CANDICE BREITZ at the Power Plant (231 Queens Quay West), to November 15. $6, stu/srs $3, free Wednesday 5-8 pm. 416-973-4949. Rating: NNNN
Video was not always my thing. Accustomed to viewing predictable narratives from the comfort of the couch or multiplex, I balked at the prospect of sitting on a box wearing headphones to watch some repetitive or static experiment.
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But shows like Candice Breitz’s Same Same have made me a convert.
Most of the South African-born, Berlin-based artist’s work focuses on deconstructing movie and music personas. Legend has 30 singing heads of Jamaican Bob Marley fans doing their version of Could You Be Loved Becoming screens clips of female movie stars while an androgynous Breitz repeats their lines on back-to-back monitors.
Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep star in Him+Her. Two rooms hold seven screens on which their film clips, with backgrounds blacked out, play as a kind of soliloquy or self-examination. Nicholson always portrays a similar menacing, unhinged character, concerned mainly with questioning his own sanity. In the other room, a persona emerges despite Streep’s chameleon assortment of accents and period costumes: a smart woman obsessed with a failed marriage or relationship.
Moving away from pop culture into documentary territory, Breitz filmed identical twins in Toronto for Factum, commissioned by the Power Plant. As the three pairs of women speak on issues of individuality, sexuality, ethnicity, rural upbringing and aging, their subtle differences in appearance and temperament become evident. (The artist is still working on five other sets of interviews, and the AGO has acquired the complete work.)
They’re bracing double doses of reality after the stunted media-constructed women, and the twin concept, besides being a unique take on the split self in dialogue, seems oddly appropriate to Canadian dualities like French/English, immigrant/North American.
No other medium could dissect personal and pop-cultural narratives in quite the same way.
art@nowtoronto.com
