Nine MCs Give It Their All in ‘Informer,’ a Tender, Funny Installation at the Polygon

Nine young white men stand in a row.

They face the gallery viewers at eye level, life-size on the video screens. They fidget with nervous energy and then launch into a full-throated rap battle, ripping off lyrics, posturing and challenging each other, clad in hoodies, hats pulled low, throwing tough-dude gesticulations.

Informer, Laura Gildner’s award-winning installation, literally stops you in your tracks. It’s, as they say, a piece of work.

It’s not hard to see why Gildner nabbed the Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize this year. Informer, her nine-channel video featuring performances from would-be MCs in full freestyle flight is cheeky, funny, as well as strangely heart-rending. The rap battles range from downright awkward to kind of amazing, with different levels of skill and confidence demonstrated along the way.

The works of the finalists for the Lind Prize, awarded to British Columbia-based artists working in photography, film or video, are currently on display at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver.

It’s well worth the SeaBus ride to take in the work and enjoy the experience. On any given day, the gallery is usually filled with elementary school kids. Notebooks in hands, backpacks piled against a wall, they’re dotted around the different rooms, drawing like children possessed.

On the day I toured the Polygon, kids were squatting in front of Gildner’s nine-panel installation screens. Two were busily rolling around on the floor, but most were looking hard at the work, intent on capturing it in a drawing, bent almost double in concentration.

Gildner said the kids were there when she was installing her piece before the opening, “asking a lot of questions, like ‘Did you feel safe when you were filming?’ ‘How did you get their phone numbers?’ We ended up talking for like an hour and a half,” she laughed.

Gildner, who graduated from the University of Victoria in June, was twice shortlisted for the Lind Prize. This year, she took home the award.

The Tyee reached her at home in Victoria where she’s working on several new projects that sound as fascinating as Informer. We asked how the work came about.

“I met one of the rappers while I was visiting my dad in Ottawa,” Gildner explained. When she was filming him in a parking lot, another young guy stepped up and asked, “Hey, can I go next?” From there, the structure for the work began to emerge.

Gildner came of age in the 1980s when hip hop really began to permeate pop culture. “You can’t throw a rock nowadays without hitting a rapper,” she said.

The young men featured in Informer all hope to be professional MCs, and Gildner said this level of seriousness was critical to the work. A few candidates who weren’t quite as dedicated were weeded out early, she said.

It’s the young men’s gravitas mixed with goofy details — flannel shirts, baggy pants, crappy apartments and white-boy dreadlocks — that gives the work its particular pathos, as well as its humour.

Often the two things slam right into each other. One moment I wanted to cry at the tremulous courage demonstrated by one particular rapper, and the next I was laughing at his near-skinless bravado. Gildner said that some audience members thought they were actually present in the gallery and being filmed live.

This choppy immediacy is anchored by the tenderness in Gildner’s approach. “I don’t think I could have done this work if I was a man,” she said.

In this aspect, the work is an interesting inversion of the male gaze. As Gildner said, rap is one of the few forms where young men can openly express their feelings. The fragility with which the men present the performances wouldn’t have been possible underneath a male gaze, simply because men don’t tend to allow this kind of vulnerability with other men.

“Asking these guys to talk about their feelings and to be vulnerable, to let me into their personal spaces, and to believe in my intentions took a fair amount of trust and bravery,” said Gildner. “They are all so sweet, kind and talented, and for the most part their performative personas were so different from their personalities off camera that I was hoping the structure of this video — shooting them in single long, 30-minute shots — would allow for tensions between their varying identities to peek through.”

The men’s raw need to be seen and understood burns into your consciousness. It also informed the way the performances took place.

“I took away their music, their beats,” said Gildner. The rappers, she said, often view their voices more like percussive instruments on top of the beats. But she stripped away the background. All you hear are words, sometimes overlapping but mostly alone and exposed. The mix of braggadocio and entreaty gives the work an energy, as live as an electric cable.

Gildner said she was careful to be transparent about the process and take the time to form relationships.

“We’d talk a couple of times before I filmed them,” she said. “The first meeting took place while filming, but they understood my intentions.... There’s a lot of power in being behind the camera.”

In addition to performative masculinity, Gildner’s subjects are all white or white-presenting individuals.*

“A room of white men rapping about their feelings,” she said, could lend itself to a dialogue around issue of cultural appropriation. Indeed, it is one of the very first things that leaps out about the work.

Hip hop has its origins in Black culture, like jazz and blues. But it’s been adopted everywhere, the lingua franca of the music world uniting kids in Compton with the young and disaffected in every corner of the globe.

Gildner spent about a year putting the installation together. As she prepared, she was able to send some of the MCs the drawings the kids had made of them in action — drinks close at hand, readying themselves for freestyle rap battles.

“They were so hilarious; you can really tell who each person is.”

Currently there’s more than Gildner’s extraordinary work on display at the Polygon Gallery, including Lacie Burning’s Blockade Rider, Rydel Cerezo’s Am I a Sea, and Xan Shian’s Cupped Hands with Frog at Fairy Knowe, Aberfoyle.

I suggest you muscle some elementary kids out of the way and take a closer look.

The Lind Prize runs at the Polygon Gallery, 101 Carrie Cates Court, until March 15.

*Story clarified Feb. 26 at 6:10 a.m.