March 2, 2010 Fringe Arts

The beautiful and damned

Pop culture takes a look in the mirror in Art Matters show

by Christopher Olson

The eyes are the closed-circuit camera to the soul. Concordia artist Thea Govorchin’s portrait of Oprah Winfrey, at PUSH Gallery this week.

Concordia student Jerome Nadeau is searching for someone: someone named Jerome Nadeau.
“We all go through a phase in our life where we try to find out who we really are,” said Nadeau. His methodology of self-discovery did not include yoga or Oprah, but Google.

Typing his name into the search engine, Nadeau turned up a litany of strangers who, aside from sharing the same name, bore little or no resemblance to one another.

Of course, people do this everyday, but Nadeau decided to turn his idle curiosity—or perhaps narcissism—into found art. The Concordia photography student’s full-sized prints of the other Jerome Nadeaus will be on display at the PUSH Gallery starting this week as part of an exhibit called Generation Why.

“Our generation is the first generation to grow up with heavy Internet culture and so much communication technology,” said exhibit curator Katherine Lewis, a Concordia art history undergraduate. “I see around me the way that people are regurgitating pop culture so frequently and fragmenting it and reusing it.”

“Degradation and Delay” is a video installation piece by Jean-Marc Perin, Paul Frigon and Philippe Leonard featuring clips taken from the film Die Hard, intercut with sound taken from news broadcasts discussing the events of 9/11 and other tragedies—a mix of fantasy violence and real-world chaos.

Irene Lepiesza’s “Still Not Listening” consists of plaster casts of cell phones and baby monitors displayed in a transparent Plexiglass pillar.

“Much of our daily conversations happen over electronic devices while running errands or through a limited number of abbreviated words,” Lepiesza, a Concordia studio arts major, explained. “We are communicating, but not really listening.”

Thea Govorchin makes her offering to daytime talk show deity Oprah Winfrey with an oil on canvas portrait of the reigning TV hostess, and Sadaf H. takes Nadeau’s narcissism one step further with a video installation piece retracing her journey through cyberspace in glorious real-time, from the blogs she visits and the YouTube clips she watches to her private e-mail messages. Katherine Pansera’s ode to hedonism, “Tall Boys,” features two ingredients: urethane rubber casts of beer bottles and real, edible pretzels.

“I wouldn’t say that I’m being critical of pop culture,” said curator Lewis. “I’m more interested in the way it affects our generation’s lives. It affirms our culture, but there’s also the possibility that it’s damaged us too.”

Generation Why runs from March 4 to 13 at PUSH Gallery (5264 St-Laurent Blvd.). The vernissage will take place at the gallery March 4 at 8 p.m.