The Full Moon Series

The Full Moon series is a fitting title for Renee Lear’s on-going Lighthouse work. All viewers can relate to Lear’s professed love of the “magical moment ”: when something - a sound, a ray of light, a smell - stops us physically and temporally and we feel our hearts squeeze at the exquisite moment. 

The cool temperatures make it difficult to see the three hours of live video-mixing from 8 to 11 pm on November 13, 2008 but passersby and friends stick it out for the time they can. The work does not contain a narrative therefore staying for the whole projection is not really necessary. Its ephemeral quality allows the pedestrian to catch a glimpse and carry away a feeling of wonder in all senses of the word.

With a contemporary twist of live video mixing projected onto a screen in a first-floor window, Lear takes back up the on-going issue of abstraction versus representation. The shifting layered images constantly disrupt the viewer’s sense of perspective. The projection shifts repeatedly from an image on a flat surface to one with perspective with a fore-, mid- and background then changes again to what appears to be only a silhouette of what is happening within the apartment, that is to say, the screen appears to revert back to a window to look through to see the art behind.

The piece is structured into segments that could be viewed individually or as a whole. In one segment, the image of the artist’s ghost-like hands can be seen shifting, fixing, and placing small glass squares. In another section, the image of a man can be glimpsed sporadically in a shifting field of light and shapes. In all the segments, the hint of representation tugs at our human desire to recognize and understand. Lear never fully allows us this. She teases us with flashes of recognizable shapes within abstract images and leaves us wanting for answers.

Whether this unfulfilled desire to understand is considered successful or not is subjective. I would argue it positively as she forces us to abandon for a moment our desire to understand, classifying and thereby control in a world too full of classification and control. My question would be, “do we always need to understand in order to judge?” A Kensington market pedestrian may have thought so when he asked, “What is it? Oh well, tell me if you have figured it out when I pass back.”

Obviously aware of this conflict, Lear deliberately incorporates the street into her performance. Two whistling friends sit on the step below the projection to catch the attention of those who move quickly through the world. The viewer’s response is as much part of the artwork as the video itself. Sitting on a pile of cardboard on the curb for recycling, I find watching pedestrians’ responses as fascinating as the video itself.

Life Drawing Class

Learn to learn

Hardwired, the axons are set
Armed with experience
My weapon weighs me down

I embark into new frontiers
Html css tags elements styles
The directions are confusing

Like a language, I am told
I refresh ma substance grise
And ftp my neurons to new synapses

Dreams

Untitled (Presence)

Life Drawing Class

I have been taking life drawing classes taught by Stefan Galvanek

More than "all in a day's work"

Leap into the Void

My Personal Social Science Experiment

I have decided to post my 2005 artist statement. I am curious to see how my changing life will effect my artwork and my thoughts on life.

My art often portrays everyday objects in a non-representational manner, isolating the object from its functional purpose, in order to disturb the viewers, thus provoking the disruption of their culturally established preconceptions or assumptions.

This exploration is derived from my life experience. A multicultural background and years spent living in different countries and languages shaped me but also forced me repeatedly to throw out concepts and judgements.

The close examination of patterns to the point of losing the sense of reality pokes fun at the fact that assumptions are based on established methods and routines.

A paradox of detachment and emotional immersion can also be felt in my work. The influence of years of working as a nurse is demonstrated by a spectatorial quality in which the subjects are never directly engaged.

However the frequent return to patterns, often with the removal of the contexts of time and place, in fact implies an inability to remove oneself emotionally, causing a loss of sense of self.

 

Untitled (Reflexivity)

Femme Fatale

A contemporary film noir.

Scene 1

Femme Fatale

Scene 2

There is More to You than Meets the Eye

The common English expression “more than meets the eye” means that a thing or situation is more complicated than it first appears.

The objective of this performance was multivocal. In both locations, the phrase was to affirm that we are all complex beings and appreciate being recognized for this fact.

My goal was to have the choice of locations contrast with each other. I chose the Toronto Reference Library as a site where people were actively engaging with their interior self. They were investing into their own “more than meets the eye”. My performance in this location endeavored to acknowledge their efforts. The Eaton Centre was the other location chosen because, in this site, people are largely focused on their exterior selves. By handing out the cards there, I wished to draw attention to our image-obsessed society that encourages more and more image-oriented consumerism. The business card undermined the capitalist paradigm that frames most aspects of our lives. By reminding the audience that there is more to our beings than our exteriors, the performance became subtly anti-consumerist and anti-spectacle.

I was aware that due to the locations, the anonymity and the material, the audience may interpret this performance in many ways or may not interpret it at all, for example, in the case of the audience at the fountain in the Eaton Centre who seemed to think that I was handing out flyers and refused to participate. Unless asked, I chose to not indicate that it was an art performance. As I was questioning elements of the fabric of Western society, I preferred to keep the performance within that context, rather than giving it an art framework thereby potentially making it a spectacle itself.

Lightly Veiled

Homage to Shirin Neshat

Thoughts on Immigration

Before

After

Although they are influenced by Cindy Sherman's Film Stills series, these photos are personal. I created them to document my first brush with the aging process: that shift from youth to the awareness that one is getting older. Life circumstances changed and all of a sudden, at 34, I was surrounded by people who were 15 years younger than me. I became aware of those first greys peeking through, a few wrinkles here and there when I overheard 18-years-olds saying "..in 10 years, when I am old..."

The Other Side

Salvation or subjection?

In this Space

Loneliness I and II

Shiftwork
Circadian rhythms interrupted
Opposition has been met
Rituals are no longer present

The interior becomes the exterior
My private becomes my public
The world is found within

Geometry in the Afternoon

the salt dries on my skin

one angle changes

the wind snarls my hair

the pattern shifts

sea spray startles me

the sines are there

Hazy Days

I thought it was fitting to start in Barbados where I first became interested in art. This image is of the east coast. The air here is thick with sea spray and Sahara dust.

I received a bronze award for this photograph from Nifca.