Ian Johnston | The Life and Times of G

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Ian Johnston, “The Life and Time of G,” 2023

video still (courtesy of the gallery)

Opening Reception: Friday August 16th from 6-9pm

The Life and Times of G is an immersive four-screen video installation that presents a collection of vignettes from the life of a character whose journey is punctuated by a series of epic and mundane undertakings. The protagonist G is embodied by two dancers, variously portrayed by Slava Doval, Hiromoto Ida, and Acacia Schachte, who themselves simultaneously represent the right and left hemispheres of the brain and what philosopher Ursula Franklin refers to as holistic and prescriptive technologies. In her work The Real World of Technology, Franklin describes holistic technologies as processes that can be controlled by the individual, such as in craft-based practices where one person is able shift direction in response to a multitude of possible changes in material and context. The hallmarks of prescriptive technologies are conformity and orthodoxy, such as in digital platforms and industrial processes, and tend to control behaviour and response by virtue of their inflexibility. Punctuated by panoramic natural and industrial landscapes, vignettes of the character shift back and forth between a series of holistic and prescriptive technologies which chronicle the trials and tribulations of the protagonist through the course of a lifetime. The dancer’s attire, made from the detritus of consumption, grows in volume and weight as they move through their journey.

Entering the gallery, surrounded by four 16 by 9-foot screens, we see the two halves of G emerging. One struggles with industrial strapping, representing the left brain, while the other emerges from a tangle of large fabric worms, which represents the right. Throughout images shift from screen to screen, inviting the viewer to actively experience the work rather than passively consuming it. The characters are intentionally neither gender nor culturally specific, rather they embody the interplay between left and right, prescriptive and holistic. Initially they appear alone, juxtaposed against scenes of Kafkaesque telephone banking, the process of hand-made ceramic fabrication, and industrial bedding plant production.

It is only midway through the eighteen-minute piece that we see them together; this time in the Sisyphean task of rolling a ball of their birth entrails perpetually up a slope. The movements of the characters combined with their location are set against the backdrop of our contemporary world in order to form a reminder that we are perpetually losing and rediscovering technology. While all of the scenes and interspersed vignettes are of specific places, it is the feeling evoked that is important, not the site specificity. As the seasons change, we see the pair mimicking street marking, left and right combining to interpret the movements together. They find themselves in an abandoned pool where the prescriptive left obsessively sweeps an area while the holistic right feels increasingly trapped within the shrinking boundaries of the unswept area. Eventually, left helps right to make the jump, physically pulling them across the arbitrary boundary between swept and unswept, which then dissolves. The holistic process of planting tulips bulbs segues into passing scenes of industrial sunflower plantations. As the characters grow, their interactions and accompanying imagery become increasingly complex and interrelated – struggling with and figuring out how to setup a card table, spinning alongside each other while trying not to get caught up in a milling machine, and the familiar two steps forward, one step back, going in circles, compliance of daily life. Towards the end, visibly weighed down by their now immense costumes, the two halves of G circle each other on a beach, each digging a hole and filling the other’s. Eventually, they walk out to the shore and the cycle begins again.

The Life and Times of G builds on a previous project Fine Line: Check Check, which explored the certainty and doubt associated with obsessive-compulsive behaviour. Similarly, this new work uses four screens to cast doubt and asks the viewer to question the conscious or unconscious nature of their movement as they engage with the work. The score by Don Macdonald, anchored by songs from Bob Wiseman and PIQSIQ, weaves through the piece and space of the installation. As Wiseman’s ‘Who Am I’ poses a quintessential life question, PIQSIQ’s ‘Corpus Callo (song)’, commissioned for the work, employs Katajjaq, Inuit style throat singing, to re-enforce the dual nature of the character’s inner life. In Katajjaq, the two singers begin with a simple back and forth volley that intensifies in both speed and complexity until the individual voices meld into one, linking the left and right. The images and sound shift from screen to screen, subtly choreographing the viewer’s focus and movement within the space of the installation. The interplay of image and sound in The Life and Times of G subtly guides the viewer's focus, exploiting our contemporary dependence on screens and drawing us deeper into the intricate exploration of prescriptive and holistic technologies.