More than 100 people visited the Carleton University Art Gallery (CUAG) on Sept. 25 for its first in-person opening event since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The event celebrated the unveiling of two new exhibitions: THREE SONGS and Where We Stand. Both exhibitions explore how people relate to the spaces they inhabit in their everyday lives.
The number of visitors was more than double the gallery’s expected turnout, CUAG director Sandra Dyck said.
“It’s really wonderful to have people back here again,” she said. “I had no idea what to expect [or] if people would come today but we’ve had an amazing turnout.”
THREE SONGS, a series of films produced by filmmaker, choreographer and dancer Laura Taler, is featured on the lower level of the gallery.
Taler worked directly with CUAG to curate her exhibition. She hired Carleton architecture student Odessa Boehm in 2019 to create a series of models the gallery used for the film installation layouts.
In each installation, Taler sings while interacting with various spaces: A German forest in “Song #1,” her late grandmother’s Romanian farmhouse in “Song #2” and the world’s largest plaster cast workshop, the Berlin Gipsformerei, in “Song #3.”
She produced these films between 2015 and 2019, with the exhibition originally scheduled to open in the summer of 2020. However, Taler and the gallery decided to delay the opening until students returned to campus this fall.
Though she was frustrated by the delays at first, she said she realized the COVID-19 pandemic gave her works a new layer of meaning.
“Film and dance … is about how we spend our time, how we work with the past and the future,” Taler said. “I think the pandemic has given us a different view on how we spend our time.”
Taler refers to the characters in her films as “doppelgängers,” which allows her to express her real emotions through fictional stories. When a dancer uses their body to make art they naturally incorporate elements of themselves, but since dance is not considered self-portraiture, they also maintain a certain distance, she explained.
Rachel Gray, who regularly attends CUAG exhibitions, said she was moved by the exhibit.
“Everyone’s relationship with home is complex,” Gray said. “[The exhibition] makes me reflect on how common the experience of being pushed from your home is and what that sensation might be like.”
She added CUAG’s provision of noise-cancelling headphones made it much easier to invest herself in Taler’s art.
“It’s been really beautiful to be able to sit with the works with the headphones on and be able to have a relationship with them, even on the busiest day of the exhibition,” she said.
Where We Stand, the gallery’s upstairs exhibition, was curated by eight students from Carleton’s curatorial graduate studies program, with guidance from professor Rachelle Dickenson.
Students selected works from CUAG’s permanent collection from the 18th to 21st centuries. The exhibition brings these works together to explore the various understandings of identity through community.
The works are split into three sections that explore how people understand the spaces around them on spiritual, familial and conceptual levels.
“I liked how there were different styles of artworks, some from Indigenous artists … and how there was a mix of photographs and paintings,” CUAG visitor Peter Vorvis said.
THREE SONGS and Where We Stand will be on display until Dec. 18.
Featured image by Zenith Wolfe.
