Alex Fischer
Translation

Translation

Group Exhibition · O'Born Contemporary · Toronto, Canada · March 2013
Works
  1. Aurora , 2011, Digital
  2. Earlier , 2011, Luster Giclée
  3. Up , 2011, Luster Giclée
Curatorial Statement

Author: Rachel Anne Farquharson

A translation can be many things: it can be a conversion or transformation from one physical form to another, it can be a progression in biological stage, and it can even be, in the most geometric of terms, the movement of a shape along an axis. Within art's pedagogical premise, the most apt definition for translation might be the rendering of something into one's own language, semiotically or aesthetically. Viewed through this lens, geographies that are foreign, ideologies that are suspect, and modes of technology to which we find ourselves unwittingly beholden need a level plane upon which to exist in globalized society. The arrow of understanding, as the exhibition title permits, rarely points in one direction, however. It is also worth considering how translations can abet the fetishization of objects, enabling simple acts such as keeping a daily journal or memorializing a pet to suddenly become estranged and foreign.

This exhibition provides recourse into the translation of the foreign into the accessible and the banal into the fetishized, proving the process to be a current that tugs in both directions. Each artist confronts their subject, at once making it pliable to our understanding and forcing it into the realm of the monumental through inherently indexical material.

Alex Fischer reappropriates digital imagery culled from today's archival abyss, exacting the terror of the sublime through an exposition of our dissolved communion with nature.

John Monteith transforms composite digital photography into a continuous film loop, a transubstantiation that proposes the foreign social and ideological landscape of North Korea as an unknowable environment to the Western mind. Digital photography reprinted as film is as much a facsimile as Petrina Ng's heirloom tapestries, where government-issued documents form the cartoon for recognizably domestic cross-stitches. Heirloom Facsimile, the artist's tri-part work, explores not only the physical journey artefacts take as they are passed between relatives but also the way in which propagandistic language and concepts translate between Eastern and Western schools of thought.

Callum Schuster creates abstracted daily journal entries by engaging with artefacts of the day — metal shorn from a soy silo or indigo material from a current installation project. The artist grinds these mundane objects down to particulate matter and suspends them in varnish or medium, simultaneously redefining paint as a medium and alluding to human's inclination to entrap mosquitoes in amber. His preservation of each day becomes a ritualistic and alchemical act as solid matter is translated into a medium that bears enhanced meaning.

In conversation, the artists in this exhibition aim to translate aspects of life, either by material or digital processes. In doing so, their works turn relatively mediocre materials into monumental versions of themselves and it becomes apparent that this translation is not uni-directional. The bizarre, propagandistic material that forms the basis of Ng's family heirloom and the society pictured by Monteith are delivered through accessible forms such as the domestic cross-stitch or the recognizable film reel. Conversely, Fischer's dismantling of the internet archive, Ng's dog fur diamonds and Schuster's faux pigment demonstrate that the current of transformation can be reversed, rendering an object strange through its monumentality as well. Transformed in these ways, the landscapes of social, psychic, cultural, physical and political content breach the boundaries of ordinary experience, inciting their audience to new personal and collective understanding.

These artworks are translated semiotically into recognizable — arguably understandable — forms. Absorptive physical platforms such as cross-stitch tapestries, diamonds, analog film, and paint deliver a programme which translates the mundane into the memorialized. And yet, none of the works exhibited here are as commonplace as they pretend to be. Seemingly banal environments and an archive of internet images with which we are lambasted every day have here been monumentalized, an attempt at archiving certain facts about life today.

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John Monteith: And So It Is

Author: Rachel Anne Farquharson

By presenting the narrative of stasis in cinematic form John Monteith complicates his audience's response to the biological, political, and social aspects of time and space. The process used to create And So It Is, a 16mm film work composed of 100 layered still images projected in a continuous loop, transforms clean, still moments into visually noisy, obscured surveillance. Still though these images may be, the whir of the projector indicates a reel in motion — a noise which, to Roland Barthes, indicates time's forward pointing arrow.

The material aspects of the film expose a strange truth about a political and social condition peculiar to present day North Korea and the later part of its twentieth century history — balanced poised on the shoulders of their departed leader, Kim Il Sung. Where the physical body and sound of the film suggest progression in time, the still image meeting the viewers' eye brings into high relief an unchanged architectural, and social moment. Identifying this current year as year 101, a dating system recalibrated to the date of Kim Il Sung's birth, the apparatus of the state is remarkably contingent on an enduring bond between citizen and absent leader, entrapping the landscape in a vacuum of time and space.

