| |
|
Annotated
Catalogue of Works in the Exhibition
Pierre Dessureault
Associate Curator, Media Arts
Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography
A Catalogue of Found Objects 1976
30 gelatin silver prints
157 x 325 cm (each 31.4 x 45.8 cm)
Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa
Acquired 1977
"I used to do on-site landscape photographs with a concentration on the
structuring of each image: the relationships of objects, ordering of lines,
spaces, tonal values, etc. Six years ago, I stood at a vacant corner lot intending
to make images of the miscellaneous garbage within this environment. Instead
I took the objects home and photographed them against a common backdrop. Up
to that point I felt uneasy about the self-conscious nature of manipulated
subject matter."
A Catalogue of Found Objects signals
a break with the social and humanist photographic practice to which Legrady
has devoted himself since leaving Loyola College in 1970. The earlier works
combined the influences of John Max and Charles Gagnon, who were committed
to a photography that explored, respectively, the workings of the human soul
and the forms of urban landscape.
A Catalogue of Found Objects endeavours
to reveal the secret language of objects as seen through the effects of displacement
and context. Legrady begins by marking off a site: a vacant lot becomes an
excavation site where, like an archaeologist, he gathers cast-off objects
that become traces of consumer society and its system of values. After this
initial phase of retrieval, the recovered artifacts are arranged in a photographic
catalogue. Legrady lays them out on sheets of computer paper, and this unified
visual field forms a backdrop for a play of juxtapositions and repetitions
that reveal similarities and contrasts. The photographic medium freezes and
relays these arrangements, creating a series of still lifes. The standardized
backdrop evokes electronic memory, which makes it possible to organize and
process a body of information too great for the capacities of the human brain.
Floating Objects Series 1980
12 gelatin silver prints:
-B78115016, London, Ont. 1978
-B78060719, Don Mills, Ont. 1978
-B78060711, Don Mills, Ont. 1978
-8006012, London, Ont. 1980
-B7511166, San Francisco 1975
-B7806106, Calgary 1978
-79050831, London, Ont. 1979
-7803102, Montreal 1978
-76090936, Willowdale, Ont. 1976
-8006016, London, Ont. 1980
-78031728, Malton, Ont. 1978
-79050930, London, Ont. 1979
Each 56 x 82 cm
Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa
Gift of Katherine Legrady, 1994
"One obvious feature of a photograph is its capability to lift a moment
out of time. This of course implies a measure of control with regard to one's
existence. You stop time long enough to dissect it. It makes you feel as if
you apprehended that moment. A frozen record out of one's life experience.
A record of being there. And it's largely a misrepresentation: a visual record,
removed from its context, a reference to an event which precludes all but
a split second reflection of the occurrence. It's a fiction, like the way
history works. History as an embodiment, an after-the-fact creation wherein
disparate bits and pieces of information are compiled and interpreted in terms
of a contemporary point of view. The photograph, in its reference to reality,
works in such a way. But behind it is an intention and the impulse to act.
It is the individual shaping a meaning. It is an expression and a response
to an experience based on one's particular circumstance."
Floating Objects Series takes up and extends the idea of using photography
to effect a visual archaeology of a site. Legrady took the first photographs
for this series while he was working on Catalogue of Found Objects.
Indeed, these two series can be seen as the systematic and poetic sides of
the same problematic.
In Catalogue of Found Objects, Legrady painstakingly organized the
objects in a way that made use of their forms, textures, and colours to create
a typology. Floating Objects Series, on the other hand, constitutes
a play of objects in which Legrady assigns one of the main roles to chance.
The operational parameters are simple; the classic rule of three is respected.
First, there is the location: construction sites littered with miscellaneous
materials. As sites of unlimited possibilities, they are open to every action
whose aim is construction. Second, there is the time: night, whose shadows
erase topographic detail, hanging a black curtain as a backdrop. Finally,
there is the action: Legrady throws disparate materials up into the air and
uses a photographic flash to catch them in flight. The expressionist painting
produced by this action abounds in objects that appear to defy the laws of
gravity, in sharp contrasts and perspectives distorted by the flash as it
cuts through shadows. This device reveals how photography freezes time and
objects, while creating incongruous juxtapositions reminiscent of the "chance"
combinations in the poetry of the Surrealists.
