woocommerce-shipping-per-product domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131complianz-gdpr domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131\nMuch like our waking recollections of dreams, the narratives that drive Keren Cytter\u2019s videos are cyclical and seductive, fantastical and frus-tratingly confusing. In Based on a True Story<\/em>, the largest North American survey of the artist's work to date, curator Helena Reckitt brings together some of Cytter\u2019s most engaging works from the past five years of her already prolific career. <\/pre>\n\n\n\nFocusing on Cytter\u2019s strategy of blending outlandish stories and nonsensical dialogue that characterize contemporary pop cul-ture \u2014 from bad TV movies and YouTube videos, to chat rooms and online product reviews \u2014 with the humour and pathos of absurdist theatre, the exhibition foregrounds the artist\u2019s investigation of \u201chow our subjectivities can seem cobbled together from fictional scenes and images, as well as our own experiences.\u201d In the Galleries\u2019 downtown Centennial Square space, several of Cytter\u2019s recent works purposefully blur the distinction between theatrical-ity and realism. Untitled<\/em>, originally produced for the 2009 Venice Biennale, is a sixteen-minute family drama that takes place entirely on a stage, in front of a small but exuberant crowd. Using professional and amateur actors, Cytter\u2019s drama circles back on itself, with the same dialogue and plot points reappearing to tell the (supposedly true) story of a boy who shoots his father\u2019s mistress. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Though the script employs schmaltzy phrases from pop songs (\u201cplease, don\u2019t leave me this way\u201d) as dialogue and makes its own facture as a fiction obvious (at one point the director of the play appears to chastise an actor for improvising), there are also moments of tense familial conflict and quiet drama in Cytter\u2019s film that seem all too real. Cross.Flowers.Rolex. <\/em>(2009) continues in this vein, using a trio of films and large-scale drawings in pencil and crayon to depict three urban myths that circulated online in 2009. Each is disturbing in its violent culmination \u2014 in one, a man leaps to his death from a window after an argument with a lover; in another, a woman is shot in the head \u2014 yet Cytter\u2019s dialogue makes these events seem banal, even expected outcomes of the deeply fraught interpersonal relationships she stages for the camera. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The second part of the exhibition, located in the Galleries\u2019 lakeside Gairloch Gardens venue, shows the breadth of Cytter\u2019s practice, incorpor-ating one of her most well known pieces, 2007\u2019s Der Spiegel<\/em>, alongside a new work, Avalanche <\/em>(2011). While Der Spiegel <\/em>is a short, looping narrative that unfolds within the confines of a single room, borrowing from the trad-ition of the Greek chorus to meditate on the pressures placed on aging women, Avalanche <\/em>is a multi-chapter opus filmed across two countries that depicts the breakdown of a couple\u2019s relationship. Seen together, the two works attest to Cytter\u2019s astute engagement with the powerful ways that gender dynamics continue to structure cinematic narratives. <\/p>\n