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Michelle Allard and Maider Fortune at Mercer Union
Art in America, Feb, 2007 by Melissa Kuntz
The works of two young artists, Michelle Allard from Toronto and Maider Fortune, who is based in Paris, were recently exhibited at Mercer Union, a nonprofit gallery that has been showing Canadian and international artists since 1979.
In the gallery's front room, Allard, claiming to have spent only $139.82, constructed an impressive piece out of fluorescent yellow office paper and cardboard file boxes. Borrowing from Tara Donovan, Allard uses cheap, everyday objects as her medium. In Donovan's hands the materials transcend their banality more elaborately; Allard is interested in devising witty combinations. Here she shaped each letter-sized piece of paper around a fluorescent light tube, glued it together, then removed the paper from the tube, creating another type of "fluorescent tube." She then stood upright about 170 of the rolled papers in each file box so that they protruded at varying heights by either using false bottoms or, occasionally, by gluing two pieces of paper together lengthwise. Some 50 boxes were arranged in a vaguely pyramidal formation that was four boxes high at the apex. Stacked as they were, these common office materials took on the form of a city model or topographic map--an allusion that was surely not coincidental.
Fortune's video projection, Everything is Going to Be All Right, was in the back room. In the 7-minute sequence, a gymnast jumps on a trampoline in a small white cubelike space. The trampoline is out of sight of the viewer and the point where the jumper meets the trampoline is aligned perfectly with the gallery floor. The jarring sound of the trampoline is uncomfortably out of synch with the gymnast's movements. He often jumps, reaches up and makes contact with the ceiling, which is covered in white paper, and causes a crashing sound; at other times he springboards off the walls. The viewer stands in the near-identical white cube of the gallery watching the acrobat perpetually bouncing in his claustrophobic space. About five minutes into the tape, the movement slows and the focus shifts to the agility and beauty of the man's movements. The repetitive action combined with the sound effects is both irritating and mesmerizing, leaving the viewer to wonder if the gymnast will ever break free.
COPYRIGHT 2007 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
