All is not as it seems
- Lalie DOUGLAS
In a faker than fake world, how do we decide what is really real? With her solo exhibition at Circa, Lalie Douglas proposes a series of narrative vignettes about the failure of representation, a happily artificial world that belies its inability to convince us of its true nature.
As a kind of ontological peep show, this installation offers multiple glimpses of inaccessible tableaux both sweetly compelling and comically macabre. Arriving in the gallery, we are blocked from proceeding further as we face the back of a façade of a compact, life-sized house whose windows let us peer through, past the empty floor space, to miniature dioramas mounted on the far walls. Using precisely angled viewfinders we discover a realm of ordinary domestic objects and phenomena, but all is not as it seems in these quaint montages.
This is not the idealized world of the miniature in which we suspend disbelief and daydream. Instead, we see ourselves in the act of looking and discerning tiny carved and moulded models that, despite all their ‘petite sincerity’, are themselves in the act of pretending to be objects. Not only is this fictitious world blatantly unable to resemble what it’s representing, it flaunts its failure with ironic touches and everything seems to be going up in smoke!
With semiotic economy, Douglas creates a deception that questions the mode of perception itself. By controlling the position of the binoculars and viewfinders she creates various levels of remove at which we gather visual information. By offering multiple viewpoints – broad, narrow, partial, illusory – she creates an elegant metaphor for the artifice of all art and the arbitrariness of social constructs: negotiating our way among incommensurable views – accumulating perspectives and values here, breaking rules there – we construct our composite vision of the world.
This work incorporates elements and elaborates themes that have recurred in the past decade of Douglas’ oeuvre. In her recent outdoor performance projects, finely crafted objects – delicious house-shaped cakes, carved chocolate birds, ice houses that melt – were consumed or left randomly as ‘found gifts’. In all cases, their construction and destruction counts as the work; the event is the thing, rather than the physical object.
Now in a gallery setting, we encounter this collection of self-aware objects in a new syntax, as players in a narrative that posits perception as an event. Fragmented and slowed down to a browse, our visual experience is mediated by a set of perceptual roadblocks that transform our relation to the gallery space. The notion of the gallery as mediated space is reified in the empty expanse that connects us to the wall vignettes; the entire room becomes the viewfinder.
Barbara Wisnoski
Montreal artist Lalie Douglas created objects and object-based performances and installations. She has exhibited her work locally and internationally. Her recent projects include Take Your Fears Away (Calgary and Montreal, 2009), The Things That Tie You Down, (Toronto, 2009), Failing (Boston, 2008), Have You Seen Any?, (Montreal, 2007), Small Dead Birds as a Unit of Measure (Montreal, 2006). Her work has been supported by several grants including a research and creation grant from the Canada Council and she holds an MFA from Concordia University.
