Threshold
May 7th - May 28th, 2005
The
large scale, single panel, colour photographs in Brenda Pelkey’s new exhibition
Threshold were taken in Windsor and Saskatoon. Pelkey shot high-end
clubs and low-end taverns empty, using their highly chromatic, existing light
to create rich, alluring and saturated environments. The result is a series
of mute and eerie, uninhabited rooms.
Pelkey’s previous works, notably Oblivion and Haunts, employed exaggerated lighting to create conditions reminiscent of cinematic melodrama or film noir, and were spatially organized to feel psychologically and emotionally charged. They used natural environments — shorelines, forests, and fields — to instill familiar places with a feeling of dread. Her new body of work is more obviously social but the intention is similar. Bars and strip clubs are not neutral locations. They are usually considered good or bad, glamorous or tragic, positive or negative depending on the prejudice of our expectations. And, since they’ve been mythologized in film and fictional writing as well as the press, they are prime candidates for imagined experience. Whether or not we find them fascinating or frightening we can’t avoid being implicated in their drama and meaning.
Pelkey’s play with the notion of public space versus private act is prevalent in Threshold. The viewer fully recognizes the activities that are normative to these spaces and yet stands outside looking in, incited to voyeurism yet kept at arm’s length from the whole story. As Brenda Pelkey states in her catalogue Spaces of Transformation, "[These] sites…all share the potential for threshold experiences where the extremes reside (and where joy and despair, reprieve or punishment can possibly be played out) and as such readily function as redolent cinematic mise-en-scene, rich with the potential for psychological projection."
Pelkey’s previous works, notably Oblivion and Haunts, employed exaggerated lighting to create conditions reminiscent of cinematic melodrama or film noir, and were spatially organized to feel psychologically and emotionally charged. They used natural environments — shorelines, forests, and fields — to instill familiar places with a feeling of dread. Her new body of work is more obviously social but the intention is similar. Bars and strip clubs are not neutral locations. They are usually considered good or bad, glamorous or tragic, positive or negative depending on the prejudice of our expectations. And, since they’ve been mythologized in film and fictional writing as well as the press, they are prime candidates for imagined experience. Whether or not we find them fascinating or frightening we can’t avoid being implicated in their drama and meaning.
Pelkey’s play with the notion of public space versus private act is prevalent in Threshold. The viewer fully recognizes the activities that are normative to these spaces and yet stands outside looking in, incited to voyeurism yet kept at arm’s length from the whole story. As Brenda Pelkey states in her catalogue Spaces of Transformation, "[These] sites…all share the potential for threshold experiences where the extremes reside (and where joy and despair, reprieve or punishment can possibly be played out) and as such readily function as redolent cinematic mise-en-scene, rich with the potential for psychological projection."
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| Orchid Room 1/3 Photograph mounted to aluminum 40" x 72" 2004 |
| View Artist's CV |
