the large scale of the work is undercut by its translucency and buoyancy. The composition follows a surrealistic dream logic that works against the straightforward invocation of memory the equestrian monument normally presupposes. In place of Picasso’s nightmare vision its softened edges offer instead a space for reflecting on the borders between memories and dreams. 

Carol Wainio's work revisits cultural forms to comment on the importance of childhood memories to understanding contemporary situations but also to access the space of dream-logic in which images are read though condensation and displacement rather than literally. One Evening takes up the changing experience of temporality and the loss of an earlier immediacy of cyclical time. The painted statements woven through the depicted forest, layer multiple narratives in the image refusing to settle on a single point of view. The scattered footwear in Puss in the Subcontinent re-positions Charles Perrault’s mythic figure of the trickster cat to take up the politics of global agribusiness. 

By referencing past artworks and exploring cultural references and forms the artists explore the ways in which memories and dreams become embedded in objects and how those memories can become lost, recovered, distorted, and revived. The selected works play off each other, the different strategies at play in their works revealing different aspects of the complex and subtle roles that mediation plays in remembrance. Taken together, their work reflects on how our current environment shapes our ability to remember and to reshape those memories into dreams. 

Organized by: 

(China) Beijing International Art Biennale Organizing Committee 

(Canada) The Canada Council for the Arts 

Supported by: 

The Embassy of Canada to China 

Ontario Arts Council 

University of Toronto, Faculty of Information 

Canadian Focus Exhibition at Beijing International Art Biennial 2015 

2015 marks the 45th anniversary of the normalizing of diplomatic relations between Canada and China. To mark this anniversary, Yan Zhou and Matthew Brower were invited by the Sixth Beijing International Art Biennale to curate an exhibition of contemporary Canadian art. The project brings together a group of ten Canadian artists whose work takes up the material mediation of memory, to engage with the theme of the Biennale “Memory and Dream”. The artists are: Sara Angelucci, Douglas Coupland, Wally Dion, Pierre Dorion, Angela Grossman, Yam Lau, Gord Peteran, Ed Pien, Max Streicher, and Carol Wainio. The exhibition will be held at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing from September 24th to October 15th 2015.