David Cronenberg: Transformation (Guide)

By Noah Cowan
TIFF Cinematheque/TIFF Bell Lightbox 180 magazine
September 2013

Additional (wonderful) texts can be found in the PDF
by Laurel MacMillan, Andréa Picard and Thom Powers

Produced in partnership with The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA), David Cronenberg: Transformation is the visual art component of TIFF’s multifaceted 2013 endeavour, The Cronenberg Project. Curators David Liss and Noah Cowan invited six artists with clear affinities for Cronenberg’s films to respond to a specific theme in his work: the yearning to witness the next stage of human evolution. Providing a cross-section of Cronenberg’s enormous impact on visual arts language, these works form the core of Future Projections this year, exemplifying the programme’s commitment to explore the rapidly expanding field of media art informed by the history, culture and aesthetics of cinema.

Treatment Candice Breitz
2013
Dual-channel video
Presented and organized in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art
Co-curated by Noah Cowan and David Liss

A shared interest in the interplay between the clinical and the personal brings Candice Breitz and David Cronenberg uncomfortably close in Treatment, a multi-channel meditation on Cronenberg’s The Brood. She has selected three key scenes of the film, each unsettling interactions between Dr. Hal Raglan, a radical psychiatrist, and his patients: an infantilized male, and a rage-filled woman who produces embodiments of her emotions as fetal monsters dropping off her body. Breitz recognizes the film as Cronenberg’s most confessional, a cri de cœur about his failed marriage, the crackpot therapist that destroyed it, and his resulting fears around parental influence. She meets him on his own terms, enlisting her own therapist, herself, her mother, and her father to re-dub the scenes in a studio, on camera. Their portrait-like line readings are positioned in the gallery directly across from Cronenberg’s original scenes, underscoring the universal anxieties and discomfiting emotions his work elicits in audiences. The result is a highly personal, and frighteningly precise—a response to a filmmaker baring his soul.
—Noah Cowan

Candice Breitz was born in Johannesburg and is based in Berlin. Her moving image installations have been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, the Sundance Film Festival, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her work can be seen in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and MoMA.

Swarm
James Coupe
2013
Stereo cameras, computers, monitors
Presented and organized in Partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art
Co-curated by Noah Cowan and David Liss

James Coupe’s highly unusual practice combines elements of contemporary industrial surveillance and the darker side of social media. In Swarm, he riffs on the social paranoia undulating through David Cronenberg’s cinema and, in particular, the shifts in personal identity brought about by new technology in his films. Coupe has created a staged area within the gallery to capture the surface identities of visitors, processing their “look” through social media algorithms, and assigning them various “clan allegiances”—a reference to J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise. The images are re-channeled onto monitors, showing the gallery as if it were exclusively occupied by specific demographics of people. In Coupe’s terrifying universe, visitors will “see the clans occupying the museum, proliferating in number, assembling and dispersing: a community that appear to be waiting for something to happen but in fact dramatically demonstrates how social media technologies involve a redistribution of identities based upon principles of demographic segmentation, social exclusivity, and the illusion of community.
—Noah Cowan

James Coupe was born in Blackpool, England, and is based in Seattle. His work has been exhibited widely in the United Kingdom and North America. Most recently, his exhibition Sanctum was displayed at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, Seattle, and On Observing the Observer of the Observers at the Phillips Museum of Art, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Introduction to The Memory Personality/Jeremy Shaw

Introduction to The Memory Personality (TIFF Expanded Version)
—Jeremy Shaw

Rough Cut (Hiker Meat)
Jamie Shovlin
2012–2013
Multi-channel HD video
Presented and organized in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art
Co-curated by Noah Cowan and David Liss

Hiker Meat may be a horror exploitation film, a low-rent iteration of the type David Cronenberg was making in the 1970s. And Jamie Shovlin may have created it by reassembling 1,500 film sequences from generically relevant films. Those fragments contributed to an assembly of sixty scenes, presented in an order that apparently addresses the iconic character of this highly structured cinematic form. Shovlin has never shown this creation in a cinema and has no plans to do so. Instead, he has taken a number of oblique approaches to defining what Hiker Meat might be and how it might have been created without his intervention, for example by presenting seventy-six feet of possibly archival blackboard storyboards. The project has now reached a new level of ontological uncertainty with Rough Cut (Hiker Meat), a gallery-based combination of a newly reconstructed “making of” documentary, an exact re-enactment (or unearthed archival fragment) of the film’s opening and closing sequences, plus an original trailer and a few “magical objects” from what might have been Hiker Meat’s production location.
—Noah Cowan

Jamie Shovlin lives and works in London. He is known for such exhibitions as Naomi V. Jelish and Folk Anthology 1976–1981. His work has been acquired by both the Saatchi Gallery and Elspeth and Imogen Turner Collection in London, and has been featured at Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, the Tate Modern in London, and Artists Space in New York.