Still Lifes 1981
9 gelatin silver prints
Each 92.0 x 74.5 cm
Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa
Gift of Katherine Legrady, 1994
"In 1977 I worked as a darkroom technician for six months in a commercial
studio. Through this job I had access to studio hardware lights, large format
cameras, etc., and also to the studio 'aesthetic:' lighting procedures, background
staging, the nature of a commercial photograph, its iconography and contextual
treatment. However, at the time I didn't consider this applicable to my own
work.
"But for the past three years I have been making my own images primarily
in a studio situation, working with a basic structure of thematic development
the subject matter being common objects in relation to one another, set against
a defined background. These can be considered 'still lifes.' My working procedure
consists of a combination of pre-planned activities such as drawing or fabrication
of props, with intuitive decisions shaping the final outcome of the image
when the objects are staged.
"This approach provides a wider range of possibilities for defining some
aspect of a conscious and unconscious expression. The staging of a situation
is a self-generated, active representation which also integrates a reflective
response, whereas on-site photography primarily involves a responsive act.
In contradiction to the slick presence of a commercial photograph (whose function
is to be a pure channel of ideological transmission), my work contains a certain
crudeness, whether in the subject matter itself, or else in the technical
effects, such as lighting. This crudeness becomes a connotative device, playing
against the concept of the 'studio' photograph. In the ordering of information,
my concentration is on a clarity of expression."
"My artistic work during the past ten years has dealt with the discrepancy
between the photograph as a record of transmitted light and the assigned cultural
meanings that it conveys. Projects and exhibitions have considered aspects
of photography's problematic nature and syntax: the representation of time
and space, the effect of text as a connotative device, and the impact of industrial/commercial
pictorial references. From a cultural perspective, some of the work has dealt
with the exposition of submerged social and historical structures in visual
conventions, and the cultural conditioning that dictate the photographer's
decisions and the viewer's responses."
Still Lifes belongs to a group of works that include, among others,
Everyday Stories, Image/Text Series, Theoretical Studies, and Object Narratives.
These explore, within the framework of the studio, the system of objects and
its syntax. Legrady composes his paintings by combining objects taken from
daily life with drawings, words, and constructions made from corrugated cardboard,
lead foil, or plywood. The stagings are reduced to a few essential motifs
located within a zero degree of language in which an economy of means condenses
the scene into a few basic symbols while expanding the scope of the image
tenfold. Thus, televised warfare is signified by a rough cut-out of a tank
and the image of a crushed human figure framed by the borders of a television
screen. By deploying a range of routine situations and conventional symbols,
Legrady casts an ironic gaze on the social consensus that regulates discourse
and hardens images into stereotypes.
Throughout the various work cycles that have occupied him since the mid-1980s,
Legrady has used photography to expose the strategies by which objects constitute
an internal system of relationships that opens onto language. In the same
way that objects are continually consumed, thrown out, and distributed in
a multitude of contexts, images are caught up in an uninterrupted whirl that
places and displaces them endlessly. The cycle of found objects is succeeded
by that of borrowed images.
Posing I II III IV 1985
12 gelatin silver prints on silver and gold metallic paper
7 prints 101.5 x 101.5 cm; 5 prints 101.5 x 132.0 cm
Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa
Acquired 1987
"The work focusses on the representation of innocence at a time of global
conflict. The contrast between the way America saw itself and the political
events of the day are underscored by the gestural expressions of both male
and female sitters. Other thematic considerations in the work address cultural
issues such as the complex signifying aspect of the photograph the layering
of meanings imbedded in the conventions of the pose, specifically gestural
coding as an indicator of gender typing and race relations."
Posing series is made up of snapshots taken from two family photo albums
dating from the 1960s. One shows a G.I. serving in Vietnam, while the other
presents two sisters in a suburban environment. On the basis of these elements,
both rich in connotation, Legrady weaves a narrative, switching images in
a filmic manner. A parallel montage draws the scenes out of their original
context in the family albums and transforms the people in them into characters.
By making large blow-ups of the snapshots, Legrady inscribes them definitively
within the public domain. Personal memories become historical figures. Two
worlds confront each other: the human face of war, represented in a series
of conventional poses mimicking heroism and candid male camaraderie; and the
world of two supremely gentle and submissive sisters, embodied in poses reproducing
female stereotypes from the period. The triptych arrangement and montage format
keep switching the two worlds, magnifying the contrasts between them. The
passages correspond to a visual rhythm that alternates between the silver
and golden tones of the large gelatin silver prints.
