Katie Lyle & Ella Dawn McGeough
Terms of Endearment

In Terms of Endearment at Support Gallery in London, Ontario, curator Lillian O’Brien Davis’s third collaboration with artists Katie Lyle and Ella Dawn McGeough, artworks respond to how touch and its material and phenomenological effects might be recognized and embodied through gestures of interference, imprint, and re-inscription. These gestures consider O’Brien Davis’s framework of touch as an event of displacement within the body, the self, and the artwork. She frames this conception in part within Anne Carson’s intratextual exploration of decreation, a writerly method of recounting heightened states of spiritual, emotional, and physical self-undoing in which internal and external forces transform and decentre an autonomous sense of self.

At the entrance to the main gallery space, McGeough’s large sheet of copper encased in wood reveals marks and rings left by the shapes and weight of various objects and bodies. I was told by a gallery attendant that any visible ripples, sags, and bowed edges aren’t meant to be there, nor is the debris that has naturally fallen from the ceiling; I’m meant to look for a more determined residue, or the results of touch as a more careful accumulation of effects. McGeough’s wax-treated cotton and silk pieces, in bright sunset colours clouded with inky stains, are stacked, tied, propped, stuffed in corners, and draped across an ornate railing. A wax object appears as cast impression of both bone and sandbag, its floor placement anchoring an invisible force field, interrupting my viewing of Lyle’s work on the wall. In a basement room, rings and crumpled shapes made of wax cotton are piled like socks or old underwear, as if left to congeal after too many laundry cycles. A doorknob is a makeshift drying rack.