MacDonald Stewart Art Centre

Marian looking at "Women's work," a set of silver spoons

Another image from the Arboretum on Wednesday has been posted in texture.

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This afternoon Marian and I visited the MacDonald Stewart Art Centre, a gallery on the campus of the University of Guelph. Sometimes the displays are better than others. Today they were better. Two in particular caught our interest.

One was a three-dimensional film. You had to pick up a pair of glasses at the door. Two brief segments followed, accompanied by the music of a movement from Philip Glass's String Quartet No. 5. It consisted of abstract, organic shapes. The first segment depicted layers like cellular membranes shifting sliding within one another. It reminded of a glomerulus, a vascular structure inside the kidneys, though honestly I can't accurately remember what one looks like. At the centre of this structure moved a light. It could have been a firefly, a spirit, or the beginning of an idea.

The second segment was entitled, "A memory." It was more dynamic and unpredictable: at one point irregular spherical shapes like blood corpuscles drifting through corridors, some opening like windows into different geometries beyond or inside them. Then the whole screen would change, with lines erupting like threads of a spiderweb.

From the website: "Canadian animator Munro Ferguson made this hand-drawn stereoscopic animation titled June in memory of artist and filmmaker Joyce June Wieland who died in 1998."

The other display that appealed to us both was a complex installation that appeared to rely on holographic imagery. I later found out all the technology used was pre-digital. I didn't notice how the devices worked, I was so engaged with the images. You entered a dark room through a heavy curtain. Along one wall were several holes opening on dioramas, one depicting a trailer park in a woods, the second some kind of wharf with a boat inside a cavern, and the third depicting a hotel room overlooking a seaside with docks. As you watched these scenes, ghostly human images would appear and move about. The same exhibit included two life-size human projections, both young woman. One sat behind a window at a table toying with a cup of tea, lighting a cigarette. The other figure was standing near the door where you hardly noticed it at first. The girl kept taking some kind of a book out of a pocket in the thigh of her slacks, studying it intently, and occasionally gazing up self-consciously at the viewer—at me. It seemed intrinsic to the exhibit that all these figures, projected somehow from television screens using glass and mirrors, moved awkwardly and restlessly, as if they had time on their hands and nothing to do, except watch the parade of gallery visitors shuffle through the darkened room, entranced. A few images from this display can be seen on the centre's website:

David Hoffos: Scenes from the House Dream

"The agitated figures in each scene appear to wait for some forecast event that is never revealed."




Above: the exhibit Rolph Scarlett: Painter, Designer, Jeweller