NORTON MAZA | ÉTUDE POUR LA SYMPHONIE DU POUVOIR ÉTERNEL

NORTON MAZA | ÉTUDE POUR LA SYMPHONIE DU POUVOIR ÉTERNEL

Gallery

Norton Maza

STUDY FOR THE ETERNAL POWER SYMPHONY

EXHIBITION / AUGUST 30 TO OCTOBER 6, 2007
As part of the Mois de la Photo à Montréal, the Clark Gallery presents the work of Chilean artist Norton Maza. Maza is best known as a sculptor and for projects that are close to installation, such as his Territory among others, constructed spaces in which the artist recreates semi-apartments, functional-looking lofts, assembled from bric-a-brac, constructed of trash, tires, various planks and bits of cardboard. Those who saw his piece at the third Manif d'art in Quebec City in 2005 remember a bedroom, as precarious as it was ingenious, that by accumulating trash, examined the state of the world, its patterns of consumption, globalization and the sociopolitical stakes that are so inextricably linked with it. Norton Maza returns to Quebec, this time with a photographic project in which his assemblages, his “sets,” have taken the form of models. It is no longer a question of domestic scenes but rather of “stagings” of toys and other photographed small objects that are to be presented on the chic picture rails of the small museum Clark will become for the term of the exhibition. These eight photographic works open up like apocalyptic mini-theatres in which all manner of political and religious figures mingle and kill each other without restraint, under the sacred lightning that pierces clouds of foam insulation and cardboard hung here and there. Here, before the gray and smoky landscapes that cover the background, churches burn, the popemobile is overturned, bishops seem to flee, and piglets appear to share the battlefield with robots, knights, old cars in flames and other cobbled-together cadavers. In this project Maza explores, with undeniable cynicism and his familiar strategies of accumulation, the different declensions of power and the failures faced in imputing it. In Study for the Eternal Power Symphony, everything happens through an adding up of brutal allusions that criss-cross the codes and semiotic debris borrowed from the various hegemonic structures of different eras. These scenes pastiche some of art history's great classics, long since viewed, reviewed and digested. Vermeer's The Milkmaidor Veronese's Last Supper, for example, claim their share of slaughtered animals, soldiers in burqas, Coca-Cola bottles, non-stop public massings and dozens of other curious associations. This conscious echoing of art history is not without recalling the power of the image, of its use in history and our own time alike. Anachronisms abound, amuse and become determinants of sense. They take part in the chaos; a chaos even more destructive than the disorderly crowds we see in the photos for being implicit. It is a question of an infiltrating power, one that silences the catastrophe, deafened by the weight of mores and years, the same catastrophe that we so often silence in a museum. It is with much humor, and in an unbelievable shambles, that Norton Maza offers us this commentary with its end-of-the-world lineaments, a playful and tragic symphony performed by a handful of plastic angels.
Y.P. Translation PduB