Aesthetic Paralysis
Enzo Cillo, Sarah Fuller, Michael Heindl, Ed Janzen, Jillian McDonald, Brad Muir, Jens Pecho, Vera Sebert
February 17 to March 16, 2024
How does one make art about being unable to make art? We’ve used the phrase aesthetic paralysis to describe this place of inbetweenness, realizing it could be a temporary or permanent phenomenon. Creative blocks are usually depicted as clichés—the hamfisted tropes presented in popular entertainment. In reality, this ambivalence is a common occurrence in the lives of working artists but it is largely hidden from view, a hopefully passing condition. How is this limbo overcome? When does it end? (It always involves time but, of course, time ends everything.)
The eight moving image artists in this online exhibition have engaged with the frustration of the blank page, canvas and especially the screen in the extraordinary way that art can address thorny or liminal problems. Who better to see the contours of voids and the poetry of silence even as they fear being surplus or unoriginal? They shift the frame to create structure and image from nothingness and sit comfortably with stasis. They consider how they are in thrall to their artistic output, the privilege of their creative exploration, when capitulation or cessation is a useful strategy and whether recombination can offer a new approach to old problems.
Is any artistic action or imagined narrative an appropriate response to perceived futility in the face of world crises? We think so, in the unflinching acceptance of the failures and triumphs of the creative process: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
– Deborah de Boer & Todd Eacrett
Silent Edge
Enzo Cillo, Italy/Ireland, 2017, 5 min
Silent Edge is a work that questions ideas about vision itself. The idea of this project comes from a reflection on the concept of “limit.” The space constrained between the horizontal and the vertical, between X and Y.
Enzo Cillo is a new media artist interested in the mechanism of perception and the idea of the image as a set of shapes and distances. His research investigates the meaning of the space within the image. His works try to deconstruct the visible field, emptying it from its meaning. Moving forward he had the opportunity to rethink not only the video itself but also the moment when the projection is meant as the spatial extension of the image. His works are exhibited in various museums and international festivals such as Transient Visions, ECRA, nodoCCS and Experiments in Cinema. He currently lives and works in Rome.
Camouflage (Boulder/Iceland)
Sarah Fuller, Canada/Iceland, 2016, 4 min,
In Camouflage (Boulder/Iceland) I utilize the photograph object to investigate the difference between a lithic and a human sense of time. My embodiment as a boulder within the Icelandic landscape is intended to reference a glacial erratic—a tangible remnant of geologic memory and time within the landscape.
Sarah Fuller is a settler-Canadian artist who works across the mediums of photography, video and installation. She has been an artist in residence at the Ós Residency in Blönduós, Iceland, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Laughing Waters, Australia and the Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Italy. She holds an MFA from the University of Ottawa and a BFA from Emily Carr University. Recent exhibitions include Remold at the C2 Centre for Craft, Redesigning Paradise at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies with artists Mary Anne Barkhouse, Dianne Bos and Penelope Stewart and Terra Incogknita at PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts. Fuller’s work is in public and private collections including the Canada Council for the Arts Art Bank, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Walter Phillips Gallery, the Indie Photobook Library and Global Affairs Canada.
Drawing from Nature (Episode 3)
Michael Heindl, Austria, 2023, 4 min
In this filmic work, I deal with the ambivalent consequences of human curiosity, in which attention and interest in something brings with it the possibility of its destruction. I am particularly interested in the tipping points at which curiosity and the associated openness to the unknown turn into an urge for control.
The title Drawing from Nature refers to the artistic practice of nature study. It is a way of visually and mentally appropriating what is observed, which subsequently allows one to freely dispose of the representation of the motif. I make use of this principle in my work. In my studies of nature, however, I try to include both the motif and the observer himself. My specific interest here is in the area between the two poles, the area of tension in which the weighting of open-mindedness and dominance is decided.
