BGL: Breaking Through the Looking Glass
Exhibition Essay by Mona Filip
BGL: La senteur de mes mains / The Marks of My Hands
Koffler Gallery, 2007
‘Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it's turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It'll be easy enough to get through –’ She was up on the chimney-piece while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.
In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room.1
Uncertainty and intrigue begin at the door. A makeshift wall blocks the entrance of the gallery. If you circumvent this obstacle, your gaze encounters a hovering mirror, con- fronting you with your own reflection. Looking around the mirror, you discover that it is actually part of a solitary sculpture, a life-size male mannequin that floats perched on his chin on top of a tripod. He holds his balance by hanging on to the double-sided mirror. His gaze seems fixed upon his own image. With a nudge, you can make him spin. Mud covers his sporty clothes, as if he just returned from a rough terrain exercise, or perhaps a more dramatic adventure. Oddly, his face is also covered in mud, with cucumber slices over his eyes. Intensifying the eerie atmosphere, a single light source goes on and off intermittently, alternating between this room and the adjacent one, behind a sliding glass door. The frosted windows prevent you from seeing what hides beyond. At first, you might disregard the door completely. This type of contraption seems ubiquitous, routinely encountered in subways, malls, hospitals and airports. When it suddenly opens, activated by your approach, you are enticed to cross the threshold. On the other side, a wall fragment still blocks your view — the very piece cut out to install the automatic door. Finally, moving past the standing debris, you discover a second sculpture — a female mannequin, set-up just as the male, but with her face covered in bandages and her hands bound with gauze to the mirror she holds.
La senteur de mes mains / The Marks of My Hands is a new site-specific installation created by Quebec collective BGL (Jasmin Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère and Nicolas Laverdière) during a short residency at the Koffler Gallery. Arriving with the two sculp- tures and a basic idea of how they would be adapted for the Koffler gallery space, BGL gradually developed new elements determined by their response to the architecture, the situational context, and by material constraints. Through their process they remained receptive to unforeseen and meaningful diversions. Provocative and unpre- dictable, as usual, their intervention engages gallery visitors in a reflective exploration. Through a disconcerting transformation of the gallery space that dissolves the limits of the artwork, The Marks of My Hands challenges visitors to question their preconceived expectations of what art is. Gradually discovering and physically progressing along a set circuit, the visitors replicate the intuitive approach intrinsic to the interpretation of an artwork. From the initial bewilderment of the encounter, they proceed inquisitively, making their way toward deeper layers of insight. The installation thus metaphorically emulates the interpretive thought process.
Puzzled, the viewer approaches the installation as a detective piecing together a plot. Two rooms, a wall, a door, two characters and their appearance provide clues to a possible story. Self-absorbed in their uncertain balance, two people seem to search only for their own reflection, oblivious to everything around them. The light that lures to the other side, articulates a longing. The break in the wall makes passage from one’s space into the other possible. If only they would notice and raise their eyes from their own mirror world. Then they might fly towards each other meeting, as though in a Marc Chagall painting, in a miraculous union. In Chagall’s idealized universe, two lovers can find solace defying gravity and rising above the menacing world.
In our contemporary reality, however, modern technologies render face to face interaction obsolete, subtly and irrepressibly increasing the gap between us. Reality TV turns finding a spouse or facing fears into a game drained of intimacy and authenticity. The pressures of a makeover-obsessed society that promotes extreme alterations to one’s body, home and way of life impose false standards, further propagating alienation through conformity. Even the Self reflected by the mirror or by a store window, fleetingly, looses subjectivity, becoming an object of self-consumption. Creating a personal experi- ence — both physical and psychological — BGL reveals the emotional distance between people in a world where virtual contact dominates and individuals easily become self- centered in their quest for materialistic goals, or within the walls of their inner fears. Integrated into the uncanny mise-en-scène, the disconcerted viewer has to unravel the thread of his or her own assumptions to find the way out of the hall of mirrors.
Acting as illusory vanishing points, the mirrors extend the characters’ personal space into a narcissistic world — an inescapable trap. The other side of the looking-glass lures you, the viewer-detective, into the same dangerous game, offering however a chance for self-reflection. As you struggle through the dim lights and make your way around obstacles, you may suddenly realize: in addition to all other possible stories, this is also about the act of seeing. Anxiously anticipating what the event of the light may offer to perception, we focus and look intently. As in previous BGL installations, such as A l’abri des arbres (2001), Need to Believe (2005) and Le discours des éléments (2006), the obstructing walls entice us to search through secret passageways, making the act of looking an utterly conscious choice. Awareness of the physical act of seeing leads to the realization that looking doesn’t automatically imply seeing. The circular logic of the mirror world echoes the circular path of the installation, which mimics the circular nature of interpretive thought. As the individual needs the true reflection of another to reveal the reality of his or her humanity, the work of art requires the viewer to complete its meaning. The viewer, in turn, has to rely on the artwork to uncover it. It is a game of chicken and egg.
Seemingly paradoxical, the interpretation does not close, however, in a vicious circle, and neither does BGL’s installation. Recognizing the circularity of the thought process, as Heidegger pointed out, leads to a moment of truth and the realization that we must learn to think differently. The question then becomes not how to circumvent the circle, but how to break into it. If the mirror does not dissolve magically, one option may be to cut a hole in the wall and install a sliding door...
1 Lewis Caroll, Through the Looking Glass, Toronto: Random House of Canada Limited, 1992, p 173.
2 À l’abri des arbres (Sheltered by Trees) was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal. The installation led visitors through a hidden labyrinth of storage and gift wrapping spaces under a false sealing made of cardboard cut-outs of stylized trees.
3 Need to Believe (Besoin de croire) transformed the space of Mercer Union’s Front Gallery to the point that visitors believed they had entered the wrong location, or that the space was under- going major renovations. A secret door opened a way through office debris unto the site of a car crash and to a humorous final revelation regarding the source of the water leak.
4 Le discours des éléments (The Discourse of the Elements) was part of the Sobey Award exhibition at Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal and has been recently acquired by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Recycling previous artworks, this installation invited viewers on a circuit through BGL’s past projects, to discover a kind of self-made retrospective.
5 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers, 1992, p 144.