Not Necessarily in That Order

An exhibition of video works with a raw, abrasive aesthetic could not be more timely; they appear refreshingly antipodal to the slick, austere, high definition images everywhere around us. Not Necessarily in That Order brings together five contemporary video artists with striking works that rub up against each other like two sticks ready to spark fire. The exhibition’s title borrows filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s observation that “a story should have a beginning, middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” Indeed these video works reject standard narrative structure in favour of contradictory, disjunctive or fragmentary storylines that challenge viewers to actively construct meaning from what they are seeing. Mixing references, genres, and modes of performance, these artists demonstrate that the way a story is told is as important as the story itself.

The exhibition starts with an early video performance, The Ballad of Dan Peoples (1976), in which Toronto artist Lisa Steele recounts her grandfather’s stories, adopting his incoherent and rambling mannerisms, neurotically repeating tales as traumatic and extreme as the way they are uttered. Amsterdam-based, Italian artist Rossella Biscotti’s homage to film noir, The Undercover Man (2008), is based on testimony of former FBI agent Joseph Pistone, whose infiltration of New York’s mafia scene under the guise of thief Donnie Brasco made headlines in the early 1980s. Similarly drawing from extensive archival research, Belfast artist Susan MacWilliam recreates a 1931 séance that took place in Winnipeg, in a narrative collage titled F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N (2009). Both works use the format of the documentary interview to address time, portraiture, and the problematic relationship to truth that the medium of video inherited.