Through her exhibition Loudspeakers and Other Forms of Listening at the Carleton University Art Gallery, the American artist Sharon Hayes does not simply re-enact the political past but re-fashions it with dry humour, a sense of the absurd, and empathy, by marking our historical differences and making them materially present. For example, in the four-channel video installation Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20 & 29, one of her signature works on display, Hayes is coached by an audience as she falteringly recites partially memorized transcripts of the four taped statements made by Patty Hearst during her captivity with the SLA in the 1970s. Each work in the exhibition contains a similar, interior structural spacing, like a broadcast delay that suspends the immediate reception of its address.
Sharon Hayes, We Knew We Would Go to Jail, still, two-channel video installation, 2003-2012.
Curated by Heather Anderson, the exhibition features nine works deploying a variety of media including textiles, video, audio, and prints through which the artist reveals a very personal side of the political that is vulnerable to doubt. All the works are displayed within a variable structure of makeshift platforms, partitions and risers by the artist in collaboration with Andrea Geyer titled Space Set / Set Space that is both a framework for the exhibition and a work of art itself, encouraging viewers to prolong their engagement with the materials, discover connections, and try to answer the myriad questions evoked in the process. Like the placards left blank in the drawings within the five-page poster project, In Times Like This Only Criminals Remain Silent, another collaboration with Geyer, viewers can project their own concerns onto the works.
The reflexive aspects of the exhibition are doubled by the fact that it is being presented at CUAG, as several of the works consider the university as a crucible for political activism and the formation of political and personal identity. As an apocryphal preamble to the exhibition, there is a video monitor displaying archival photographs of protests by Carleton students through the 1960s. An undergraduate on campus might even identify with the twenty-something interlocutors of the video installation We Knew We Would Go to Jail if he or she didn't get the sense that they were putting on an act. The exhibition offers a study in how politics are represented, performed, and taught.
Finally, Anderson makes the best use of the Mezzanine Gallery at the CUAG that I've seen: a 100-foot-long banner reading "Now a chasm has opened between us that holds us together and keeps us apart" is both architectural foil and speech act, running along the railing that overhangs the Main Gallery. Paired with the Dennis Tourbin show below, it is well worth multiple visits.
CUAG: http://cuag.carleton.ca/
Sharon Hayes: Loudspeakers and Other Forms of Listening continues until April 27.
Michael Davidge is an artist, writer, and independent curator who lives in Ottawa, Ontario. His writing on art and culture has appeared in Border Crossings, BlackFlash, and C Magazine, among other publications. He is Akimblog's Ottawa correspondent and can be followed on Twitter @MichaelDavidge.
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Sharon Hayes at the Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa
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