Press Review on AKIMBLOG for installation Waves/Vagues presented at CIRCA.
18 June 2010
Review on Akimblog- by Stacey De Wolfe
http://www.akimbo.ca/akimblog/index.php?id=390
Just up the street from the MAC at Circa, Denise Dumas’s Waves speaks to some of the same themes explored in Yesterday’s Tomorrows, in particular, to Iñigo-Manglano Ovalle’s film Le Baiser/The Kiss, with its exploration of Mies van der Rohe’s famously unlivable Farnsworth House. According to legend, the house’s original owner was too uncomfortable to actually live in the house because its glass-walled structure made for too much interaction with the always encroaching natural environment. Dumas’ multi-media work also seems concerned with the impact that external elements have on the personal realm, as her table, the heart of domestic life, is continuously intruded upon by the natural world and its forces. But unlike Ovalle’s work, which populates the screen with figures who narrate the story with their actions – a distancing effect that serves to emphasize the fact that because the private is made public, it loses that which makes it private and personal in the first place – Dumas’ empty chairs seem to invite the spectator to imagine themselves in the work.
Stacey DeWolfe is a Montreal filmmaker and teacher. She has written for C Magazine and is the arts writer for the Montreal Mirror
