Rare (Ad)diction

Curated by Scott McLeod

August 17 to September 22, 2001

Rare (Ad)diction is an exhibition which explores the obsessive-compulsive impulse in contemporary photographic art. In this show, four unique artistic voices from Canada and South America engage in social commentary through the formal devices of series and multiples, and the characteristics of irony, caricature and humour. By obsessively documenting mundane cultural artifacts, these artists make visible the fundamental assumptions, beliefs and values of Western society. By rendering visible the mechanisms by which oppressive orders are created and perpetuated, these artists empower the viewer to envision ways of critiquing and challenging racism, sexism and imperialism.

In Bitter Sweet Story, Toronto artist Julie Arnold has created a careful assemblage of Anglo-Saxon surnames from headstones, the black-and-white photographs presented in a grid of three by thirteen. Her particular choices emphasize the fact that, within western patriarchal societies, surnames have often had their etymological origins in the bearers¹ occupations, or physical or psychological characteristics. This linguistic connection is remarkably revealing of our culture¹s dominant narratives and provides "a powerful example of the human penchant for reducing complex realities to single-word generalizations."1 The first and second horizontal rows consist of names which also serve as English-language adjectives, while the third row of names function as English-language nouns. Viewed vertically, the names can be read as three-word phrases such as "Strong White Leader" and "Pretty Little Nurse." Etched into stone. these phrases demonstrate, with ironic detachment, social values as rigid and old as language itself. Viewed diagonally, however, alternative three-word phrases such as "Sweet Fatt Lover" and Noble Little Hood" can be created, thus locating the potential for the subversion of existing stereotypes. The fixity of the stone is then reinterpreted as a marker of the death of oppressive regimes of thought and behaviour. Arnold converts the impediments of language and the shackles of social convention into a playful, humourous exercise in unfettered potential.

The Phenomenology of Licorice by Toronto artist Susan Kealey is a photographic taxonomy of licorice candy. For this project, Kealey has assumed the guise of a cultural ethnographer to pursue an unusual study of the social identity of the people of the Netherlands. The Dutch spend the equivalent of forty-five million dollars annually on this candy and consume it at a rate of fifteen thousand kilograms daily. Photographed against lustrous velvet fabric and subtly enhanced through darkroom printing techniques to simulate a metallic sheen, these candies at first resemble primitive artifacts recovered from a lost civilization. Upon closer examination, however, one recognizes these artifacts as contemporary Western representations, in myriad forms ranging from popular cartoon characters to the Virgin Mary, from objects representing common trades and activities to figures representing cultural and racial stereotypes. The mass consumption of this candy is an apt metaphor for "swallowing" the ideologies of western capitalist nations, an act which all too often is as unconscious as eating. Through the sheer scope of her obsessive documentation, Kealey defamiliarizes the commonplace and, in so doing, reveals the cultural heritage, the legacies of pride and shame, and the hopes and aspirations of Dutch society.