Vida Simon & Jack StanleyCarried Away: The Fruit Outside of the Frame

Carried Away: The Fruit Outside of the Frame, at the Cinémathèque québécoise, is part of an ongoing series of installations and live drawing performances by Vida Simon and Jack Stanley. In residency at the Cinémathèque for much of 2022, Simon and Stanley presented an introductory performance on June 10 of that year, followed by an exhibition and a series of five performances in January 2023. Together since their studies at NSCAD University, Simon and Stanley have consistently maintained a goal of intermingling their lives with art. In the past this resolve has included opening their Montréal home to artists to use as a gallery and site of research (a room under the stairs, 1996 — 2000). This experience led to Souffles (2002 — 08), an exhibition and event space in a former sewing factory where the couple also lived. When they returned to Montréal after several years in Newfoundland, Simon invited Stanley to integrate his burgeoning interests in theory and practice into a new idea she had for a performance. Together they decided that Simon would draw and Stanley would bear witness to this activity, intervening physically or through writing. I first experienced Carried Away in one of its earliest iterations, at Galerie B-312 in Montréal, in 2018. I was immediately intrigued by the dynamics at play in these durational performances. Simon sat on the floor surrounded by paper and charcoal dust. Stanley hovered around her performative aura, ready to literally carry her away when she was at risk of overworking a drawing. My interest in Simon’s art has deepened over the years in the context of conversation and friendship with her and Stanley. Simon has a unique and established practice in which she reincarnates her fetishized repertoire of tools and objects. There are always charcoal and paper, as well as fruit or vegetables (or their peels, skins, or shells), and often piles of something relatively small and worn. There is nostalgia in these cast-away and reclaimed objects that to me often feels vaguely European. Wartime thriftiness comes to mind, and there’s a sense that everything could be quickly swept into a suitcase. With many of these elements in play at B-312, I perhaps naturally credited Simon as the primary author of Carried Away. Vida Simon & Jack StanleyCarried Away: The Fruit Outside of the Frame, installation view, 2023.Photo: Andrée Lanthier & Jack Stanley, courtesy of the artists Since then, Simon and Stanley have produced versions of Carried Away at six additional venues in Canada and abroad, usually in the context of a residency. I next encountered the project at the Cinémathèque, where it was immediately clear that it had evolved considerably. The artists had included a third performer, violinist Malcolm Goldstein, and sound was the dominant component of this theatrical, more than cinematic, encounter — sound that was not exclusively melodic or instrumental, but also bumping, scraping, and scratching as handmade charcoal was pushed across the paper and a table was dragged over the floor. At the opening of Carried Away in January 2023, the familiar objects of Simon’s practice again seemed at first to preside. There were piles of folded blankets, some tiny scissors. A pewter platter on the floor was heaped with limes. The bright-green skins struck me as a bit flashy, not Simon’s typical palette. The room was partitioned off at the back by a floor-to-ceiling black curtain, behind which were four spot-lit piles of large, square drawings, executed in charcoal on a white ground. Looking at those drawings gave me significant pause. I knew that they were the artefacts of recent Carried Away exhibitions, but there were so many of them. Most were hidden, and I didn’t feel invited to start flipping through the stacks. The expanse of the Carried Away project was so simply and elegantly stated here. One of the drawings was more densely worked and complex than the others: a single sheet of paper was transformed through cycles of layering and erasing charcoal. I later learned that it had developed during a two-week residency at La Chambre Blanche in Québec City in 2021. Typically, Simon’s style tends towards the expressionistic; here, however, was a pair of rendered eyes that I thought I recognized as Stanley’s. Vida Simon & Jack StanleyCarried Away: The Fruit Outside of the Frame, installation view, 2023.Photo: Andrée Lanthier & Jack Stanley, courtesy of the artists Coming out from behind the curtain I looked again at the installation that had been set in advance of the planned performances. Everything was clustered and low-lying, except for a bleacher-like bench made from blond wood that rose up to human height, providing a bird’s-eye view onto a large, square platform of the same material that was laid with paper and carbonized twigs. There was a new, geometric aesthetic at play in this infrastructure that I couldn’t attribute to Simon. In the lobby of the Cinémathèque, just outside of the gallery, a large projection screen was suspended from the ceiling. A fifty-five-minute video loop was shown here that I’ll describe as a mix between visual journal and fragmented archive. This is an incredibly intimate work. In the filmed segments the artists appear individually, rarely together, never with anyone else. Often Simon is drawing during a performance, and it’s a pleasure to watch her assured executions. Other passages of the video are less formal. Simon responds bodily to the play of light on a worn plaster wall. Stanley sits at the foot of a tree, talking. His mouth and hands move, but there’s no sound. Who is he speaking to? Simon? Himself? The camera often follows Simon’s movements in a documentary manner, but it’s always fixed in place when Stanley appears. I have a picture in my mind of the artists working on Carried Away, talking and talking, always taking the long way round to determine not necessarily what is right to include or exclude, to elaborate on, but what feels significant to them. There are so many dimensions to Carried Away: light, sound, gesture, video. The project plateaus when each exhibition or residency concludes, then takes off again several months later, following a surprising new tangent, as Simon and Stanley continue to develop the work. This ambitious collaboration represents the endeavours of two individuals who are always finding ways to renew their commitment to merging life and art. Following the Cinémathèque opening, I attended a Carried Away performance. The pewter dish was still there, with gold foil covering something lumpy. Not limes. Stanley knelt on the floor beside the spot-lit platform and drew with charcoal sticks on the paper. Then he carefully cleaned the surface of the drawing with a brush and dustpan, smudging it. This was I think the first time I saw Stanley draw. Simon stood for a couple of minutes off to the side, in the dark, watching him. Tucked under the bleachers were three tripods set with cameras, ready for Simon to take her turn. A visual artist living in Montréal, Nikki Middlemiss works with the repetition of the drawn line to explore themes of transformation and time. Recent exhibitions include the McClure Gallery (Montréal) in 2021 and the Art Gallery of Regina in 2022. Jack Stanley, Nikki Middlemiss, Vida SimonJack Stanley, Nikki Middlemiss, Vida Simon

Vida Simon & Jack Stanley
Carried Away: The Fruit Outside of the Frame

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