IRENE BINDI and ASTON COLES: "At the Corner," Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts, Winnipeg Jan. 30 to March 14, 2015

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IRENE BINDI and ASTON COLES: At the Corner

Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts, Winnipeg

Jan. 30, 2015 to March 14, 2015

By Sarah Swan

The ancient Greek mathematicians Ptolemy and Euclid believed that light was a sensitive substance that shoots from the eyes, reaching into space to illuminate objects. For Aston Coles, that idea is a beautiful one, and an apt metaphor for film, cinema and the act of observing art. He and partner Irene Bindi, multidisciplinary artists based in Winnipeg, explore the idea of projection in their work.

But for this show, At the Corner, the pair averts their gaze from obvious focal points. For them, the corner represents a drift away from the centre, compositionally speaking, and a place to see new things. In essence, the artists have made a ‘film’ without any actual film apparatus, relying instead on elements of time, light, rhythm, colour and form.

In Coles’ installation, Maltese, a spotlight is directed towards a ceiling fan, which casts a large swirling shadow into the corner of the gallery. On the other side of the wall is a second installation, Shark Purse Area. Under the baseboards, a band of light wavers, as if hesitating, before spilling out across the floor. Meant to echo the movement of waves on a beach, the light advances and retreats ad infinitum.

Coles’ pieces can certainly be read as a composite and delightfully ad hoc description of the infinite (the contraptions that power each installation are made of a jumble of wire, fishing line and cinema foil). Coles’ simple pairing of light and shadow is beautiful.  The endlessly spinning shadow is hypnotic, boring and then depressing. But the hesitant band of light creates a sense of subtle anticipation each and every time.

For her part of the show, Bindi recorded interior and exterior corners of their house on 16mm film. Choosing subjects for their unremarkable qualities – the plumbing under the kitchen sink (16-6), a heap of clothes (16-5), a pile of books (16-4) – she then translated them into paper collages. In her seven abstract works, each resembling an enlarged frame of film, form and surface have been broken down and pieced back together with hundreds of paper cuttings.

As the translation is not literal, some colours have been augmented. In abutting tone against tone, Bindi often makes choices with little representational sense that serve instead to obfuscate the subject. As she tells curator Collin Zipp: “The subject is available, but it has fallen away.”

All the colours of winter light are here, blues, greys and the particular shade of lilac that snow turns in the early evening.  As a counterbalance to Cole’s movement-based works, the collages convey something about the otherworldly stillness of cold weather, existing in a kind of half-world between the flatness of abstract painting and the dimensionality of film.

Platform: Centre for Photographic & Digital Arts

121-100 Arthur St, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 1H3

204-942-8183

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