Jeremy Shaw

Searching for transcendence through the ecstatic body.

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There are few things that allow one to truly let go, to come to a state of abandonment where thoughts fall away, and the body is swept up in motion. A hard workout or other physical activity can sometimes bring us out of our heads and into our bodies. Who is not familiar with that rare and perfect experience on a lucky night of dancing? 

Phase Shifting Index, the North American première of a seven-channel video installation by Berlin-based Vancouver artist Jeremy Shaw, on view at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver until Sept. 24, ruminates on this moment, revelling in it and even producing the same feeling for viewers.

The work was originally created in 2020 for a solo show the Centre Pompidou in Paris, adding to Shaw’s list of high-profile exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale and MOMA PS1 in New York City. As well, Shaw is the recipient of the 2016 Sobey Art Award. His work, spanning some two decades, explores the altered state as way to achieve transcendent experiences.

In philosophy, transcendence points to God, or the gods beyond this world, so experiencing it should bring one to a feeling beyond one’s community and oneself. Across Shaw’s oeuvre, experiments with drug trips, belief systems, dance and dance music explore the quest for transcendence as something that can fracture the psyche, as in his 2020 series Quantification Trilogy, or disintegrate it, as in the 2004 video installation, DMT.

At the Polygon, seven screens play documentary-style footage of different groups undertaking a range of movement practices: an addictions therapy group; a new-age spiritual practice; groups for ritual; groups for dance; and groups for hardcore skanking. With their varied hair styles and costumes, they speak to different periods of time from the 1960s to the 1990s. The use of 16mm and Hi-8 video tape suggests we are watching found footage. 

My journey began as cerebral: I dutifully entered, planted myself at the far left of the gallery, planning to explore each screen from left to right. The task of an efficient critic is to see the work individually and holistically, find the interruptions within it, and decipher its strategies. This fell apart by the time I’d made my way to the second screen.  

As I watched an ’80s dance troupe explore jump-style dance to a digital soundtrack that might work well with a video game, I noticed the dancers’ robotic gestures were starting to quicken. Through montage, the speed and intensity increased until the individual video’s audio was consumed by a score that overtook the room. 

From my perch in the corner, I turned and saw all seven screens overtaken. Just as quickly, the pace slowed, and each group performed some version of the same dance. But it was not a routine, it was more like prayer. Bodies moved with an abandonment that seemed determined to summon a higher power. As the videos synced in movement, each group seemingly working towards the same goal, the characteristics that defined the time period of each screen – the hair, the costumes, the film style – crumbled. 

Phase Shifting Index is set to a score composed by sound artist Konrad Black, Shaw’s longtime collaborator, a fellow Vancouverite turned Berlin ex-pat. Black’s score is nothing short of epic, evoking every phase of transformation. The score moves from speed to slowness, from pretty to distorted, before finally dissolving. It pulls the screens, the bodies in them, and the viewer’s experience into alignment. 

It may be a point of philosophical difference, but I don’t view what I’ve seen as transcendence. While these are surely bodies made ecstatic through repetition, meditation, somatic transfer and improvisation, these practices bring the bodies to a place where they are more filled with themselves. This energetic direction is not transcendent, as in away from the body, but immanent, as in a return to the body, where shared motion cultivates individual and collective capacities. They are building energy in community. ■

Jeremy Shaw: Phase Shifting Index at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver from June 23 to Sept. 24, 2023.

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The Polygon Gallery

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