#julia feyrer

Stills from Julia Feyrer and Tamara Henderson's Bottles Under the Influence, 2012, 16mm film, color, optical sound, 9:42 min. Courtesy of the artists; Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Center; and Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver.

Installation views of our current exhibition Consider the Belvedere by Julia Feyrer and Tamara Henderson.

PuSh is dominating most of my reviewing time, but I am still making the rounds. Like recently, don't ask me when, it was probably a Saturday, I went up to The Western Front to check out Julia Feyrer's show. The noise from the 16mm projector was interfering with the speakers behind the mirrors, but I was there when the dancers next door came to complain about how the sound from the speakers behind the mirrors was traveling into their studio space, and that the sound was really interfering with their moments of silent concentration.

I actually ran into Tonik right outside The Western Front so I guess it would have been rude if I took the bus back down the hill instead of walking with him as were both going in the same direction. We poked our heads into McCauley and Co, but nothing was up. We walked by Catriona Jeffries, but I think Geoffrey Farmer's show hasn't opened yet or is being delayed or actually both. Cutting through the parking lot, we literally run into the crowd outside of Winsor Gallery, a space I have never been in, and it's an opening for Paul Wong, which I then reviewed here. I didn't stay for the whole duration of any single work, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't the point. We looked at some of the paintings, and then Tonik had to go buy some painting supplies, and I carried on to Model, which is the new Exercise, which I thought was great because it was just going to be one year. The gallery was closed even though I thought it was open for one day a week.

Originally published in Color magazine 11.2

Proponents of a relatively new philosophy called object-oriented ontology (OOO) argue that: an object’s meaning cannot be exhausted by any or all of its particular relations to other objects, or to us. [1] In this model, the object is not only defined by our relation to it (that we made it, that it has use for us, that we perceive it, etc.), but also as a thing wholly outside of the human mind. The exhibition Bottles Under the Influence at the Walter Phillips Gallery by Tamara Henderson and Julia Feyrer creates a universe of objects that are self-governing and self-perpetuating.

Source: color magazine. Image by Feyrer and Henderson.

Henderson and Feyrer’s first major collaborative film also called Bottles Under the Influence imagines this speculative reality of OOOas a world that doesn’t revolve around us. Audiences lose sight of the representational strategies intrinsic to film, mass media, written language, body and facial cues. There are no voices, signs or texts—in short, no remains of denotative language. This disavowal of transparent meaning doesn’t necessarily indicate a cultural resistance, but a safeguarding of a space likened to dreams that have an unfading opacity and pre-linguistic knowing.

While following the logic of the film we either: turn towards our own non-verbal systems of meaning determined by instincts, emotions and object relations, or we try to learn a foreign visual vocabulary. Eventually, as we navigate to the best of our ability, a space emerges somewhere in between.

Source: Catriona Jeffries. Image by Feyrer and Henderson.

It is in this prismatic space that we are left to surmise the filmmakers’ intentions behind the staging, lighting and manipulating of objects, their afflictions and environments. With wondrous confusion, the objects are framed far outside of familiar use, challenging our perceptions in a way reminiscent of surrealist disjunction. In exceeding typical relations, we start to imagine the object independent of normative human use and perception: as a being in itself.

In Bottles Under the Influence, Feyrer and Henderson hint at this life of objects which surpasses our involvement with them. In the film’s barely there surfacing of a narrative turn, the characters are glass bottles or, “vessels of communication,” as the artists see them. At the Museum of Spirits in Stockholm the artists examined historic glass bottles, learning how they were made to contain specific recipes and represented various states of intoxication. In the film, the bottles withdraw from the concept of pure function or history to comprise what Henderson calls, “a bottle typography.” We enter a new language when the bottles are laid down under a blanket to rest, lowered onto the missing head of a statue or shot at in the snow. Here the paradox of OOO can be seen: our best attempt at imagining objects as their own centres of meaning nevertheless involves anthropomorphism. Even if we tried to imagine things outside of human cognition, we couldn’t.

Source: Catriona Jeffries. Image by Feyrer and Henderson.

Appealing to craft theories sheds some light on how this “being” of objects defines us and not the other way around. Crafted objects drastically alter the perception of private and public divisions by containing, on their surfaces, the evidence of material processes or encounters which imply the interior space of the creative process.

For this exhibition, the architectural effects of the artists’ handmade bottles are brought to the public space of the Walter Phillips Gallery. With titles like Old Hag Bottle (Valerian) and Pest Detective (Applewine), the bottles are portraits as much as objects. Visitors to the gallery are invited to contend with these caricatures of sentient beings, as their materiality starts to shape us within a context of intimate relations and personal associations.

Source: banffcentre.ca. Image by Feyrer and Henderson.

The pineapple yellow and violet glow of a neon sign within the gallery immediately triggers the presence of a night club, which here offers a hazy atmosphere: a round table, a book of drinking songs and a newspaper called Night Times containing “nocturnal journalism.” The host structure of the gallery encompasses a strange, interior landscape made of crafted objects and mottled surfaces. More than installation art, the fabricated space is a set for a film to be made during the exhibition. As we move through it, we’re refreshingly made aware that, for once, we are not the subjects of this movie. These objects and their associations don’t exist for us; they don’t need us.