Ghosts

http://www.alicejarry.com/

Alice Jarry, _V2RECURRENCES, 2014, installation

Alice Jarry

October 30th, 2015 to December 5th, 2015
Opening: October 30th, 5-8pm

Artist Talk/ Demo October 30th, 5:30pm

Ghosts explores the intersection between screen printing, installation and digital art. The artist uses overlooked material and procedural components from the screen printing studio transforming their original purpose and meaning through different strategies of electronic diversion and programming.

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Artist Statement

My installation work questions the impact of materiality: in contrast to an inert and instrumentalized object, matter has agency and influences the course of an action. I thus engage matter’s ability to respond, to interfere, to produce unpredictable effects and to alter a course of events. In this perspective, I try to think of materiality as unstable, unpredictable and capable of reaction. I value process-based materials and re-purpose their traditional function by utilizing strategies of electronic diversion and computer programming. These materialities assemble, hybridize and continually swap between physical and digital spaces. For instance, in Moirées (2012), wires and electrical circuits produce heat that generates undetermined patterns of ink on projection screens. In _v2Récurrences (2014), the public is invited to “print” on an LCD screen and these gestures are transformed as data generating animations. In Spectrales (2014), wires, weights and motors work together to produce knots and entangled geometries. These transformative and circular processes become points of departure for site-specific installations where my interest is in the potential materials have to form transient relations and assemblages.

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Test response by Alexis Kinlock

Sometimes when I am walking I look down at my feet and wonder if, throughout history, anyone has ever walked on those exact same spots on the earth, and how footsteps might intersect over time. I envision the traces of our ghostly meetings—indiscernible data visualization that will never be able to reveal where, if time were collapsed, we would intersect with ourselves, our community, strangers, our ancestors. Within space, we are colliding with every atom we meet, setting off invisible reactions; the unseen wake of existence affecting existences. 

In the gallery, in the world, artworks stand static; framed artifacts of the movements of a body. If we were to trace the movement behind the precision of printmaking, what intersections would be revealed behind the sheer physicality and labour of production? Alice Jarry's Ghosts uses as its material the body in motion creating a printed work. Using sensors to record and project from within the printmaker's squeegee, movements generate in space like spontaneous blossoms growing with time-lapse rapidity. These lasers of light spin from each other like an assembly of webs, casting their own shadows, reflecting the enigmatic and apocryphal nature of such a medium.

The echoes of presence are overwhelmingly abstract in the face of the intentional representational movement behind the work. Alice Jarry is creating a symbolic visual archive. The standard pulling and pushing of ink on a screen in the studio translates like a fluid morse code to the viewer in the gallery. As the artwork is deconstructed into its own history, so is the story of the idiosyncrasy of the printmaker and that of each printmaker before. Like the repeated melody of a bird, the keen observer is rewarded by learning the subtleties of a printmaker's personal dialect, which shines through as the symbols build and cross over and over and over again.

The spectral narrative of overlapping layers is not one of collision. Rather, the shiver of the presence of the self, or another, within shared space is more like déjà vu; a nod towards the depth of awareness-without-knowing. These chimera are wanton, brushing up against each other and combining to record a history that is unaccounted for: the perpetual motion of the variable speed, density, and intensity of the printed gesture. Their long shadows extend through the screen; a structure of light and dark recording conversant history.

Collective whispers of labour build meditatively over time, revealing individuality and sameness, mapping each step, crossing paths, recording process, accruing, meeting, departing. Tracing time in space, hinting at duration, these matrices of movement reveal the imperceptible bodies within the work; bodies which cross themselves and others without conscious recognition. They meet and communicate, across time, through the very echoes of their existence.

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Alice Jarry lives and works in Montreal. Through an in situ practice, her digital art installations investigate the question of assemblages and the impact of materiality in the generation of dynamic forms, accidental and fleeting. Her work was recently presented at Device_Art Triennal (Zagreb), Invisible Dog Art Center (New York), the Second International Digital Arts Biennial (BIAN, Montreal), La gare numérique (France), as part of the LASER series (Leonardo Journal) and in several exhibition locations in Canada, the United States and Europe. Alice Jarry  is a PhD candidate in Études et pratiques des arts (UQAM) and teaches Computation Arts at Concordia University.