PRESENCE OF ABSENCE

PRESENCE OF ABSENCE

HADLEY HOWES AND MAXWELL STEPHENS: DELETED SCENES

CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY

VANCOUVER, CANADA

MARCH 31-MAY 28, 2006

What is absence or emptiness, and what form does it take when it is described physically or conceptually? Uta Earth's photographic series

of blurry compositions of empty rooms adequately renders emptiness both emotionally and psychologically. Earth removes the subject matter in her work, forcing the viewer to re-examine assumptions about photographic representation and content. The subject matter in Andy Warhol's films Empire (1964) and Sleep (1963) are removed as well. One film simply depicts the building's iconic facade and the other pictures an unknown resting man; both are void of activity and represent a radical departure from the traditional linear narratives found in movies of that era.

Artist collaborators Hadley Howes and Maxwell Stephens focus on similar ideas involving absence, nothingness, and loss as seen in their recent show, "Deleted Scenes," at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. Although they have been working together since 1997 and have exhibited in Australia, Canada, and the United States, this is their first solo exhibition in a public an institution. Their conceptual rigor and acute formal awareness continues in this exhibition of six installations created in 2006.

A thematic premise based upon "deleted scenes" runs throughout each piece. One of the most humorous and appropriately linked is Language to be Looked at, a syncopated three-monitor video. The left screen depicts Hadley "rocking out" while listening to music through headphones, intermittently squirting liquid soap from a bottle and tossing various objects, including a live cat and a flower. The items are projected toward the right of the screen and then travel out of the monitor's frame. The right screen installed a few feet away is synchronized so that the blindfolded Maxwell is pelted in the back of the head with the items. However, when the items reach the screen, the flower is a fabric version and the soap has become bubbles. The audio component to this piece is available to the viewer through headphones. The song "Under Pressure" (Queen and David Bowie, 1981) remade by the Blood Brothers (2002) corresponds to the first monitor and Maxwell's voice, calling out the items tossed, links to the second.

The installation refers to Robert Smithson's "Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read," a document written in 1967, which proposed speech as an intermediary point between "literal and metaphorical signification.'" The gap between the monitors highlights the absence of time and action from one moment to the next. Furthermore, the void describes an empty space during conversation: the transaction between speech and understanding

Consistent with the theme, Withdraw is a projection of two hands on one side of a white cube. The projection aligns with a series of drawn and erased marks on the surface of the cube, roughly at the horizon line. One hand makes scrawling gestures directly over the pencil marks while the other hand is busy erasing. In this work, the act of drawing and erasing is paralleled with the idea that absence is often defined by whatever existed before it; the viewer understands the absence of the pencil marks only by witnessing the hand creating them.

A more subtle but alluring piece, "Um," is a projection of a swaying light bulb onto a non-moving unlit bulb. The work is installed several feet from the ground in the corner of the gallery. The image that appears on the wall becomes a green and ghostly portrayal of the object. The functionality and luminosity expected from an actual bulb is missing The elimination of these qualities seems to invoke the disappearance of an object's "realness," provoking an interesting question: If functionality and physicality equate to the essence of a real object, what remains if it is removed?

Conspiracy relates to Robert Morris's Two Columns created in 1961. One column is installed vertically and another the same size lies on its side. A video is installed in the horizontal plinth capturing Sex Pistols singer Johnny Rotten giving his final words onstage in the group's last performance. His words, "ever get the feeling that you've been cheated?" are recorded and looped. Jennifer Papararo, the exhibition's curator, says, "[Rotten's] parting remarks leave an empty feeling, creating a greater absence than his own as he walks o(T stage. His words imply that he wasn't even there in the first place or what the audience was seeing was not him." She goes on to suggest that the act of repeating dismantles the importance of the moment, thus "emptying him of presence."2

Viewable from the gallery's exterior are the only two pieces that do not include video. Promise is a white flag raised half-staff on a twenty-two foot pole. The simplistic and poetic symbols conjure associations with surrender and loss. Pact features a balloon set afloat by a small black fan that causes it to swoop and drop with the invisible air current, implying an unstable situation. The air flow eloquently illustrates a negotiation that is not visibly apparent. The tenuous existence of the balloon is metaphorically expressed through invisibility.

Although political and an historical ties can easily be read into many of the pieces, the works expand beyond these references. "Deleted Scenes" offers several viewpoints on nothingness, a seemingly abstract and intangible subject matter. The works point toward the idea that the presence of absence is specific and literal.