Collection Count + Care seeks relationships within and conversations across the collection. What stories does the collection tell? / Prise en compte, prise à cœur cherche à tisser des liens et des dialogues entre les œuvres de la collection. Quelles histoires la collection raconte-t-elle?

Speaker / Présentatrice
Sunny Kerr

Works / Œuvres :
Tran T. Kim-Trang, Operculum / Opercule, 1993, video 14:00 minutes / vidéo 14 min. Purchase, 1996 / Achat 1996

Barbara Astman, I as artifact / Moi en tant qu’artéfact, 2014, 20 digital prints on Epson Ultrasmooth Fine Art Paper / 20 impressions numériques sur papier Fine Art Epson Ultrasmooth. Gift of the Artist, 2020 / Don de l’artiste, 2020

https://agnes.queensu.ca/exhibition/c…

Collection Count + Care is a revolving exhibition. It is a series of conversations between small groupings of works from Agnes’s collection. Changing over every two weeks, the Samuel J. Zacks Gallery currently features a photographic series by Barbara Astman called I as artifact and a video work by Tran T. Kim-Trang called Operculum.

Operculum discloses voices and footage from several consultation meetings for cosmetic surgery of the upper and lower eyelids on an Asian woman. Tran T. Kim-Trang presents the surgeons’s explanations of the popularity and success rates for different Asian nationalities. She frames them with a written description of experimental lobotomy through the eye socket designed to eradicate schizophrenic hallucination. Operculum means “little lid” from Latin and signifies, in animal and brain biology, covers or flaps that open or close to control contact with internal and external world. Kim-Trang turns a camera’s own aperture on the “self-effacing fantasy” of these surgeries and the normalized black hole that is insistently neutralizing differences on the face. The piece ends with a laugh, however; a found movie clip shows Lao Ze disguising his eyelids and erupting in laughter as he looks into what seems to be a mirror.

The faces in Barbara Astman’s I as artifact seem to sing silently or to express thrown voices. Their eyes seem wide open to a void within and all around. Or perhaps, instead, do we look out—through a mask that would cover our own faces, as if the mask were glimpsed from an uncanny remote interior? Astman reveals a multiplicity of possible expressions temporarily frozen at the intersection of desires and practices. To produce this series, Astman exposed her own cosmetic facial masks on a scanner bed and then inverted their values, digitally emphasizing their folds and creases. They become like a chorus of planetary topographies that offers solace but no anaesthetic.

The pairing suggests critical encounters with the face as a social landscape, one where gender, race, ethnicity and age intersect, and where normative violence enacts physical intercessions. At the same time the works express counteracting proliferations of difference. We cannot see our own faces directly, and ultimately, the facial diagram is frayed by a mutability that implies passage to chaotic universes.Collection Count + Care seeks relationships within and conversations across the collection. What stories does the collection tell? / Prise en compte, prise à cœur cherche à tisser des liens et des dialogues entre les œuvres de la collection. Quelles histoires la collection raconte-t-elle? …

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Rob Birch, Richard Finch, Harry Wayne Casey, Nicholas Hallam

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