would have been a great Halloween show if it hadn’t closed just shy of the 31st. Walking into the Forest City Gallery to see the works meant passing through a sunny front room into what felt like the dim, sparsely decorated living room of someone long gone. Most of the light filling the space comes from the delicate glow of the artworks themselves. Each piece, petrified by the still light, showed signs of a life far removed from the work.
Photography by Paul Walde
A lampshade covered with the caramelized bodies of a few dozen houseflies sends out amber-tinted rays to your left. Laura Kikauka has recreated one of those sticky, golden-brown ribbons that are used to catch pesky flies sans decomposing bugs. Instead of dried-out insect skeletons, images of doomed bugs are simply printed onto the faux bug-catching tape. A kitschy lamp is graced by the morbid shade.
This exhibition is filled with near biohazards and open flames—like any haunted house should be. Tony Matelli's piece adds the eerie glow of a faintly swaying flame to the show: a one hundred dollar bill, suspended in time, burns continuously in one of the back corners of the gallery. The piece achieves a graceful stasis at first glance—the muttering flame lends a stillness seemingly outside of time to the aluminum tin that it rests upon. However, pretend money doesn’t make your heart leap like real money would if it were alight: God forbid.
The next piece I noticed sparked my interest most. Ooma Haru Mooma’s creepy bedside table seemed to garner such diverse reactions. I was fascinated by the piece, and excited by the fact that Mooma had finally decided to show something after a long period of hiding her work from prying eyes. My fellow gallery-goer, Sarah, was all smiles after seeing Mooma’s work. Her smirk went from ear to ear - quite a break from the solemn mood of the show.
Mooma’s piece comes in four parts: a bedside table, a lamp (a small brass affair with a green glass shade, like something you might see on the desk of a bank clerk in the 1930s), an envelope (complete with official Canada post markings, correct postage and address), and a pair of soiled white panties. The lamp is installed with a black light so that the ejaculate adorning the tighty-whities glows toxic neon green. I guess dirty laundry is funny. Here’s what Ooma had to report about the reception her work recieved:
So have you heard about any reactions to your work at FCG?
Actually yes. Jason [Schiedel: the artistic director at Forest City Gallery] mentioned how a lot of women point & laugh at it.
Laugh?
I'm fine with it because it's supposed to be humorous. I suppose. They think it's funny, but have no idea it's based on true events.
Mooma’s work comes fully loaded with emotional baggage, but nothing that weighs her down in the slightest. Mooma bared all to me online. The flippancy with which see explains her work in the following interview has only come after a long period of thoughtful consideration about the online experiences that inspired the work:
So when I figured out what I was going to do, I had a meeting with Paul [Walde] & Jason [Schieldel] at his apartment. My proposal was seriously my stained panties in a kraft bubble wrap envelope and my verbal proposal, explaining the story behind the piece and what it symbolized.
Elaborate on what it symbolizes.
I am -- I was seriously running on a close deadline. My piece came together that day because i had to redo a few things. My piece is minimal, but every part is crucial, even though it took me a bit of time to get the things I needed. The panties had to be perfect, the stain, the glow, the lamp, the table, the light bulb. The envelope, especially.
Do they resemble things from the past exactly?
The banker's lamp represents the businessman I dealt with. The green lampshade depicts what he was; rich, powerful, he was all about the skrilla. It's not meant to be taken literally... I sent the panties, but I don't know what he did with them exactly.
How did he approach you for the panties?
He didn't approach me.
No?
We had this online exchange for a year. He brought up stained panties, even sent me a site where you could bid on panties Japanese women stained with their feces, urine, etc. and he'd laugh over the mugshots beside the auctions. So I half-jokingly asked if he wanted mine. He thought I was serious. And that's when he asked if I would be okay with it.
Did you want him to say yes to the idea?
Yes, I wanted to be part of his growing panty collection.
Do I detect sarcasm?
No. I wanted approval. I wanted to make him happy somehow. I was a naive 17 year old.
You said the envelope was really important to you. Why?
It was important to make it look legit, so I had to send them through the mail and get the authentic postage for the show. I had to do it a few times to get it right. Within the envelope, were the white cotton panties.. which represents me, a virgin, the envelope almost acts as my chastity; innocent, pure. The UV light was used to highlight the stain that the man left on me. It acts as a barrier, the envelope.
How does the envelope act as a barrier?
You can draw many conclusions that maybe I have repressed emotions, that maybe I'm hiding behind a screen, that I have a wall up, but inside are delicate instruments that long to be played with. Wow, that sounded kind of lame. For the benefit of others, I leave it to the viewer to interpret how they see it; there's really no right or wrong.
What is the stain left on you by this man? Isn't it interesting that the stain, the mark itself, was produced by your own body? Not the stain in the installation, but you were on the original panties.
The stain was the whole experience.. it was traumatic for me at the time.. this man stalked me, he hacked into my yahoo account, fucked with my online friends posing as me. I'm left with this memory. It did happen. I can't wipe it clean, but I can detach from it and observe it as an outsider and learn from it and draw inspiration. Almost becoming the sexual perpetrator... Owning it. But in a way, I am still attached to my past, because I wouldn't have done this piece if I wasn't, right?
Yeah that is interesting.
I did think that at first, but I came to realize these sort of people are drawn to me because I am like them in ways and I won't judge so harshly.
Do you feel the desire to keep exploring this other world of internet connections and strangers?
I haven't stepped foot into a chatroom in 2 or so years now, I think... I have no desire to meet people via online anymore, with the exception of random strangers adding me on Facebook and running into them on the streets of London, of course. I felt so fed up with never meeting people outside of the computer for the longest time my social life was online.
Does your art allow you to maintain a connection with your fetishistic side while keeping it real so to speak?
It's the only way I can churn out anything at the moment -- I have a lot of repressed sexual energy. I need to unleash. It's like masturbating for a lifetime and waiting to ejaculate onto the faces of bewildered looks, which is why I like to think of myself as a 'visual rapist.'
Following Mooma’s delicate instruments, I came across a fitting end to my experience of the show: Wyn Geleynse’s photo installation. This work comes just to the right of the entrance of Guided by Voices. The faded pink polyester bedroom captured by Geleynse might as well be a morgue. Life seems to be a mere afterthought in this space where a cheap hotel room meets the guest bedroom from hell. So still and achingly sterile is this place that I’d imagined the cheap carpet covering the floor probably had the itchy feel of fiberglass. Mounted in the photo is a small square that juts out slightly from the work. A red and starkly shadowed face, which looks on menacingly, is fixed in this little window or screen. Lit from behind by a bulb that flickers like a fake candle, this presence doesn’t seem out of place in its bleak surroundings. Seemingly at home, the image in the Orwellian TV is a face without a name: a trace of something distant only hinted at by the uninhabitable décor.
Geleynse’s work brought forward some common elements of the works in Guided by Voices. Each work seemed lifeless and distant like Geleynse’s creepy bedroom. But each work achieves the feeling that it is only a trace of another time in which some presence presided over these objects. Geleynse’s character remains vacant and shimmering like most TV images: not commanding any presence, but marking its absence. Laura Kikauka’s lamp, by bearing bodies compiled over a period of time, marks the passage of those moments, but leaves any notion of that other place and time empty. Only the feeling found in the tinted light might suggest the resonance of that distant place. Tony Matelli’s work too, by capturing an instant, gestures toward some happening beyond the grasp of the viewer. And finally, if it were not for Ooma’s outpour above, her work might find a visitor captured with the thought that a strange man once held the gaze that they now hold on such delicate instruments.
