JAYCE SALLOUM, "history of the present," October 25, 2009 to January 3, 2010, Kamloops Art Gallery

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Jayce Salloum, "history of the present," 2009, installation, Kamloops Art Gallery.

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"history of the present"

Jayce Salloum, "history of the present," 2009, installation, Kamloops Art Gallery.

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JAYCE SALLOUM, history of the present

Kamloops Art Gallery

October 25, 2009 to January 3, 2010

By Portia Priegert

It was Jayce Salloum’s “map of the world”, a sprawling collection of envelopes, photographs, plants, doodles, feathers and other found objects, all pinned to a bulletin board, that gave curator Jen Budney the idea for history of the present. Although, as she acknowledges, “map of the world” has a whimsical flavor at odds with the politically engaged videos that have made Salloum one of Canada’s best-known artists abroad, it shares the same concern with the multiplicity of experience.

Salloum’s work can be challenging and is even regarded by some as having a ‘marginal’ aesthetic because it refuses to provide the simplistic linear narratives commonly seen in public discourse. Like “map of the world”, Salloum’s video installation, “everything and nothing” and other works from the ongoing video installation, “untitled”, 1999-2009, is dense and archival, bringing in different perspectives while subverting what we typically expect of documentary. It also has a tactile quality, as strange as that sounds for such a cool technological medium. In part, it’s due to Salloum’s unorthodox camera work — by turns shaky and adrift, sometimes inverted, sometimes sideways. It mimics the unmediated processes of sensory functions, transmitting a message of contingency and subjectivity in its physicality, whether projected on a wall or screened on a monitor.

Fundamentally, Salloum asks viewers to participate in the creation of meaning for his work. While this relationship is implied with any piece of art, Salloum makes it explicit, challenging viewers to ponder not only multiple viewpoints but also to question what they know and how they know it, and through that process, potentially to adjust their understandings. He is attracted to complex colonial histories and geopolitical disputes — the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia are two places he has worked — and that increases the challenge. Salloum has described his process as creating “productive frustration” for viewers. “I work to raise questions, insert propositions, and to counteract the fulfillment of knowledge,” is one apparently paradoxical utterance. Ultimately, however, asking people to think for themselves is indeed productive.