Monica Tap, Séance, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. January 12 – March 25, 2007

Medium

The purpose of a séance is to speak with the dead. It is, in part, an attempt to make the past present, a refusal to accept that the gulf between now and then is unbridgeable. The séance argues that the past is never really gone but is always present with us. In other words, to invoke the space of the séance is to open up a complex relation to history and time. For this reason, it is a fitting title for Monica Tap’s series of video-based paintings responding to the life and times of Homer Watson. Tap’s work for the show is a complex meditation on the tradition of painting, landscape and Canadian art. It is also an exploration of the extended and multiple temporalities of the contemporary technologically mediated encounter with landscape.

The modern séance emerged with the Spiritualist movement at the middle of the 19th century. The Spiritualists drew on the tropes of modern technology to make contact with the dead. Their séances incorporated the telegraph in the form of spirit rapping and the photograph in spirit photography.1 Thus the séance is not simply a metaphor for a relation to time but also for a relation to technology. In drawing on the metaphor of the séance, Tap’s work aligns with a broader re-engagement by contemporary artists with the tropes of Spiritualism. As the artist and curator Martyn Jolly has described, there are a number of contemporary artists whose work “reinhabit[s] and reinvent[s] the metaphysical, performative, and iconographic legacy of the Spiritualists.”2 Artists have found in Spiritualism tools for addressing the ethical and political engagement with the past.

At the centre of the séance is the medium, the figure, usually female, who brings together the present and the past, the living and the dead, allowing her audience to communicate with the beyond. The medium does this, however, by becoming other than herself, by giving up her own voice to speak with the voice of another. Thus the medium is a figure for a complex relation to authorship outside the masculinist paradigm of the solitary genius. It is this space of the medium that Tap explores in her paintings.

Tap’s paintings speak to the life and work of Homer Watson through their reworking of the landscape tradition. The paintings offer a highly mediated encounter with the landscape. The paintings emphasize the process of mediation through their engagement with video source images. The videos document a series of trips following the path of Watson’s life. The large canvases in the show are composed from multiple video stills. The landscape is captured with the low-resolution video of a digital camera and distilled into a series of still images, the stills are combined and projected onto the canvas and then the artist responds to the stills in
paint. In making the works, Tap inhabits the space between the projector and canvas – the space of the medium. Working in the dark gives Tap’s brushstrokes an assurance that is free from a facile or self-indulgent virtuosity. The use of the projector distances her from an overly romantic investment the work.

The Grand River paintings respond to Watson’s 1879 trip down the Grand River. Inspired by the probably apocryphal story that Watson’s three-month trip down the Grand River in 1879 had culminated in a trip to the Spiritualist camp at Lily Dale (founded 1879), Tap took her own trip down the river accompanied by her digital camera. Grand River 1 is a dense exploration of the landscape of the river’s edge – an ill-defined border space penetrated by tree branches. The painting bears the trace of the digital process; the rusty bar at the bottom of the image could represent an artefact of the compression algorithm or of the video’s interlacing. With its cascading paint and complex sense of space, Grand River 1 speaks to landscape without resolving into the scenic or picturesque.

The Road to Lily Dale paintings come from footage of the drive to the famous Spiritualist centre in upstate New York.3 Watson visited Lily Dale and consulted with the mediums later in his life. He experimented with spiritualism and spirit photography after the death of his wife. The paintings in the series are marked by the mediation of the car window. The highway is a modern mode of movement. The car offers a very different experience of landscape from the canoe; the roadside presents a nature that has been maintained at a proper viewing distance in contrast to the riverbank’s arbitrary distance. In The Road to Lily Dale 1, the reflections off the glass produce light effects in the video reminiscent of spots in spirit photography – the double mediation of lens and window echoing spirit photography’s double exposures. The car window flattens the landscape and functions as a screen. It unifies the landscape but also throws up interference patterns that distance us from the scene. The other Lily Dale painting opens up the question of speed in its incorporation of motion blur. In this, they share visual characteristics with the smaller canvases of the Homer Watson Boulevard series.

The smaller paintings of the boulevard series are based on single video stills. The series is characterized by the strong presence of motion blur brought about by the use of a highly compressed video format on a digital camera. The footage for the smaller canvases comes from two trips tracing the length of Homer Watson Boulevard in Kitchener. The paintings offer fleeting images of the passing landscape. From a distance the paintings appear highly realistic representations of the passing landscape however, the images breakdown into paint as we approach. Their realism is that of the half-glimpsed landscape. The paintings draw our attention to the landscape but don’t fully bring it into focus. The boulevard paintings work with Watson’s social and cultural position as a celebrated artist and promoter of Canadian art. Their non-descript landscapes reflect on the process of commemoration and comment on the cultural position of the arts. By focussing attention on the commemoration of Watson, the paintings open up the question of Tap’s relation to Canadian art and the history of landscape painting.

The paintings in the show present mobile landscapes. They are less of depictions of place than of passing through. The landscapes they offer occupy a middle ground between space and place.4 They present spaces of passage to reflect on the movement between past and present. Tap’s séance is about mediation rather than contact; we are always still on the road to Lily Dale. The paintings suggest that while the medium of paint is haunted by its history, engaging with that history provides a place for reviewing our occupation of the landscape.

ENDNOTES
1 Tom Gunning, “Haunting Images: Ghosts, Photography and the Modern Body,” The Disembodied Spirit, Allison Ferris ed. (Brunswick, Maine: Bowdoin College, 2003). Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
2 Martyn Jolly, “Spectres from the Archive,” Image and Imagination, Martha Langford ed. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queens University Press, 2005): 173-184, 177.
3 By the end of the 19th century the centre of the Spiritualist movement had settled in Lily Dale, New York. www.lilydaleassembly.com
4 Cultural geographers contrast space and place to distinguish between the bare physical facts of space and the meaningful landscape of place.