Canadian_Art_2016_S_

140 CANADIAN A RT • SPRING 2016

CALGARY

ESKER FOUNDATION

CHARLOTTE MOTH

by Lindsay Sorell

Paris-based Charlotte Moth’s exhibition “living images” assembled a

staggering diversity of sculptures, photos, films and research in order to

engage commercial tropes and archetypes in a humorous comman-

deering of the language of design. In a subtle parody of the modes of

presentation, the exhibition foregrounded the honest utility of its base

materials: shiny purple plastic, raw wood, fake marble, green Formica

and mirrors. At the same time, the work carried an acute awareness of

the seductive and manipulative potential of design and, ultimately, the

innate impressionability of materials. For Moth, each blank surface,

however seductive, exists in need of context and research, in need of a

social translation. Every object requires a shadow to prove its existence.

Throughout the exhibition, images of brutalist architecture—an emblem

of utopian socialist thought—and poetry were placed into marketing and

presentation displays. Story of a different thought( 2014 ) focuses on the

curious architectural experiments based on suspension and flotation in

the industrial town of Marl, Germany. In the film, the viewer is dreamily

flown through marble and concrete brutalist interiors, guided onward by

an oscillating aural collage of fragmented email conversations, poems

by Joshua Edwards and quotes taken from exhibition leaflets and history

books. The film’s narrator calmly reads out building descriptions like poem

stanzas and driving directions like scientific equations. To exercise the

viewer’s memory, the film’s underlying themes are recalled elsewhere in

the gallery in a series of typographic mind-maps and architectural maquettes.

The exhibition’s brightly lit front room was presented as the embodi-

ment of an institutional foyer. Here, Moth continued to utilize commercial

archetypes in an installation of workshop tables titled Noting Thoughts

( 2011 ). Each table was topped with pieces of bent aluminum printed with

images of plants and brutalist architectural forms. Accompanying each

image under multi-coloured filters on the tabletop were poetic fragments

taken from “Continuous Trajectories – Broken Utopias,” a text written in

response to Moth’s research by anthropologist Alice D. Peidano. As in

Story of a different thought, Moth again conflates poetry and image while

subverting a commercial presentation method usually reserved for

architectural fly-throughs of new condo buildings.

Driven by an anticipatory true-crime-esque soundtrack hinting at the

film’s subversive role, Moth’s 16-mm Filmic Sketches (2 015) opens with a

clamouring of dramatic piano, and moves into waves of droning windpipes,

intermittently relieved by interjections of sci-fi piano fortes that float out

and into adjoining rooms. Indeed, moving from room to room, the exhi-

bition’s repetition of imagery and bleeding sound works to fold time and

memory in on itself, as though perhaps it is not the viewer that is moving,

but the object that is following the viewer.

In the gallery’s hallway, light from Sculpture made to be filmed (2 0 12)—

an array of plywood boxes containing coloured light bulbs blinking in

varying sequence—animates nearby black-and-white photographs of

collected objects in domestic spaces, as well as three bronze cast hands

installed on the wall— one holding a ball, another a plastic tray and

another a striped rod. The flashing lights relieve the objects of their

inertness, and the sound drifting in from Filmic Sketches casts them anew.

By continually cross-referencing and overlapping objects and atmospheres,

Moth celebrates an unexpectedly harmonious relationship between

spheres of language and presentation, and subtly renegotiates the

multiform complexities of commercial communication.

REVIEWS

FROM LEFT: Charlotte Moth

Inserts (detail) 2 015 Four

vitrines, wood, book cloth,

plastic, paint and photographs

Dimensions variable

CO-COMMISSIONED BY ESKER

FOUNDATION AND THE BANFF CENTRE

PHOTO JOHN DEAN

Charlotte Moth Backdrops

2 015 Mirror, wood, wheels,

aluminum-mounted litho and

silkscreen print Table: 56 x

5 7 cm; Print: 69 x 10 0 cm

COURTESY MARCELLE ALIX, PARIS

PHOTO JOHN DEAN

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