Séance Fiction

by Tarin Hughes

Away from the chaos of the crowded tourist destinations of the Rocky Mountains, the landscape provokes considerations of history, time and an enduring natural power. This overwhelming and oft unnerving force of the mountains is a fine setting for “Séance Fiction,” curated by Peta Rake at the Walter Philips Gallery. In her essay of the same title, Rake references the chapter, “The Slow Cancelation of the Future” in Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life, Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Zero Books, 2014), in which he laments a kind of loss of loss; a 21st century ability to access countless moments and times. In his discussion of temporality, Fischer references the British sci-fi television series Sapphire and Steel wherein Time was an anachronistic force.

Within both the exhibition space and the seven works included in “Séance Fiction,” Time with a capital ‘T’ is an unanchored, anachronistic presence. The artists as mediums employ nostalgia to anticipate the future. The curatorial aim undertakes how the temporal doctrines of science fiction are manifested within contemporary visual practices. The improvised term, séance fiction, conjures multiple curious, imagined and spiritistic meanings and references.

Before entering the gallery space, Shana Moulton’s video The Undiscovered Drawer, 2013, features an installment of the artist’s ongoing video and performance work “Whispering Pines”, featuring Moulton as Cynthia, a semi-autobiographical character in a strangely real yet fantastical world. In The Undiscovered Drawer, Cynthia explores the surreal properties of the unknown drawer, setting her on a journey where infomercial products become magical tools to play Coldplay’s “Clocks,” among other things. Moulton’s scenery is crude but elaborate, crossed with odd CGI and green screen effects and a hope-inducing score. Time is muddled, but familiar.

From Cynthia’s reverie, Rake’s curation sets up another weird world. Welcoming viewers into the space, Hannah Doerksen’s commissioned installation replicates the Overlook Hotel bar. I Come to Believe We All Gunna Drown, 2015, begs the memory of Jack Torrance and the terror of isolation with Doerksen’s bar as a confused social space, void of vice and thus distraction. I Come to Believe… shows us our own reflection – we must sit with ourselves without any real diversions. As Jacqueline Bell argues in Dry, her essay included in the “Séance Fiction” publication, Doerksen’s bar presents an ambiguous space of its own. And while the contemporary art world has faced a recent influx of bars as installations, Doerksen’s work is a necessary experience within the show as an immersive filmic object.

With Doerksen as an object-based cinematic reference, Heather and Ivan Morison take up the literary with the “Science Fiction/Wildflower” series, 2003 – ongoing. Housed in vitrines placed across from the bar, the books are enclosures for flowers, each bunch collected from locations including Mongolia, Ecuador and Bulgaria. As with much of the Morisons’ interconnected works, the series was begun while writing their science fiction novel Divine Vessel (ARTicle Press, 2003). The flowers are geographical markers, botanical studies and historicized objects imbued with their uses through time. The books’ covers are familiar, inducing personal nostalgia while housing texts of extraordinary futures.

Through a likeminded pursuit, Maggie Groat’s artist book Studies for Possible Futures, 2010-11, offers, through collage and found images, saturated visions of untold lands and depictions of wildflowers in a kind of future alchemy. Studies… lulls us through her prospective visions by setting up pairings: a vision on the left page with collected examples on the right; dreamy specimens abstractedly relating to the artist’s proposals.

As a seemingly tangible embodiment of the artist’s vision, Groat’s salvage-based practice is included through A study for collected tools for directions, healings, focusings, reconnections, wayfindings, wanderings, unseeables, wonderings, outsidings, action reportings, future seeings and interconnectivities, 2015. Groat’s crystals, glass, string and metal presented in striking geometric configurations recall Moulton’s magical details and renderings and the colour palette of Doerksen’s bar.

Past the bar, books, flowers and tools lies the vista of Guy Maddin’s Hauntings 1, 2010, an 11-channel film work projected on staggered suspended screens of various heights and sizes. Hauntings 1 is the product of Maddin’s collection of unrealized stories and films resurrecting lost and forfeited works of great directors. The segments play at once, when viewed from afar, presenting as one amassed whole. The clips were directed by Maddin in conjunction with a number of handpicked filmmakers, creating a selection of silent vignettes with intertitles. Maddin’s relationship with cinema is haunted; films conjure ghostly phantom performances within worlds and spaces captured in one time. Commissioned by Tiff Bell Lightbox in 2010 and screened in cinema and gallery venues, Hauntings 1 maintains a presence within “Séance Fiction” balanced between installation, object and film, mooring the exhibition.

Flanking Maddin’s film installation are Soda_Jerk’s The Time that Remains, 2012, and Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj’s A Familia do Capitão Gervásio (Captain Gervasio’s Family), 2013-2014. Each work takes up unreal conceptions of time and temporality. Soda_Jerk’s use of found footage engages in Hollywood critique and cultural investigation. In The Time that Remains, the second work in their Dark Matter series, the artists are focused on their ongoing research into hauntology. The work features a 2-channel video installation of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, each caught in a cycle of time haunted by their own presence. Upon waking they are confronted with specters of themselves and surrounded by clocks, mirrors and photographs – within this context, gendered objects with implications of female aging, youth, beauty and relevance. Set in black and white, both actresses are captured by mixed footage from a number of their films.

While Crawford and Davis are caught in infinite time, Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj’s A Familia do Capitão Gervásio showcases the city of Palmelo interwoven with its astral, perfect counterpart. The installation incorporates 16mm film, sound and concrete and wood benches. These physical architectural elements play off of the film with images of modern architecture,juxtaposed against those of mediums.

Throughout the film, we learn that a commissioned medium in Palmelo experienced astral colonies where the deceased lived and worked. These colonies were modern utopias. With this realization the seemingly disparate nature of the footage and installation connects in a holistic experience fostering considerations of the pluralism of being and time.

This ontological pursuit has been woven throughout “Séance Fiction”, through medium, subject and embodiment, while simultaneously positing the future in the present. Maintaining time as an ever-present character. As viewers within the exhibition space, we are gathered into strange immersive worlds that instinctually relate. The success of the show evidenced by an overlapping relationship between the works and the artists’ inquiries into Rake’s “imagined proposition.”

“Séance Fiction”, curated by Peta Rake, was exhibited at the Banff Centre’s Walter Philips Gallery, Banff, Alberta from May 02 to July 26, 2015.

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Tarin Hughes is a curator and writer based in Saskatoon, SK. She is currently the Executive Director of AKA artist-run.