‘Not Quite How I Remember It’ at The Power Plant

I’m writing these impressions of The Power Plant’s summer show, Not Quite How I Remember It, from the other side of a somewhat fuzzy Canada Day weekend that stands as a handy temporal buffer between the moment of viewing the exhibition and my writing on it now - it’s a gesture that is either an homage to the past-present tensions of the show’s concept or else entirely sarcastic on my part. Recording my thoughts on this exhibition as memory certainly doesn’t improve my impression of the show’s purpose or results.

The idea behind Not Quite How I Remember It is to examine how artists examine past events and narratives as archival memory depicted in the present, largely through historical re-enactment and strategies of appropriation presented here as a sort of collective authorship; often, the very transparency with which these devices are used lacks a certain originality, which I suppose is meant to be all cute and self-referential. The very nature of that concept, as well as its basis in strictly twentieth century events, means that much of the work takes on the media of modern archives - namely, photography and video. Of the fourteen artists participating in this show, nine employed these methods as the primary components of their works, and if the notion of fourteen artists competing for attention isn’t daunting enough, consider the time needed to take in upwards of eleven durational video works between them. As The Power Plant’s accompanying brochure kindly assures me, ‘Many works require time and patience to unravel,’ but be prepared to give the effort the better part of an afternoon.

That same brochure essay continues, ‘Caught in a dynamic tension between accessibility and reticence, the process of deciphering works asks us to dig deeply into our personal and collective image and data banks.’ This also proves painfully accurate, and while I can certainly enjoy the in-joking of such things as Diane Borsato’s ‘Three Performances’ (the image above depicting her take on Beuys’ ‘I Like America and America Likes Me’) and am actually enough of a sci-fi nerd to appreciate the content of Gerald Byrne’s rather overwhelming installation of ‘1984 and Beyond’, I wonder how much of this material would actually prove downright alienating to an audience lacking a fine art education. Even when the subject of these historical re-enactments is more widely accessible - such as repeated references to various civil rights movements, or else the near-manipulative presentation of blind German youth in Felix Gmelin’s ‘Tools and Grammar’ as an evocation of Nazism - a sense of privileged self-indulgence tends to pervade many of these works, as though the audience is merely a voyeur to the rigorous intellectual masturbation at work here, their understanding, enjoyment or lack thereof a secondary concern at best.

Something that does prove to be a strength of this show, albeit a not entirely visible one, is the recurrence of light as an element in these works with its implicit relation to Truth. Light as a principle medium of both still and moving photography lends a certain metaphorical weight to the cultural acceptance of these media as objective records of true events, and gives credence to the pesky dominance of these methods in this show. Where that concept becomes quite toothy, however, is in three photographic transparencies by Mary Kelly - mounted on lightboxes, funnily enough - depicting a group of feminist protestors progressively disappearing from the image in increasingly wild blurs of light. Compared to the rest of the show, it’s a quiet and modest work, but one that does much to emphasize light’s ability to obfuscate as well as record, photography’s tendency to reveal as much as conceal its subject. With that lesson in mind, the lapses in reality seen among the other artists are more easily appreciated.

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