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There’s a lot of spinning going on in Shaun Gladwell’s installation Portrait Of A Man: Alive And Spinning/Dead As A Skeleton Dressed As A Mountie at Georgia Scherman Projects.
On video, Vancouver skate legend Kevin Harris does a 360-degree spin on two skateboards. Another video shows performance artist Bill Shannon doing helicopter spins on crutches in a New York subway. A row of Harris’s skateboards with their signature skeleton Mountie logos that Gladwell ordered as a teenager living in Australia line a third wall.
Gladwell explores three major youthful preoccupations: skateboarding, hip-hop and fast cars. Like art, they are intensely solitary preoccupations that border on manic. Like him, his spinning subjects seem to be trying to wrest as much intensity as they can out of the present.
The artist’s video style, at once clinical and dreamy, shows each subject in slow motion. They appear both graceful and solipsistic, performing their impressive physical feats for the public while lost in their private worlds.
In the back room, a tiny PSP stuck partway in the wall reveals a video of a black Trans Am, slowed to a crawl, churning up clouds of dust while turning doughnuts in the Australian outback.
In another piece, a large and exquisitely detailed photographic still, the roiling dust clouds, resembling a dust storm with no discernible origin, are all that remain while the car is enigmatically hidden.
Other bifurcations and interruptions echo this concealment of the car. In a tiny maquette, jet black motorcycles and Trans Ams are partially embedded in or emerging through walls.
The show might seem a bit sparse and puzzling at first viewing. The skateboarder, the breakdancer and the hot rod reference a male vision of grandeur from a specific era.
But it raises interesting questions about the myths we build around the activities that continue to fascinate us, and the narratives we construct around our personal history and obsessions.
art@nowtoronto.com
