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Oboro,
Montreal
Will
Straw
The
following review first appeared in C International Contemporary
Art (issue 61, February-April 1999).
Amantea's
exhibition, titled "Dearest," offers five works that circle loosely
around the themes of love, emotion and obsession. The four pieces
in the main gallery consist of images and text rendered in paint
and flock over large expanses of wall. Knockout, for example,
pictures the comic-strip character Popeye in a love entanglement,
while Iles des Démons uses maps and illustration to tell
the story of Marguerite de Roberval, a French noblewoman of the
16th century who was left stranded on an island in the Gulf of St.
Lawrence as punishment for sexual indiscretion. These pieces continue
the work with industrial and decorative materials characteristic
of Amantea's production over the past several years.
The
stunningly effective centrepiece of "Dearest" is the video installation,
In Your Dreams, which plays silently in a separate, darkened
room. The first impression, on entering that room, is of an abstract,
almost phantasmagorical field of pulsating colours and images that
shift chaotically in size and scale, but this invites closer examination.
Each video sequence is projected onto a purse-size mirror housed
within a plastic globe (the kind that usually contains a miniature
landscape and that you can shake to create a snow storm). Thirty-one
of these globes are arranged along three shelves, while three separate
video channels deliver compilations of brief clips from older films.
Like
exercises in Soviet montage, these compilations build unities of
theme or form. One sequence offers images of female suffering; in
others, women weep or brood. Several build geometric patterns (Busby
Berkeley choreographies and flowers, phallic skyscraper and electrical
towers). Examined individually like this, the clips cannot escape
the melancholy that now attaches itself to the obsolete but persistently
familiar bits of cinematic language once used to convey desire,
love and despair. Reduced to fleeting (and mute) bits of emotion
and sensation, filmic moments once puffed up with dramatic extravagance
(such as Ingrid Bergman's agony in Joan of Arc) become quaint,
miniature curiosities. Like the earliest of films, they have been
rendered both minor and magical, made obscure by the loss of sound
and context but marvellous by their innocent, almost archaic vocabularies
of emotion and gesture.
We
come to these miniature screens amidst a contemporary collapse of
consensus concerning the proper scale of cinematic experience. As
screen formats proliferate, we are equally accustomed to watching
films in giant IMAX theatres and in small rectangles on the corners
of our computer monitors. Hand-held computer-game players, pop-down
airline video screens and tiny, kitchen-counter television sets
have installed a contemporary field of vision in which a global
industry's polished products are regularly reduced to murky fluctuations
of movement and colour, unfolding at the peripheries of our vision
or attention.
In
reducing the grandiose to the miniature, shrinking complex narrative
worlds into tiny, flickering oddities, In Your Dreams inverts
the movement of the other pieces, which blow up drawings and letters
so that they fill entire walls, magnifying moments of intimate emotion.
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