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Art Art & Books

Truth or dare

PAULETTE PHILLIPS at Diaz Contemporary (100 Niagara), to March 17. 416-361-2972. See listing. Rating: NNNN


Can art ever tell the truth? Toronto’s Paulette Phillips pursues her fascination with the cultural and ethical spaces in which truth and lies are concealed in her new show, The Directed Lie.

In 2009, she trained in Maryland alongside police officers and federal agents to become an accredited polygraph tester. Two months later, skilled in the art of legal truth detection, she set out to administer lie detector tests to the artistic intelligentsia, 238 people in all, in eight international cities.

The results of the Toronto and Vancouver tests are the basis of her new show at Diaz Contemporary. Filmmaker Atom Egoyan, composer Tom Third and novelist Sheila Heti are among the subjects. Each test was filmed, and this makes up the exhibit’s video component: viewers can watch the interviewees sit strapped to a polygraph machine, answering questions while three needles measuring their respiration, heart rate and galvanic skin response record their telltale physiological reflexes.

Artists actively pursue relational and aesthetic modes of truth-telling that are often unexpected and pointedly paradoxical. Polygraphs are machines used by the state and its agencies to obtain concrete certainties from accused criminals. It’s hard to imagine a more volatile or compelling mismatch. Phillips has succeeded in getting opposed modes of truth-seeking to sing an odd, discordant duet.

To make things even more interesting, she directed all her subjects to lie. Half the genius of this show is the questions, pitched in gentle shades that leave any objective truth in hopelessly soft focus. The subjects, some grave and some cheeky, respond to a series of yes/no questions pitched with just the right degree of semantic ambiguity. Thus, each test is also a subversion of the process of institutional truth-seeking, leaving the answers up for wry interpretation.

According to Phillips, subjects who approached the test lightly, even flippantly, were unexpectedly shaken by the process. In this seemingly playful investigation of state-sanctioned truth-seeking, Phillips has unearthed a deep vein of apprehension and complexity that lies buried in our collective ideas about personal accountability, ethics and the truth.

art@nowtoronto.com

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