Year End Art Exhibit Rush (Montreal) 2: Bill Vazan "Cosmological Shadows".

"I’m fascinated with how people, no matter where, have tried to communicate with something other than themselves—the other. I guess my way of making contact with the other is by taking a parallel position with what these people have done. Of course, I’m only in one time and place. Is there a connection with God? We all want to connect with God, whether or not we deny his or her existence. We eventually realize, one way or another, that we did not bring ourselves here, and we have no control of how we’re going to get out of here."

Bill Vazan







This show, in true Vazan form, is a whole pilgrimage of a show. It's been running around since such a long time that I have no idea what in the world made that I hadn't catch it yet. I remember being in Ottawa and missing it in a wink.


I always thought it was a retrospective, but it's not: it's mostly a specific
photograph project linking lands in Quebec (Mingan Islands) and Egypt.
The "water" and the "sand", as the artist would put it, a metaphor
of the juxtaposition of the "new" (vivid) with the "old" (dry).


Vazan is the "Goldsworthy of Canada". Probably our most important land artist (and also one of our first video artist). Over the years, through the mean
of documenting his works, he started producing art that was, as I
just mentioned, specifically photographic. Bluntly: think Alain Paiement.
The show "Cosmological Shadows", at Centre De l'Université De Montreal,
consisted in a series of gigantic grids of photographs (5 in total), added
with 3 medium works and around 30 smaller works (grouped together on
one wall), all using a similar aesthetic of mosaic. In addition to this, I counted 6 large photos of various Vazan's land works (including "Cobra Stand For A Parallel World" (2001), a motif
made of stone somewhere in India, and other ambitious stone sculptures, reminiscent
of paleolithic art, which to Vazan means being in the same position as the first men who tried to communicate with nature and universe).



But let's concentrate on the show's most elemental characteristic: the grid.
By "grid" I mean that the photos are individual fragments of one unique
large landscape subject, sometimes overlapping in representation (kinda like
watching a nude landscape descending the stairs). One wonders if he had to photograph every of the photos for the larger works, a method exploited vastly by Alain Paiement.

The artists mentions that he uses the space between the individual photos
(forming a decipharable grid) to help the viewer infer a graphic shift on the horizon line, what triggers the optical illusion from which, with the help of switching the horizon axes on each photo, leads the impression that the photographs as a whole form a 3d globe, or three-dimensional curves, when they don't simply expand their standard axes horizontally and vertically.


From there comes the self-evident focus of the works: Vazan associates landscapes with universal forms such as cells, stars, waves, rays and other forms
influenced by theoretical physics, that he's attempting to simplify for his audience. Add to this the juxtaposition of archaic egyptian reliefs with contemporary raw Quebec landscape (as in this work, which depict an egyptian relief crossing the circumferance of an "island", splitting it into a perpendicular), and you're getting dangerelously close to esoteric.


But frankly, Vazan's work is much simple. He means to
remind us of a pre-Galileo world when we didn't know that it
was round. He means us to assert how little we know from the cosmos
and that much of it is still a mystery. The use of reliefs from ancient civilizations
underlines both the wonder of man towards nature and his failed attempt at
controlling it. The self-reflective images of the Pyramids here at the left propose a gaze toward the hidden shapes in all things.


In a sense, Vazan treats landscape photography from a minimalist's point
of view. You can accept the beauty of his work once you indulge
in tolerating its overtly systematic aspect.

Like with any minimalist works, the essence of its success lies in the way simple mathematical shapes help us breathe with the work, both physically and intellectually. The major recurrent proposition is the opposition of perfectly formal mathematic grids with perfectly curved and spherical representations of landscapes. Once we get familiar with Vazan's approach, and regardless of the overwhelming amount of photos (especially on the wall collection of small works), we are able to straddle from one piece to the next at ease, rapidly grasping the general forms at play (though a surprising amount of urban subjects in the smaller and medium format seems to disrupt the relation established by the greater works, maybe getting slightly too Melvin-Charneyish here, but I found out later that some of these were actually older pieces).

The best work is the oval shape separated by a path, installed as two beds against the floor (I think it's called "Oval" (2000-2001)). The format recalls a pool, or the reflection of landscape on water. I rarely ever seen photographs positioned that way above a floor, and therefore I declare this work
the "major" Vazan piece deserving to be bought by a museum. For this piece alone, the visit was well worth the distant travelling.


Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com


Bill Vazan: "Cosmological Shadows"
October 28 - December 19, 2004
Centre D'Exposition De L'Université De Montréal
2940, chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine
Local 0056, Montréal