Burning Down the House

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Gwenessa Lam, “368 House Fires,” 2016

video (looped), 1:42 min., dimensions variable

A photograph of a house fire in Commerce, Georgia, plays a central role in a striking yet disquieting exhibition, Gwenessa Lam: What Magic, at Calgary’s Glenbow Museum. Curated by Nancy Tousley, the show consists of photo etchings and text, an artist’s book, graphite drawings and a video projection, all set within a small, intimately lit room with black walls. Every component focuses on images of house fires Lam found using reverse image searches on Google. The show, which runs until Sept. 9, is the latest exhibition in a series that presents new work by significant Alberta artists.

Lam’s video loop, 368 House Fires, presents repeated “still” images of a house on fire as flames transform the two-storey structure into a blazing inferno. The fire is advanced enough to be dramatic and reveal the house’s architectural form, but not so far along that the structure is unrecognizable. The animation, composed of 368 flashes of the same image in different sizes, spans less than two minutes and mimics the quick, glancing views of a digital search while simulating the flame’s flickering, burning assault. The effect is both terrifying and mesmerizing.

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Gwenessa Lam, “Brentwood No. 2 (Negative),” 2017

graphite on paper, 7.5" x 10"

The animation’s intensity is a stark contrast to eight small drawings completed between 2016 and 2018. Rendered in graphite and mounted on panels, they depict ghostly images of burning houses from Canada, the United States and New Zealand. Lam digitally degraded the original images several times, even turning them into negatives, before recreating them as drawings. These multiple manipulations shift the blazing buildings into images on the verge of disintegrating into smoke and ash. Mirroring the proportions of a smart-phone screen, the delicate renderings become spectres suspended somewhere between turmoil and stillness, the real and the imagined.

In the digital world, distinctions between reality and fiction are blurring. Social media and other sites feature photos, videos and stories that may or may not be real. For an artist like Lam, an assistant professor at the Alberta College of Art and Design, appropriating and repurposing images is accepted practice. But it’s misleading, if not deceitful, when media outlets or bloggers take an image from one context and use it in another.

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Gwenessa Lam, “What Magic,” 2017-2018

29 photo etchings with Chine collé, 6" x 8" (detail)

What Magic juxtaposes 29 photo etchings on shelves spanning two connecting walls, along with an artist’s book on a rectangular table in the room’s centre. Lam found the same image of a burning house on 29 websites. Only once was it connected to the actual event. Text above each piece narrates the strange and evolving life of an appropriated image that migrated to sites based in Zambia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Holland, illustrating everything from dream interpretation to psychological disorders, as well as fire safety, insurance claims and suspicious evictions.

Tousley, in her exhibition essay, points to ongoing shifts in how we understand what we see online. “Lam’s engagement with both old and new technologies implicates the changes that human perception of images has undergone with immersion in digital technologies,” she writes. The allure of Lam’s work is in how she relentlessly but responsively manipulates found images to create new meanings while illuminating a critique of technology and the consumption of digital imagery. ■

Gwenessa Lam: What Magic is on view at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary from June 16 to Sept. 9, 2018.