Vernissage: Saturday, January 14, 3 pm to 5 pm
Erika Dueck: Divided Proximities
Art Mûr, Montreal (QC)
Text by Anaïs Castro
A magician’s success lies in his ability to control the spectator’s attention so as to render the tricks of illusion invisible. In this sense, Erika Dueck’s work is the very opposite of prestidigitation, since from the outset, the artist delivers everything to the viewer. At first glance, it’s hard to resist her sculptures. At first glance, they appear to be assemblages of foamcore, sticky paper and accent lights, their wires dangling crudely in the void. It’s rare for such raw materials to be exhibited in a gallery space. Thus, they appear first as pieces in the making or, arranged together in the gallery space, as an exhibition site. An impatient or carefree public could easily miss the wonder of experiencing Dueck’s work. For those who are willing to pay attention, Dueck turns the world upside down: she thwarts perspective, makes verticality horizontal (and vice versa), and extends interior spaces beyond the limits of the objects that contain them. A skilled illusionist, her work fascinates, even surprises. It’s in a relationship of visual seduction that the magic of the work operates. Indeed, each piece demands the viewer’s presence, for without his deceived eye, it is no more than an incomplete assemblage of boring materials.
Through his use of miniatures, Dueck’s work is linked to the world of toys. Pretend play is part of children’s social and intellectual development.It is through their voluntary involvement in the chimerical world that they develop as human beings.Children know that play is imaginary and accept its facticity, because in return it gives them access to a world larger than their immediate environment, a world in which they can give free rein to their creativity.Dueck’s work projects us into a similar universe.The interior spaces she proposes are like theatrical sets in which our imagination can abandon itself.Moreover, they never contain any characters, allowing viewers to project themselves into them alone.Nevertheless, in these abandoned spaces, Dueck is accustomed to leaving us clues to a bygone human presence: disorder, construction, contamination and fire set the tone and character of each playlet.
In his latest documentary, HyperNormalization, Adam Curtis explores how current communication technologies have succeeded in mediatizing the world to the point of manipulating the very concept of reality. According to Curtis, the public lives in an incredulous world in which reality is a fluid, unstable and often distorted notion.If, in Curtis’s dystopia, the public has become servile, Erika Dueck’s work is both the product and the remedy of the world depicted in HyperNomalization.It forces a second and even third look, and encourages a spirit of discernment.To come into contact with Erika Dueck’s work is to seek to demystify an illusion, without ever letting go of the wonder of the optical phenomena she manipulates with ease.Her work exists in a universe in which knowledge in no way invalidates wonder; indeed, it elevates it.