Exhibition Opening at Modern Fuel
13 June – 21 July 2007 at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre
Opening reception: Saturday 16 June @ 7 pm
In the Main Gallery:
POST-CAMP
Shelly Bahl, Ben Darrah
“Camp is (to repeat) the relation to style in a time in which the adoption of style—as such—has become altogether questionable.” (53rd note on Camp.) Following Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” (1964), the exhibition Post-Camp, at Modern Fuel this summer, tentatively establishes connections between the work of Shelly Bahl and Ben Darrah, and proposes that they be considered in terms of the sensibility “Post-Camp.” Shelly Bahl’s new series of photographs of a group of South Asian women at an international airport and Ben Darrah’s suite of paintings and assemblages are both underpinned by similar concerns that arise through their individual explorations of what might be called a National identity, while practicing a form of citation that dislocates their subject matter. Shelly Bahl has pursued throughout her career a Post-Colonial interrogation of the issues of cultural displacement and appropriation by highlighting the hybrid and stereotypical nature of orientalist fantasies, colonialist histories, and multi-culturalism. Ben Darrah refashions the representation of the Canadian landscape by setting it afloat, thereby disconnecting nature from an unexamined ground and pinpointing its status as a cultural construct.
Just as the Post-Modern has been understood as both a disruption and a continuation of the Modern, Post-Camp should be understood as both a disruption and a continuation of Camp as defined by Sontag. The proposition of the category of “Post-Camp” asks if the Camp relation to style is still tenable today, in an age where the questionable is subjected to an even closer scrutiny. It is not possible today to view the figures in Bahl’s airport photographs (who have an air somewhere between idlers and detainees) without the insecurities attendant to their location. And the very support upon which Darrah’s images rest, camouflage-printed fabric, calls attention to the concealment of its baselessness: a ground with a false-bottom.
Shelly Bahl is a visual and media artist born in Benares, India, and based in Toronto and New York City. She received her B.F.A. (Visual Art and Art History) from York University, Toronto and her M.A. (Studio Art) from New York University. Bahl is a founding artist member of SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Collective) and ZEN-MIX 2000: Pan-Asian Visual Arts Network in Toronto.
Born in London, England in 1965, Ben Darrah immigrated to Canada with his family in 1968. He graduated with a BFA from the University of Alberta in 1987 and received his Masters of Fine Art at the University of Windsor in 1995. He lives in Kingston, Ontario and currently teaches at St. Lawrence College. As well as teaching, Darrah curates and writes about art.
In the State of Flux Gallery:
A YEAR IN SHANGHAI
Dave Gordon
“A Year in Shanghai” explores the cultural differences Dave Gordon experienced while teaching in China. Using items clipped from the “Shanghai Daily” and other sources, Gordon contrasts China living with life in Kingston through water-colours, sketches, paintings and photographs. Dave Gordon is an artist living and working in Kingston, Ontario.