It is this disparity in societal homeostasis that Monteith aims to translate. Original digital images are given volume when turned into film, a transubstantiated body which translates the foreign social and ideological landscape of North Korea into an accessible image. Simultaneously the banality of the city and landscape that the artist photographs become monumentalized and this estrangement amplifies the ritualism intrinsic to this society.

Notes

Form and content do not always stand in correspondence but rather in contradiction; they do not duplicate each other but mediate and translate each other. The subject-object relationship becomes transformed or translated as form "destroys" content.

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Petrina Ng: Heirloom Facsimile

Author: Rachel Anne Farquharson

Ng co-ordinates an interest in familial lineage, as well as archives and artefacts, with the pursuit of human's inclination to monumentalize or aggrandize these objects. In Heirloom Facsimile, a tri-part series of tapestry works based on a government-issued document first possessed by the artist's grandmother, Ng explores not only the physical journey artefacts take as they are passed between relatives, but also the way that propagandistic language and concepts translate between Eastern and Western schools of thought.

The documents materialized in Heirloom Facsimile originated in China and were issued by an apparently governmental body called the Hong Kong Administrative Unit. The texts begin in Chinese, but transition to English half way through. The content of the document regards the nature of cancer and advises on preventative measures largely based in Eastern Medicine. The language used, which was most likely intended to be convincing, reads much like the chain-letter vernacular that many North Americans may be familiar with. Heirloom Facsimile enables viewers not only to consider the way the Chinese approach cancer — for example, it is widely held that while everyone gets cancer eight or nine times in their life, it can be resolved through diet and holistic care — but also the way more remote societies choose to disseminate information in comparison to Western medical/governmental/social communities. Heirloom Facsimile therefore involves a translation of sorts, or a reframing of what we are encountering to fit within the confines of our own terms.

The document was faxed by Petrina Ng's grandmother to her father from China, the process giving the page quite a bit of visual noise. From there, Ng's father scanned each page and emailed them to the artist. Ng printed the facsimiles on A4 paper, the customary size in the UK, blew each up to A0 (4x), creating templates or cartoons for her cross-stitch tapestries. The enlarging process pixelated the text and so each pixel is translated into one cross-stitch. The material process of information transfer, from b/w fax, to colour scan, to b/w print, to b/grey on white embroidery mimics the transformation through which the subject-object relationship goes as the audience experiences the work. The document is translated from 2-D to 3-D. From code to body, as if by transubstantiation. From propaganda to monument. In other words, the form of the work serves as a physical metaphor for the way in which we must translate the work's content in order to understand it. Ng translated government-issued nonsense into a keepsake and legacy artefact. A fac-simile: not a fact but a fax (a slant rhyme) and a simile, which is a "like" or "as" — not an "is." The word play here, calling into question the veridical identity of the document, also gestures towards the ultimate impossibility to archive something legitimately. The ultimate failure of the archive.

Personal dimension: Medical translation between western empirical treatment and more suspect eastern remedy has been mediated by Ng's personal experience with cancer. Subjective experience can transform even the most propagandistic notions into truths. This body of work has perhaps enabled the artist to better understand how life experiences translate into knowledge and behaviour — how the initial work of an artist reflects a one-to-one relationship whereas a mature artist gestates and processes thoughts, going beyond self-interested manifestations. This is related to Freud's stages of development and understanding immediate sensory perception versus knowing what senses can exist beyond what is being felt at the time.

Notes

Rachel Farquharson's editorial notes embedded in the draft:

- Re: John Monteith section — "I realise that you are asserting your intentions here but does it conflict with the overall argument I am making about translating concepts to gain a better understanding? I mean, I think that the noisiness of the visual experience viewers have when watching your film contrasted against the actual static state of the image perfectly delivers the ideological landscape of N Korea. So, they actually gain a better understanding, not because they come to subscribe to the socio-cultural way of thinking in NK, but because they understand something more of the nature of it. You are opening up a closed world for people here. Don't you think?"
- "I adjusted this to 'artists' so that I could use [it] later instead of repeating it. Do these two sentences make sense?"
- "Translation: No need to explain, needs a strong statement for the title"