Interior Infinite

Costume, carnival and a celebration of reversal.

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In Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnival, the traditional roles of peasant and sovereign are gloriously overturned for a single day. Justin Ramsey, a curator at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver, takes Bakhtin’s celebration of reversal as a starting point for his ambitious first feature exhibition, Interior Infinite, on view until Sept. 5. 

The exhibition eschews entrenched assertions of identity in favour of what is mobile, flexible and transitory. The artists – Nick Cave, Martine Gutierrez, Zanele Muholi, Meryl McMaster, Kris Lemsalu, Skeena Reece, Yinka Shonibare and Carrie Mae Weems, among others – are not only some of the most important  contemporary artists working today, but they each explore the mutable nature of the subject and link futurity with transformation.  

Because our mediatized lives have been playing out as something of a culture war, the works in Interior Infinite made me think of the abject art movements of the early 1990s, where themes of undesirability and disgust are hyperbolized to draw attention to identity-based oppressions. In the ’90s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, artists of the abject – feminist, queer, American and largely white – utilized elements of the grotesque to construct identity against the social norms reinforced by Republican censorship and the Christian right. 

Although awareness of these systems of power is growing, our culture now is no less fraught with white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia and sexism. These are pervasive violences. The works in this exhibition, however, practice a different kind of affirmative politics in their unforgiving expression of self-assuredness that turns towards the viewer. The works demonstrate deep awareness of the experiences of the raced body, the queer body, the misgendered and trans body. But the difference in their exhibition is in the exploration of what a body can do, as opposed to any kind of rumination on inherent abjectness. 

I caution viewers not to naively mistake what you see for anything less than an act of refusal. This is perhaps best represented in four site-specific photographic murals by South African visual activist Zanele Muholi. In the ongoing portrait series, Somnyama Ngonyama (‘Hail the Dark Lioness’), Muholi uses their own body as a deliberate site of critique, where the sparse effects of black and white photography, a costume and a plainly confident gaze deliver a rebuke of racism and sexual politics, as well as a powerful exegesis on beauty. 

Many works play with identity through experimentation with colour and fashion. Self-portraits by French photographer Claude Cahun, who died in 1954, experiment with gender expression, a throughline that Ramsey traces and finds remixed in glossy images from the 2018 magazine tome Indigenous Woman by Martine Gutierrez. The traditional beauty image is queered. From Cahun to Gutierrez, and in moving image works by Sin Wai Kin and Ursula Mayer, fashion becomes self-styled protection, a cloak of secrets and a dynamic material from which to perform reversals. 

There are more great artists in the exhibition than can be mentioned in this review. One of Nick Cave’s many Soundsuits is on display, as well as a video from Yinka Shonibare. Both pieces, but particularly Cave’s, revel in the political capacities of joy through ornamentation. 

My one critique of the show is the emphasis placed on the carnival. While the upheaval of norms that Bakhtin wrote about have offered theorists a model for revolution and the inversion of power systems, this reversal of fortune is intended to last only for a day and does not touch the hierarchical structure that remains the problem. The question is how to make the effects of the carnival last longer than a day, longer than this show? I’m heartened to see the recent turn to more relevant and representative curation from larger local institutions, such as the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Polygon. I hope we will one day bask in the lasting and continuing effects of these efforts. Justin Ramsey will be one to watch. ■ 

Interior Infinite at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver from June 25 to Sept. 5, 2021. The artists include Lacie Burning, Claude Cahun, Nick Cave, Charles Campbell, Dana Claxton, Martine Gutierrez, Kris Lemsalu, Ursula Mayer, Meryl McMaster, Zanele Muholi, Aïda Muluneh, Zak Ové, Skeena Reece, Yinka Shonibare, Sin Wai Kin, Carrie Mae Weems and Zadie Xa.

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The Polygon Gallery

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