The Noise Factor 1988
4 ink-jet colour prints
Each 61 x 76 cm
Collection of the artist
Poetics of the News 1987
4 ink-jet colour prints
Each 76 x 102 cm
Collection of the artist
"Digital images simulate rather than represent the real. They can be
invented according to mathematical algorithms, making visible, through the
use of computers, concepts and physical phenomena that do not exist in material
form. For instance, objects and images that are rotated on television broadcasts
exist in virtual space an environment that is totally fictional, defined mathematically
and based on laws of physics ...
"Our perceptions about the world we live in are reinforced by the conventions
of representation that inundate us daily, and television's particular mode
of defining reality seems to be a dominant conditioning force within the culture.
Television becomes an unlimited, real-time image bank when it is linked to
an image-processing computer. Appropriating images from this databank is a
means to examine and comment on television's highly ritualized syntax."
"My current work with digital technology considers visual structuring
that is not only context dependent (vantage point, editing, image/text, cropping,
etc.) in its treatment, but also fictionalized through electronic alteration.
Narratives are created through photographic events that never existed in the
real world. The images are assembled from digitized video sources and reconstructed
through diverse means of electronic retouching. The narratives are believable
as they refer to recognizable events, familiar representational genres, or
social situations that we all experience. Some of the images are visually
indistinguishable from conventional photographs whereas others incorporate
the full capabilities of digital technology to stretch the ways photographic
images can be represented. For instance, concepts about 'noise,' filtering,
and digital enhancement have been borrowed from telecommunications and are
incorporated through image-processing algorithms to expand definitions for
a new visual vocabulary. These applications have necessitated acquisition
of programming skills so that software could be developed that would make
the computer perform according to personal needs.
"The intention is to engage the viewer in considering the discrepancy
inherent in an image that looks objective on the surface but is in fact subjective,
manipulated, and therefore a challenge to the conventional notion of belief
in photographic representation."
During the 1980s, Legrady turned his attention to the world of information
processing and digitalized images. Media images, like all other products of
consumer society, are disposable objects. Mass-produced and standardized,
they go through a life cycle that takes them from context to context across
a wide range of incessant formulations and displacements. Legrady takes the
ephemeral world of the media, which produces and reproduces images at maddening
speed, and makes it the key element in his approach.
Just as he borrows from numerous semiological codes to study the construction
and blurring of meaning in photographic images, Legrady refers to information
theory to play upon the concepts of signal and noise in the work he produces
in magnetic and digital media. While the signal transmits a clear and precise
image, the electronic noise produced by various data-processing programs interferes
with the texture and referent of the image. Legrady's arrangement of photographs
into small groups generates interactions among the fluctuations produced by
the interferences that have transformed the original images. The latter, meanwhile,
are still identifiable from a number of immediately recognizable symbols.
Poetics of the News sums up Legrady's strategies. Serving as a backdrop
for the images, brief phrases are repeated endlessly, as in an incantation:
"lost like tears in the rain," "a shadow of its former self,"
"the space between," "a sea of noise." And flames are
superimposed over the words. Thus the media event is reduced to a linguistic
representation coupled with a simple graphic element.
An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War 1994
Interactive digital media installation
Variable dimensions
Collection of the artist
"An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War is an interactive artwork
on CD-ROM designed as a museum exhibition display. The Archive features early
1950's Central European personal and official Communist material in the form
of home movies, objects, family documents, Socialist propaganda, money, sound
recordings, news reports, books, identity cards, photographs of public documents
and video footage of Central European places and events. These have been part
of my collection of objects and narratives related to the Cold War, gathered
during the past twenty years. The items, grouped into some sixty topics, were
organized thematically in eight rooms superimposed on the original floor plan
of the former Workers' Movement (Propaganda) museum in Budapest, the original
contents of which have been in permanent storage since the end of Communism
in 1990.
