TASMAN RICHARDSON at MOCCA (952 Queen West) to April 1. 416-395-0067. See listing. Rating: NNNN
Where do images end and we begin? In Necropolis, curator Rhonda Corvese and video artist Tasman Richardson have constructed a labyrinth inside MOCCA, a multimedia installation that addresses our entanglement with visual culture.
Richardsons premise is that images have an afterlife, haunting our collective imagination. Hence the necromantic, spooky feel of the show, with its winding corridor painted impenetrably black and populated by ghostly screens and pulsing with light and raw static. This is a show you grope and listen your way through as much as view.
The first installation, Forever Endeavour, plays with Heather O’Rourke’s turn as the child in Poltergeist. Her haunted, cherubic face stares past the viewer while, across the narrow passageway, the face of Naomi Watts in The Ring, stares back at her on a second monitor. Both characters see ghosts in the static, and their mesmerized horror is contagious, all the more so because the two faces morph into each other, a process infinitely reflected by dark mirrors on the floor and ceiling between them.
Memorial, the most iconographic work in this show, sets images of Joan of Arc in a mock stained glass rosetta window. Each piece of the window is a video screen showing Joan as she’s been cinematically portrayed, starting with The Passion Of Joan Of Arc by Carl Theodor Dreyer and radiating outward to Milla Jovovich’s stint as Joan in 1999’s The Messenger. The structure elegantly demonstrates cinema’s self-memorialization and creation of layer after layer of alternative parallel narratives.
Pan, an installation on two large screens that form the final segment of the show, consists of three clips from Ken Russell’s Altered States, Kubrick’s 2001 and Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void painstakingly “braided” together. The result resembles a hallucinogenic near-death experience rendered in supersaturated colour and sound, a maelstrom where notions of the void and transcendence blur into each other with no clear distinction between them.
This bleeding of the human into the technological, of the horrific into the sublime, almost marks Richardson as an old-school Romantic. His investigation of images tests the limits of our cultural and perceptual boundaries, which he breaks apart and reconfigures with disturbing precision.
art@nowtoronto.com
