The below text is written by Ray Cronin for the Alternator, who at the time of writing this in 2005, was a Halifax based curator and writer.
Language transforms our world… we are not talking about the cosmos out there, which preceded us and is indifferent to us, but about the world of our involvements, including all the things they incorporate in their meaning for us. - Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments.
Western convention would have it that the world as we know it is mostly our own creation. That position is arguable, I suppose, though a few minutes out on the streets of any large urban centre will likely still most dissenting voices. From a viewpoint that is submerged in the concrete canyons of the modern city, the real world appears pretty far away buried deep under varied creations of what philosophers call techn_. For tool wielders, which we undoubtedly are, the temptation, or perhaps the habit, it to treat everything as either a potential tool or as a potential material for the exercise of tools. A world in which everything is exploitable would be like what, exactly? Well, I’m with Charles Taylor: such a world would look like modernity, it would - it does - look like us.
Whether the world is our creation or not, culture certainly is, and humans inhabit culture like goldfish in a bowl. And, like goldfish, we tend to forget where we’ve been. Each new turn is treated as if it’s really new as if we’ve reached a new stage in our development. It’s the old joke about the goldfish: “Oh, look - a castle! Oh, look - a castle! Oh, look - a castle! Oh, look - a castle!” ad Infinitum. What that goldfish needs is something to make her realize that she’s in a rut - what we seem to need is some sort of external memory, to remind us that we’ve seen these castles in the air before. A sense of deja vu is just a good defence in these times.
In Engagè, Svava Juliusson presents a body of work that is not about rendering judgment, but it is about rendering, the vast industrial complex that surrounds something as seemingly natural as a cow, a sheep, or a pig. Her materials (carpet, underlay, fabric, plywood, plastics, wax) are all derived, in part or wholly, from animal products. The very banality of the material is the key to the impact of the work - is there any aspect of our lives untouched by products derived from, for example, a cow? Apparently, there are precious few.
This work is not political in the sense of advocacy, though it will be easy, and not incorrect, to see it in political terms. but easy and correct isn’t enough - to stop at the political implications of this work is to miss if you’ll pardon the expression, the meat of Offal. To see this work as wholly polemical is to miss the sense of wonder at its root. It goes back to that sense of deja vu, to the reminder of the reality of that goldfish’s castle. As humans, as wielders of tools, and builders of castles, we run the risk of becoming slaves to our technology - to forgetting that technology is something we use, not the other way around. The sheer ubiquity of the products of the rendering industry, the way that every aspect of our daily life is somehow touched by animals - animals that we may or may not choose to eat - points to just how finely woven is the technological web in which we find ourselves.
There is a sense of awe in Juliesson’s work, an awe based on the sheer scale of the industry that she has been researching, but also apparent in the glimpse into the unacknowledged reality of or technological society. that so much of our plastics, fabrics, glues and foams that make up our domestic spaces are drawn, at least in part, from animal products, makes our high-tech pretensions seem so shallow. The veneer of techn_ is stretched particularly thin in its instance, exposing that it is not just nature that is “red in tooth and claw.”
These sculptures all carry an immediate impact, one heightened by the seemingly surreal aspect of their materials. The calf figure, the line of heads, and the other elements of the Offal expose, without histrionics, something that is not exactly secret, but which most prefer not to know. There is a logic to this work, one that is as inexorable as the assembly lines that made it possible. In essence, Juliesson is returning found materials to the form from which they were refined, yet she is doing so with a sense of humour, of wonder, and of play. That makes these sculptures something more than that logic. The world is both rich and strange; we do ourselves a disservice when we forget that.
Svava Thordis Juliusson is a visual artist born in Siglufjörður, Iceland in 1966 and currently based in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. Juliusson began undergraduate studies at the Alberta College of Art and Design in 1993; received a Bachelor of Fine Arts at NSCAD University in 1997; and completed her MFA in studio at York University in 2007. Juliusson is a founding member of the collective (F)NOR
to learn more, click the link to her website here.