Jeremy Shaw's Quantification Trilogy

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Jeremy Shaw, “Towards Universal Pattern Recognition (MM Pastors 21.01),” 2016

kaleidoscope acrylic, chrome and archival colour photograph

Jeremy Shaw's cerebral exhibition, Quantification Trilogy, on view at the Esker Foundation in Calgary until May 12, inspires curiosity about how the transcendental is reflected in popular culture. Shaw plays cleverly with the tension between belief and disbelief, prompting us to think about how we, individually and collectively, understand such experiences.

His three video installations – Quickeners, Liminals and I Can See Forever – work with the aesthetic of cinéma vérité, a type of documentary in which the truth about a subject is revealed through the raw data assembled by the filmmaker.

Shaw also presents Towards Universal Pattern Recognition, a series of archival photographs framed under custom-machined prismatic acrylic. The works, which he calls optical sculptures, depict people in transcendent states accessed through prayer, dance, yoga and the like. They act as a preview to the videos, which are projected in meticulously constructed spaces, each with eight office chairs facing a single screen.

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Jeremy Shaw, “Quickeners,” 2014

HD video installation with original soundtrack

Shaw’s first video installation, Quickeners, transports viewers 500 years into a future where hyper-rational people – known as the Quantum Human society – have achieved immortality through scientific reasoning.

A group of these evolved humans are afflicted with Human Atavism Syndrome, meaning they desire so-called archaic religious rituals, such as handling poisonous serpents or speaking in tongues, to restore the feeling of linear time. The phosphorescent blue glow at the height of their quickening – whether from frenzied dancing or other rituals – bleeds into the screening room, suggesting that viewers have been given privileged access to their transcendence.

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Jeremy Shaw, “Liminals,” 2017, HD video installation

Both Quickeners and Shaw’s second work, Liminals, couch his most recent, I Can See Forever, presented here for the first time in Canada.

It’s set in a possible future 40 years from now that resembles Berlin in the 1990s. This video follows the story of 27-year-old dancer Roderick Dale, the sole survivor of the Singularity Project, a government-funded experiment to find a balance between human and machine DNA.

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Jeremy Shaw, “I Can See Forever,” 2018, two-channel HD video installation

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Jeremy Shaw, “I Can See Forever,” 2018, two-channel HD video installation

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Jeremy Shaw, “I Can See Forever,” 2018, two-channel HD video installation

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Dale works to achieve a feeling of corporeal and digital presence through dance. He moves into a transcendent state as the video shifts from distant and documentary to intimate, revolving and stroboscopic.

As viewers, we are left with a literal and metaphorical afterimage that invites us to rethink how we legitimize traditions linked to out-of-body experiences, as well as the role the pursuit of transcendence plays in defining humanity. ■

Quantification Trilogy is on view at the Esker Foundation in Calgary from Jan. 26 to May 12, 2019.