Split Screen: Leslie Bauer, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Todd Lambeth, Kate Shults

Opening Friday, January 27, 7pm.

Deluge Contemporary Art

636 Yates Street, Victoria BC | http://deluge.ca

Exhibition Hours: Wed–Sat 12-4pm (Thurs 1-5pm)

Split Screen is an experiment in encouraging language and conversation between 2D (in this case painting) and media artworks while expanding experiential possibilities for viewers. Less a situation of work coexisting alongside other work in aid of a specific set of ideas, appositions or overarching theme, the exhibition loosely harnesses syncopations—visual, audial, kinetic—to imagine a larger composition within which infinite possibilities for comprehension exist and from which infinite numbers of questions arise, much like abstraction itself. 

In Leslie Bauer’s Fahren 7 velocity deforms our understanding of static objects, effecting surfaces into recondite dynamic shapes. “Traffic, as something very essential and characteristic of a particular time, is presented as a pattern of order and a perceptible form of structuring space and time. Locomotion makes a holistic view impossible. In the state of movement, speed and distance determine the perception of the landscape traversed. The road network itself is a pattern, a space-rastering construct, which in turn offers a reservoir of patterns, images and narratives." 

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster’s film Dada Ship wrests itself away from the homogeneity of the historical movement to set sail for other, queerer shores employing disrupted stereoscopy and collaged détournement of archival imagery. 

In his paintings, Todd Lambeth has long been interested in optically challenging unfixed areas of interest by flipping figure and ground. Like the moving image artists in Split Screen, Lambeth understands the actions of fracturing, splicing and splitting in order to animate lacunae between seeing and recognition, between “this” and “that.” 

Kate Shults has created a video portrait of a disaster—2017’s Hurricane Irma—from the precarious safety of her home in inland Central Florida. Through anticipation, impact and aftermath, Irma explores the fragility of digital images and landscapes while deftly challenging the politics of looking.

While the artists in Split Screen engage with varying approaches and concerns, they often utilize similar techniques and processes—layering, montage, chroma shifting and hybrid analog/digital workflows—to enrich the vocabulary of contemporary abstraction across disparate media.