At the New Media Gallery, a Reminder of What It Means to Be Alive

It’s not very often that an art exhibition looks a lot like a rock concert. But such was the scene when aBIOTIC, the most recent exhibition at the New Media Art Gallery, opened last week. More than 250 people crowded up the stairs at New Westminster’s Anvil Centre. They were eager to see art!

It was a bit surprising, but also not. The New Media Gallery has offered one extraordinary show after the other. It’s a living embodiment of the idea, “If you build it, they will come.” And come they did.

In addition to the thematically organized exhibitions curated from some of the most fascinating artists working today, there is an experiential aspect to New Media Gallery shows that embeds deeply. The exhibitions aren’t simply something to look at. They get inside you, roll around a while and make a place for themselves. It reminds me of something that dancers often talk about as taking something into your body so that it fuses with memory.

Another reason that people packed into the opening of the show has to do with the bespoke experience that makes the New Media Gallery so unique.

Founding directors Sarah Joyce and Gordon Duggan take a hands-on approach. They’re not sitting in their office, doing administrative things, although lord knows there’s mountains of that stuff to contend with. Rather they’re in the gallery talking to people who come to see the shows. It has created a community. A community that includes teenagers, older folk and the cognoscenti from the cultural community. There is an openness that is as friendly and inviting as it is deeply thoughtful and intellectually engaging.

Here is everything that exists

In amidst the crush of people at aBIOTIC’s opening, I found myself standing beside a woman staring at Verena Friedrich’s 2015 installation The Long Now.

The installation involves a clear Perspex box containing a mixture of different gases. Into this atmosphere, a single soap bubble is generated. The bubble birthing process doesn’t always go according to plan. Sometimes, a bubble emerges and then is sucked back up into the machinery that created it. Occasionally, it pops upon entry. But if all goes well, a bubble is issued, settles gently into the centre of the box, and simply exists there for a time, perfectly suspended, allowing onlookers to gaze upon its singular beauty.

I don’t know if I’ve ever had the opportunity to simply look at a soap bubble for an extended period, but it’s a curious experience. A woman I was standing beside was almost overcome, “It’s like a miracle,” she said before fleeing, yelling over her shoulder before she disappeared into the crowd, “I can’t bear to see it pop!”

I got it. There was something about its fragile gossamer beauty that reminded me of a newborn baby, a tiny, infinitely lovely thing that exists for a brief window of time and then is gone. There, in this interstitial place between being and not being, is everything that exists. Bubbles, babies, aardvarks, insects, humans, roses. All of the miraculous stuff in the world. Here and now, at least for the moment.

Sometimes, it takes a work of art to remind you of this knife edge of being alive. The tension is so great, I understood why the woman witnessing the bubble couldn’t take it and simply ran away.

There is probably no better element to capture the mutable, mobile, transient quality of existence than water. aBIOTIC surfaces the foundational relationship between people and water in different ways, allowing for a spectrum of experiences to rise up, bringing with it a range of emotions, everything from grief to silliness.

But back to the bubble for a moment.

At the artists’ talk that preceded the opening, the four creators explained the theory and impetus behind their work. The Long Now is akin with artist Verena Friedrich’s other time-based installations. Earlier work has included things like a single human hair or a burning candle incorporating technical, organic and experiential elements into a whole that encompasses the esoteric and the ordinary. A soap bubble is perhaps the perfect distillation of these ideas. The description of The Long Now cites the earlier precedents “The work builds on a long art tradition of depicting soap bubbles in still life and portraiture. Known as Vanitas, the bubble serves to remind us that life is transient and our demise is certain.”

Due to the unique composition of atmosphere inside the box, bubbles can last a couple of hours before popping. The residue of these brief bits of life mark the inside of the installation in a series of soapy remains, like so many small demises. But before the inevitable end, there is so much beauty, ravishing in its perfection, filled with iridescent colours: bright teal, salmon pink, chartreuse green, floating in a shifting dance across the perfect surface. Utterly ordinary and perfectly extraordinary. Just look at this crazy thing!

On the endless cosmic tumble

The birth motif occurs again in Infra-Supra (2014-23) from Icelandic artist Finnbogi Pétursson. Taking up the entire length of the largest space in the gallery, the work consists of a long flat pool of inky dark water, marked by three speakers at equidistant spots. The speakers create a series of ripples on the surface by pulsing sound waves into the water. The movements are then projected onto the wall, creating in the project’s description an “animated dance, which is reflected again on the water, resulting in a quasi-infinite interfusion of below (infra) and above (supra).”

The technical aspects of the work are only the beginning. Sit long enough with Infra/Supra and something very curious starts to happen. First, there are the patterns, oscillating separately and together, braiding into ropey lengths, as the water moves, then stills, then moves again. Then come the colours, rainbow sheens that recall the iridescent glories of the soap bubble in The Long Now. They move in undulating lines, rippling with mathematic precision across the length of the gallery. The effect is somewhat trance-inducing, straddling the line between exquisite and agonizing, which is fitting, since pain and pleasure both come in waves.

Sitting with the work, I was reminded of being in labour, or more exactly how contractions build in intensity, then gradually fade away and then rise again. As I was trying to describe the work to a friend, they commented that people who lived through an earthquake might feel very differently about the power of vibrations. But gentle or not so much, they move us in all kinds of ways.

The Paris collective Labofactory’s installation Sky (2022-23) takes up another entire room in another part of the gallery. Like the other works in the show, the mercurial, changeable aspects of water are at the heart of the piece. At the artists talk, two of the collectives’ members Laurent Karst and Filippo Fabbri described earlier incarnations of the work, where gallery attendees were allowed to directly manipulate how the piece functioned.

As its creators explained, the installation became something of a game, so they altered how it operated, composing a score, specific and different to each location, in order to make the underlying informing ideas more resonant. Literally. Sound is a dominating aspect of the work. A digital soundscape unique to New Media Gallery was composed by Fabbri in the week leading up to the exhibition in response to this moment in time and the surrounding environment. Listen closely and you can hear New Westminster, the trucks, the train tracks, the motion and emotion of a city.

Driven by its score, Sky recreates the movement of clouds. Inside of a long rectangular box, patterns of water vapour emerge, dissipate, then reform in layers. Spectral, skeletal fingers reach out to clutch at the air, before being sucking back into the opening from whence they came.

It is a mesmerizing process to witness, but there are other layers of meaning. Transience, impermanence, transformation and the cyclical nature of wind, water and light are all in evidence. But again, beauty itself is something that never fails to astound. In sound and image, flowing seamlessly together, there’s a marriage, if you will, of concept and execution that circles round, in endless cosmic tumble.

This is maybe the most resounding aspect of the show. Individually, the three different works are all fascinating, but in acting in concert with one another they become something else. That’s curation. The act of seeing connection amidst difference and coaxing it out so that everyone can see it. Not just see it but feel it.

Many of the exhibitions that I’ve seen at the gallery continue to live on in my head, surfacing at odd moments: aBIOTIC joins these previous experiences. Bordering the country between unbearably sad and cathartically glorious, like a soap bubble, it is here, it exists and then it’s gone.

Ultimately, it is beauty that remains. Allow it into the deepest caverns and recesses of your innards, let it do its thing. Come out the other side, changed.

---

‘aBIOTIC’ is on view at the New Media Gallery through April 23.