All Things Being Equal was a group show featuring new works in video, sound and sculpture by Phil Rose (Ottawa), Mara Eagle (Montreal), Anna Queen (Maine), and Henry Andersen (Brussels). The artists each explored a specific method of assembly in which vast, bulk amounts of materials are accumulated, measured out, organised, and committed to a predetermined sequence or logic. Through methodologies propelled by the momenta and gravity of obsession, empathy, pleasure, and humour, vast streams of image and sound emerge in the included works, presenting strangely gripping taxonomies of everyday things, moments and vernaculars. Installed together in the space as an amplified, resonant, poly-vocal room, their collective rhythms wove in and out of one another, encouraging and sustaining states of drift, rumination, skimming and play.
Phil Rose’s (Un)Stills project was diligently accumulated over the course of 2017, during which the artist committed to a weekly schedule of shooting one minute of static video footage in and around Ottawa. The imagery ranges from patient studies of the deeply banal to hypnotic visual textures. Assembled here as a 52-minute sequence, a wandering montage emerges that strings together incongruous moments separated by the interval of a week.
Positioned in the opposite corner of the room is an edit of Mara Eagle’s ongoing project Spherical Awakening, which moves at a comparatively quickened pace. Through obsessively examining and capturing the behaviours of spherical objects (tennis balls, bubbles, the biosphere, the moon) Eagle’s absurdist field research sets in motion an unending, rolling supercut of all things round, where the comical and the cosmic collide.
Centrally located in the room is Henry Andersen’s alliterative sound composition Stanzas, or the Law of the Good Neighbour – the result of a private word game that the artist has been playing for several years. Unfettered by sense and syntax, a chain reaction of linguistic pleasure is unleashed, where words come to coexist based purely on the relation of their sonic affinities. The expansive two-hour edit of the work, installed here as a clustered PA system, features five performances in which Anderson has directed close friends to read sections of his list in near-perfect unison.
Similarly propelled by both the tangential and the relational is Anna Queen’s site-specific sculptural response, A Sense of the Room. Incorporating preexisting materials of the project space itself (grey linoleum tile, fluorescent lights, grid pipes used to hang projectors, and orange extension cables used to power them), Queen spent three days in the room pushing these materials into different configurations, in search of zones of excess where their utility stretches into the absurd. Her corner piece, I don’t know, a video both performed and displayed on an iPhone, isolates the device’s predictive text algorithm, causing it to fold over onto itself and sustaining an infinitely affirmative refrain: you can do it for you and you can do it for you and…
Related Exhibition
Public Syntax: SAW Video at Critical Distance. Feb. 7 – March 31, 2019.