#katinkabock

Katinka Bock

_o_o__o

Mercer Union, A Centre for Contemporary Art

24 June – 12 August, 2017

By Alana Traficante

---

Mercer Union’s summer exhibition, Katinka Bock _o_o__o, seems to be about layers: the presence and absence of things, spaces, voids, and screens. But more so, Bock’s creation and assemblage of objects provides grounds for an aesthetic work out of the basest form – to look, see, move, and touch through the eye as our primary point of contact with the exterior world.

The exhibition is a composite of photography, Super 8 film, and sculptural objects rendered in ceramic, metal and wood, with found elements and objects intertwined throughout. The interplay between natural and prefabricated materials (tall walnut columns free-standing on the gallery floor met with perforated metal sheets suspended from the ceiling above) creates jarring dissociations of surface texture, colour, and weight. There are holes throughout the objects that invite acts of peering through voids into the spaces behind. Bock’s strategic layering of objects requests considered focus on the depth of field; one that shifts as subject-bodies navigate space within that visual plane. New perspectives and images are revealed by way of the moving beholder – the open and observing perceiver an essential component to Bock’s aesthetic act.

Katinka Bock, (installation view); _o_o__o (Soundsystem), 2017, walnut, brass, bronze; _o_o__o (Film), 2017, (exterior view of installation), S8 film digitalised, b/w, no sound, 2min40 sec; courtesy Galerie Jocelyn Wolff Paris

When stripped bare, aesthetic experience is about the sensual body and its interaction with things: the objects, spaces, scents, sights, and sounds that compose the affective realm it inhabits. For Bock, sight is the primary mode of this perceptual encounter but the eye may lead to deeper, embodied sensations. Through strategies of very simple illusionistic effect, she seems to question the truthfulness of what we see. Folded ceramic objects read like bundles of soft foam to the naked eye. A green pepper, when filmed in black and white, may actually be its sweet red counterpart. To see the truth of these objects, we must invoke sense memories, tap into our embodied knowledge of taste and touch. And even then, the hand that holds and tongue that tastes can be just as deceptive as the eye that sees. Perhaps, we should not seek meaning by looking, but find meaning in the act of looking itself.

Katinka Bock, _o_o__o (Stehende), (detail) 2017, walnut; courtesy Galerie Jocelyn Wolff Paris

While the project claims to respond to Toronto, and specifically, the culturally diverse neighbourhood where Mercer Union is situated, external context seems void (or perhaps obscured) in the gallery installation itself. However, Bock’s architectural interventions do call attention to the history of the building – by cutting into the back gallery wall and projecting a silent film loop through this hole into the gallery’s workshop/storage room, Bock references the site’s previous use as a cinema. The adaptive use of this space serves to punctuate the exhibition’s exploration of holes, spaces, and voids, but even more so, the absence of its previous use, and the very particular aestheticization – and sterilization – of space that occurs in the frame of the gallery’s white cube.

---

Alana Traficante is an art writer and curator based in Hamilton, Ontario. She is a recent MFA graduate of OCAD University’s Criticism and Curatorial Practice program, where she researched sensory criticism, feminist theory, installation and moving image artworks. Alana is currently Acting Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.  

All images courtesy of Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art, Toronto