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Art has always been, of course, a cultural front line, so while it’s bold enough of borderLINE’s curators to symbolically yoink the Queen’s flags from of the perimeter, it’s hardly shocking to do so in 2020; indeed, in an internal gesture, one of the show’s artists, the talented Amy Malbeuf, pulled her work after the catalogue was published to protest in part the lack of Black artists in the show — her statement included in a pullout pamphlet under the heading “erratum.”
It’s a funny time for art in general — you’ve maybe seen the memes of Will Farrell yelling “Anyone want to buy a painting?” as the world burns. But anyone expressing themselves loudly these days can hardly begrudge artists doing the same thing cleverly and passionately, which brings us to the actual art inside borderLINE, full of cleverness and passion, indeed — and all loosely based on the curatorial idea of borders real and philosophically imagined.
As a sort of easy symbol for the show, David LaRiveiere large-scale digital print Treaty 6: The Smooth and the Striated shows the basic randomness of territorial lines which here erase the provincial borders, replacing them with intersecting tribal borders, which of course didn’t traditionally exist in any settler sense. QR codes take us to audio links from the regions.
Across the wall from this work is Elise Rasmussen’s A Year Without a Summer, which squishes images of the Swiss Alps and Indonesia, both linked as recipe ingredients for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — the first location where the author came up with the idea, the second providing the volcanic eruption which chilled the planet in 1816, which drove Shelley indoors, thinking about the gothic horror with her friends. The links to pandemic isolation are obvious enough, but I also like how the sense of place as inspiration is flattened here.
