Solstice greetings,
I thought I would share a review of a loft show in the Plateau last winter that went unpublished. It was an ephemeral one-night event that brought me back to my days of performing in galleries in the 2010s. I like how this group of younger artists embraced both technology and sentimentality, two themes often derided in the traditional art world.
“truth_kissed_flesh,” Jacqueline Beaumont, Surya Bei, Raya Noire, Koko, December 4, 2022 at 3655 Saint Laurent, Montréal.
An artist-led show from a generation steeped in the digital (embraced here with a QR code-laden exhibition poster and a proof-of-attendance NFT), “truth_kissed_flesh” advances a romantigoth affect of enchantment and angst. Here, technology is an ambient given rather than a topical theme. With the cryptic coda { Technology is temporary / Emo is forever }, an exhibition text composed by Surya Bei in the diaristic meter of a web poem (unsure if angelfire, livejournal, or tumblr) stresses that anyone can interpret the artworks how they want. The concept reads, perhaps unintentionally, as an expression of faith as an elegy to truth in our “post-truth era.”
Bei’s flatscreen lightboxes bear static images, opaquely executed in collaboration with an AI(s). They contain sharp, detailed yet somehow indiscernible renderings of vibrant insectoid figures and faces. I’m a fan of the surreal visions created by AI (and bought one of Bei’s beautiful matte black poster prints, also illustrated with AI, which were for sale at a merch table), although Bei’s pieces are a real black box, made seemingly free from the careful considerations taken by artists who use AI as more of a tool within an existing well-defined practice. There’s something infectious about Bei’s uncritical embrace of these technologies, simply because arguments against AI art are often so tedious and retrograde in their definitions of art and aesthetics.
Propped on cinder blocks above a tangle of wires, Bei’s works cast a cool aquamarine glow throughout the space, which created the perfect grunge chic mood for Raya Noire’s musical performance, an emotive collection of lo-fi songs with a dark shoegaze feel. Printed photos were left scattered on the floor after Noire’s set, shared offline, like an excess of nostalgia for a time when pics weren’t taken just to be posted.
Across the room, Jacqueline Beaumont’s “bio-art” sculptures provided a restrained, and tactile, counterpoint to Bei’s digital fever dreams. Beaumont’s elegant pieces convincingly mesh technology and art, with their encoded meanings drawn from chemistry and biology paired with a canny grasp of the language of contemporary sculpture. Works like “The End of a Bloodline” (an oblong Pyrex dish filled with a dark brown powder that turned out to be recycled human blood, perched on a modular styrofoam shelf) and “Pelvic Floor” (a small glass vitrine on the floor containing a 3D printed fox pelvis suspended in sulphur-colored gelatin, like an echo of Paul Thek’s reliquaries) speculate on futures, fantasies – and perhaps truths – told through the lens of science.
As for the night’s closing performance, by Koko, I will admit that I couldn’t get a good vantage point because the venue had filled up so much by then and I had become fairly comfy on the large couch near the entrance, but from what I caught of the artist’s carnal pantomime – accessorized with tall white thigh-high boots, two-piece outfit (crop top front: RENT, hot pants bottom: DUE), and violently gestural makeup – it seemed to successfully conjure yet another existential iteration of “truth” “kissed” and “flesh.”