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Quiet Resistance: An Interview with Yam Lau

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Yam Lau in front of his video installation “Room: An Extension” (2008) at Darling Foundry, Montréal. Photo by Guy L’Heureux

Toronto-based Yam Lau is currently holding a solo exhibition entitled “A World is a Model of the World” curated by Alice Jim, in the main gallery of Darling Foundry in Montréal. Working around his personal dwelling, Lau constructs virtual spaces that integrate layers of live-action videos with computer generated 3D animations to produce illusionistic effects, drifting between real and unreal topologies and existing in a temporality that expands into infinite loops. In the following conversation with M-KOS about his work, Lau expresses a quiet resistance to the art world and finds affiliations to past scholars and thinkers.

MKOS: You are showing two videos here at Darling Foundry: one is called “Room: An Extension” and the other one “Between the Past and the Present: Lived Moments in Beijing”. Are they connected to specific times and spaces?

Yam Lau [YL]: “Room: An Extension” was shot in my old apartment in Toronto in 2008. It was a very particular moment because we had record snowfalls that day, and you can actually see snow on the balcony in the video. So you can trace it back to that particular day. This is actually the second work where I use this technology. The first one called “Room” [2007] was also shot in my apartment. It was more simple but done in the night time – I’m coming back home, changing and going to bed. This one I’m getting up in the morning, opening the blinds and so on. The context of the video itself is not specific. I imagine this is a very abstract space where a natural event keeps recurring.
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Yam Lau “A World is a Model of the World” at Darling Foundry, Montréal

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Yam Lau, Between the Past and the Present: Lived Moments in Beijing (video still). Courtesy the artist and Katzman Kamen Gallery, Toronto

Yam Lau
A World is a Model of the World
6 June – 25 August 2013
at Darling Foundry, Montréal

Curated by Alice Jim

The 11th Anniversary + Opening of the exhibition: 20h00
VIP Benefit event: 18h00 – 20h00
Thursday 6 June 2013

In a corner of a city centre undergoing modernization and gentrification, fraught with conflicting economic scales of living together, a means of voluntary reclusion is on offer via a Chinese scholar’s studio and an apartment residence. The video projections, Between Past and Present: Lived Moments in Beijing (2012) and Room: An Extension (2008), are set adrift on two island pavilions connected by unobstructed garden pathways that are partly imaginary and partly evoked through deliberate landscaping and the open frame armature. Yam Lau’s recent work explores the use of real-time video footage and computer-aided design software to manifest familiar spaces in varying dimensions and perspectives.
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Opportunities: International Residency at Darling Foundry, Montréal

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Site-specific installation “Courte-Pointe” by Philippe Allard and Justin Duchesneau, making a shade at the entrance of Darling Foundry in summer 2012. Photo by M-KOS

International Residency in 2014
at Darling Foundry, Montréal

Deadline: 1 June 2013

The International Residency at the Darling Foundry is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. The program supports foreign visual artists from outside of Canada. One residency of six months will be awarded. The schedule of the residency is from the beginning of January 2014 to the end of June 2014. The resident artist will receive a grant amount of $23,000 CDN which contributes towards travel, subsistence, and production costs.
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Olivia Boudreau “Intérieur” at Darling Foundry, Montréal


Olivia Boudreau, Intérieur, 2012. Courtesy the artist. Photo by Guy l’Heureux

Olivia Boudreau
Intérieur
3 October – 2 December 2012
at Darling Foundry, Montréal

[…] Intérieur is a videographic installation involving projection on two screens, set almost in front of each other, to reproduce, in a close, static shot, two windows as seen from inside an apartment. Randomly blown open by the wind in turn, they are then promptly closed by a figure who enters and then leaves the visual field to perform his action. That of Intérieur consists in capturing the opening of the windows, each veiled by a white curtain, as well as the motion of the fabric caught in the draught.

By “magnifying what is terribly ordinary”, Olivia Boudreau turns this startlingly banal scene – two windows, two curtains, one figure – into a paradoxically captivating situation that simultaneously involves several features of our perception. With its two screens facing each other and an arrangement of volumes that plays on transparency and superimposition, the installation prompts the viewer to mentally reconstitute the apartment’s room and to appropriate its inner space. Long moments of stillness, framed by closed windows, put us in a state of expectation and steep us in a new temporality, one in which we are forced to remain passive. The opening of one of the windows and the movement of the curtain that is then caught in the wind turn this action into a genuine event. [read the full text here]

Darling Foundry
745 Ottawa Street
Montréal, Quebec
H3C 1R8
fonderiedarling.org

Opening hours:
Wednesday, Friday – Sunday: 12h00 – 19h00
Thursday: 12h00 – 22h00

Entry: $5
Free on Thursday.

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Review: Shilpa Gupta – Will we ever be able to mark enough?

Currently on view: Montréal
Shilpa Gupta: Will we ever be able to mark enough?
at Darling Foundry
5 October – 4 December 2011 (extended)
Curator: Renée Baert


Shilpa Gupta “Will we ever be able to mark enough?” Installation view at Darling Foundry 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Darling Foundry. Photo credit: Guy L’Heureux

In a rapidly globalizing world, intensified human migrations have brought issues of identity, culture and homeland to the forefront of many’s political agenda, and with them the fears and insecurities of change. Shilpa Gupta’s exhibition Will we ever be able to mark enough? at Darling Foundry sharply addresses some of our most recurrent anxieties for the issues above, particularly regarding border security. The Mumbai artist worked in collaboration with Montreal curator Renée Baert to present her first Canadian solo show, a selection of recent pieces as well as pivotal new works, created specifically for this show.

Unfortunately unavailable to personally set up the exhibition, the artist however did invest much fervor in her selection of signature works. Before even entering the exhibition, a row of six color photographs greet us, hanging on a brick wall across the street from the Foundry. All one and a half meters in diameter, each square image captures the upper body movements of dark skinned figures, arms flailing and faces blurred by slow shutter photo effects. In stepping outside the institutional space of the gallery, Gupta continues her ongoing practice of confronting her images in public settings, usually reserved for advertising purposes. As opposed to the latter’s focus on instantaneous communications, Gupta draws a more complex worldview.
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Review: Pierrick Sorin “Une vie bien remplie”

Currently on view: Montréal
Pierrick Sorin: Une vie bien remplie
at Great Hall, Darling Foundry
16 June – 28 August 2011

Pierrick Sorin “C’est mignon tout ça” (1993) short film 4 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Darling Foundry

Une Vie Bien Remplie is a collection of works by French videographer Pierrick Sorin, currently at the Darling Foundry. The six pieces on show form a comprehensive twenty-year overview of the artist’s career, spanning most of his thematic realm. Sorin reaches high levels of self-contemplation with each of his films and videos in order to subvert his own artistic relevance and project the buoyancy of his humor, which fluctuates between subtlety and satire.

With “C’est mignon tout ça” (1993) for example, Sorin films himself on all fours in garter belt, high heels and stockings, fondling a monitor inches from his face which is broadcasting a live feed of his own behind. The mise en scène is overdubbed and inter-spliced with a closely-shot interview of our self-portraitist, confessing his difficulties at overcoming shyness and creating meaningful relationships with others. If nothing else, this first piece illustrates the extent to which Sorin uses the versatility of video to comment on this medium of tele-presence that separates as much as unites its protagonists with the rest of the world.
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