Wayne State’s Elaine L. Jacob Gallery presented its DOUBLE LIFE exhibition which played with the concepts of distorted reality, with some artists focusing on familial relationships.
The exhibit, which ran from March 31 to May 20, featured artists Allana Clarke, Maria Gaspar, Virginia Lee Montgomery and others.
The art within the showcase all have a shared theme of using “double lives of objects, spaces and bodies to reveal the seen-unseen,” according to the gallery’s website. Art pieces were displayed using television monitors throughout the gallery.
Richard Haley, exhibit curator and assistant professor of Digital Art at WSU, said this form of display was based on circumstances given prior to this year.
“(Before the pandemic) the budget of the gallery was cut, and I said, ‘Oh, I could do a video exhibition,’ because . . . there's no money (required) to ship (the art)…it's just a digital file,” Haley said.
Haley said artist Virginia Lee Montgomery’s work in the exhibition was intriguing when analyzing the way she distorted one’s perception through her artwork.
“(her art) was such a physical act, a physical thing, but it was presented in video,” Haley said. “It almost seemed like something sculptural, but it was presented through lens-based technology. So (I was) thinking about what does the camera do and how does it enhance and distort that thing?”
Cody Vanderkaay, associate professor and director of studio art at Oakland University, was a featured artist and said his pieces in the exhibition were more family oriented.
“I know the curators Richard and Mary, and in talking to them about this show, I communicated that I'm a busy parent and I've got two children, a full-time job, you know, other obligations on top of that, and so my kind of thought about what DOUBLE LIFE was, was essentially what people — some of my colleagues, friends, family — might not actually know about me,” Vanderkaay said.
Vanderkaay had several works in the exhibition, including “Flattening” (2020), “The Inside of the Outside” (2022) and “Lodestone” (2020).
“. . .the ‘Lodestone’ (2020) is actually an architectural member. I mean, I made it, but it's a reference to architecture, it's in classical — you could say Roman and Greek architecture. It was the center upright that held the entire structure up,” Vanderkaay said. “And so it's kind of built with metaphor intact — me being the lodestone, holding my family up, the one on the floor you could say is just another version.”
Kenneth Tam said his artwork also contained family undertones.
“The piece of mine in the show is titled ‘sump’ (2015)....it's a video I made with my father, shot over the course of a number of different periods, and in the basement of the home that he lives in now and that I grew up in,” Tam said. “And it's basically a series of invented rituals that we performed together in front of the camera, and they use these kind of activities, these ritual-like activities, to explore and to sort of reimagine, let's say the father-son relationship.”
Haley said he hopes for people to form their own interpretations of his artwork.
“I just want people to see it and experience the work and come away with whatever they come away with…if you think of like a pop song…there's not like a specific message. There's a beat, there's a rhythm, there's the course that gets stuck in your head,” Haley said. “So almost thinking like, how do these materials, do these sounds, do these repetition of things — like there's four of (Montgomery’s) videos (in the exhibition) and they all have the same thing with this repetition of this drill, cutting into things…I guess it's going to imprint itself on different viewers in different ways, but there's not necessarily a specific take home.”
Tam said he enjoys the dialogue that is formed through exhibitions like DOUBLE LIFE.
“What's great about any exhibition is just being able to perhaps have the work spark new conversations and be in different locations and speak to new audiences,” Tam said. “And so I guess for me, it's always about…what kinds of new conversations can the kind of work be a part of? Certainly not just with the audience, but also the other artworks that are in the show.”