The starting point of Michael Heindl's work is the examination of the structures and dynamics that determine human action in contemporary Western societies. In times when familiar systems and supposed certainties are eroding and concepts for a new order have not yet been defined, areas of tension develop. For Heindl, this results in cracks in the perception of the world, which allow room for interpretation and thus a renegotiation of things. In his work, he is concerned with exploring this scope and the artistic potential that this entails. He usually implements his ideas in the form of targeted actions and interventions, which are documented on film and later presented. His works have been shown in Vancouver, Hong Kong, Cairo and London, among other places, and have received several awards, such as the Vienna Shorts Jury Prize (2021) and the Lentos Kunstpreis (2016).
6 Permutations
Ed Janzen, Canada, 2018, 2 min
A trial-and-error attempt to reconcile presence and absence.
Ed Janzen is a video, installation and fire sculpture artist. He holds a BFA in Visual Art and a BCS from the University of Windsor. His work has been shown in galleries and experimental film and video festivals across Canada and internationally. He currently resides in Windsor, Ontario.
Animals on the Verge
Jillian McDonald, Canada/USA, 2022, 33 min
Animals on the Verge combines Google’s ready-made 3D animals, considered a “perfect quarantine activity,” juxtaposed with drawings of holes on white paper, via Augmented Reality on a mobile phone. Animals stand tentatively at the edge of giant holes in the earth, sometimes treading water in or down in the holes. Some of these holes are gas emission craters, where melting permafrost releases enormous volumes of trapped gas in an explosive crater-forming event, or the infamous Gates of Hell in Turkmenistan—a fiery crater left burning since a 1971 Soviet drilling accident. The animals appear trapped in a glitch and unable to cross, but unharmed and waiting in limbo.
Jillian McDonald is a Canadian artist living in Brooklyn, NY. Exhibitions include Undercurrent and FiveMyles in Brooklyn, The Art Gallery of Regina in Saskatchewan, Esker Foundation in Calgary and AxeNéo7 in Québec. A CBC IDEAS documentary profiled her videos, which were also reviewed in The New York Times and Canadian Art. Critical discussion appears in The Transatlantic Zombie by Sarah Lauro. Awards include grants from The New York Foundation for the Arts and The Canada Council for the Arts, and residencies include Headlands Center for the Arts in California, Glenfiddich Canadian Art Prize in Scotland and The Arctic Circle Expedition in Svalbard.
all we are (all in all is all we are)
Brad Muir, Canada, 2018, 7 min
Exploring beauty in the everyday and making through procrastination, flakes of flesh chafe away and dance in the warm airstream of the afternoon sun to elicit a sense of our fragile temporal nature and all that we collectively share.
Brad Muir is an artist and educator whose practice focuses on contemporary photography, sculpture, video and installation. Muir holds a BFA with distinction from Concordia University and an MFA, with fellowship, from the University of Victoria. Muir's work has shown internationally and is in numerous public and private collections. Muir's interdisciplinary art practice explores place and identity through the moments between stillness and movement, ideas and realization, and the affect of memory. He lives and works on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən peoples.
Housebound
Jens Pecho, Germany, 2020, 5 min
The film combines a scene taken from the movie Copycat (1995) with footage of my editing the film. It is a reflection on the idea of artistic originality as well as the art world’s constant desire to instantly transform everything—even the current health crisis—into works of art.
Jens Pecho studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne as well as the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. As a visual artist, he works mostly with text- and video-based installations.
Raumentropie (Space Entropy)
Vera Sebert, Germany/Austria, 2021, 8 min
In this film, language is used as a sculptural tool to create space and subsequently dissolve it. The cinematic image space becomes an ice sculpture. Its physical appearance is connected to an absorbing soundscape. The term entropy describes the thermodynamic state of an object or body, which is shrinking continuously during the film. The virtual space expands and the arctic volume dwindles.
Vera Sebert works at the intersection of visual media, language, film and computer programming. Sebert holds a degree in Fine Arts from University of Fine Arts Braunschweig and Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and a degree in Language Arts from University of Applied Arts Vienna. In 2017, she was Artist in Residence at Künstlerdorf Schöppingen. She is the recipient of the 2018 Hannsmann-Poethen Grant for Literature and was the 2019 Subnet Artist-in-Residence, Salzburg.