"Viewers experience this Archive both in the digital environment of the
CD-ROM and in the real-world architectural space of the gallery in which the
computer program is generally exhibited. The Archive's contents are
listed in white letters on the darkened gallery's walls surrounding the table
on which the computer is positioned. This visual cataloging serves to emphasize
the installation's reference to a research archive environment. An overhead
projection and loudspeakers amplify the computer's contents to engage the
standing audience waiting their turn. Each viewer interacts with the computer
archive by selecting stories according to their own interests and chance.
As a result, they construct varying synopses of the archive's content and
context determined by the sequence of their choices and the depth of their
explorations.
"The objects, sounds, publications and stories that make up the contents
of the Anecdoted Archive were collected during sporadic visits to Hungary
in the 1970's and 80's. They eventually evolved into a loose grouping of artifacts
that came to embody a biographical narrative about an identifiable place and
time. In the process of organizing the archive's contents, categories emerged
which established their own sense. At this juncture, a transformation began
to take place as the Archive's disparate elements of personal to official
and ideologically diversified material began to coalesce through a set of
internal links. The process by which diverse knowledges merge formally into
an institutionalized discourse exemplifies the dynamic nature of the archive
described by Michel Foucault as that "practice that causes a multiplicity
of statements to emerge as so many regular events." An interactive archive
consisting of digitally encoded contents became the means to fuse the items
and multiple references together to inscribe them into a unified form.
"The somewhat irreverent idea of superimposing my personal narrative
on the floor plan of the Budapest's Worker's Movement museum provided structural
cohesiveness and a rich narrative potential. The appropriated museum's floor
plan was subdivided into color coded "rooms" to establish thematic
ordering for the accumulated fragments, stories and objects. These "chapters"
created contextual meaning for the archive's contents, defining hierarchical
relations and differences. The floor plan metaphor further emphasized the
discursive potential of its interface as a site where the personal narrative
could enter into dialogue with the formal structure and content of the museum's
authoritative history. The intent to contrast subjectivities and interpretive
commentaries in relation to the distant formality of official material functioned
to underscore this archive's supposition that historical inscription as an
act of narration refutes the notion of a single unified history, resulting
instead in fragmented narratives that contradict and disprove one another."
Slippery Traces: The Postcard Trail 1996
Interactive digital media installation
Variable dimensions
Collection of the artist
"Slippery Traces is a non-linear, visual narrative in which the
viewer navigates through a web of 230 interconnected postcards that are classified
and linked according to literal and metaphoric properties. Each postcard contains
approximately five 'hot spots' or links to about ten other images. The user
constructs a viewing sequence by clicking the mouse on a hot spot of interest
in the current image which leads to another image. The resultant sequence
of linked images can be reviewed to examine the evolving 'meta-narrative'
and the particular connections derived through one's choices.
"The 230 postcards in this project were selected from my collection of
over 2000 postcards. These were gathered over a period of twenty years. Following
the initial selection of images, the postcards were grouped into twenty-four
categories. This process of classification led to the emergence of topics
such as nature/culture, colonialism, the future, military, industry, the exoticization
of the Other, scenic views, morality tales, and others. Images that could
not have a category of their own were grouped into the closest thematic area.
By inserting these images that stretch the meaning of the grouping, a dialogue
ensues that extends the categories' function from simple classification to
that of narrative. The intention underlying my selection of postcards was
to provide an overview, a world view, both cultural and ideological, in terms
of how the mid-twentieth century has been represented photographically within
the framework of global development, tourism, and cultural exchange. Other
criteria included culturally significant or relevant subject matter or visually
interesting compositions that express a perception based on the photographic
paradigm. The selection does not aim to represent the totality of twentieth-century
historical experience.
"In the early 1970s, fine-arts photographic investigations focussed on
the development of a personal way of seeing. Postcards, which were understood
as conventionalized iconic signs produced according economic demands, notably
tourism, were deemed to be empty of aesthetic value derived from a personal
vision. When the same postcards were looked at from a critical, social perspective,
they became more meaningful. Postcards, being a condensation of cultural expectations
and beliefs, are ideologically charged. They are coded expressions of how
the culture that produces them looks at the world. They are coded representations
of the possible and the impossible (the real and the imaginary). They are
mythic, totemic samples, or traces whose meanings are revealed over time,
allowing the ideological narratives and semiotic coding to rise to the surface.
With time, their narratives become transformed, reconstituted through newer
interpretations, their meanings slip into other readings."
|