Catri­ona Jef­fries is pleased to announce a solo exhi­bi­tion of new and recent work by Vancouver-based artist Judy Radul, whose ambi­tious and com­plex instal­la­tions of recent years have addressed the gen­er­a­tive range and lim­its of the­atri­cal space and per­for­mance. Radul’s objects, cam­eras and per­form­ers trade roles, posi­tions and tasks in the spa­tial chore­og­ra­phy of her work, cor­po­re­ally rean­i­mat­ing subject/object rela­tions as con­tem­po­rary tech­nol­ogy increas­ingly func­tions in ways akin to human perception.

The­o­ret­i­cally anchored in the dis­course around expe­ri­ence and per­cep­tion devel­oped by Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze as well as recent writ­ing on neu­ro­science, the exhi­bi­tion acknowl­edges the inter­twine­ment between one’s own self and the world, while at the same time rec­og­niz­ing the lim­its of rep­re­sen­ta­tion to wholly express this togeth­er­ness. As art thank­fully pro­duces inad­e­quate forms and ren­di­tions of per­cep­tion, the gap between a per­cep­tion and its per­cep­tion, a per­cep­tion and its rep­re­sen­ta­tion can thus be enacted and pre­served. Radul pur­pose­fully steps into this gap to con­jure joy­ful ‘bad mod­els’ of per­cep­tion in Object Analy­sis Spec­ta­tor Poem (2012). A bot­tle, conch shell, fan, heater, chair, lectern, cam­era and clay bust all become enti­ties on top of which par­tial swathes of painted cop­per sheet­ing lie across – like paja­mas on a radi­a­tor – like ‘a thing on top of the thing’. To com­plete Object Analy­sis Spec­ta­tor Poem, Radul took the works into the street to be pho­tographed, how­ever direct vision does not suit the encounter she is seek­ing. Rather, using a mir­ror held at arm’s length the objects are seen as they stood behind her. The image pro­duced is an assem­blage of for­ward and back­ward views. When installed in a spa­tial com­po­si­tion with the sculp­tures, they cre­ate a mul­ti­far­i­ous web of par­tial views, objects and forms.

Two new works, which Radul terms ‘dis­plays’ rather than ‘sculp­tures’, also appear in the exhi­bi­tion. Moti­va­tion (2012) is a col­lec­tion of small rocks (and some rock-like objects) ordered in a row. Their arma­ture is a tilted plinth con­structed at the max­i­mum degree pos­si­ble before grav­ity would have its way and the rocks would roll off its sur­face. Sil­ver Screen (2012) is an ode to cur­tains, screens, and the thrill of fem­i­nist and post­mod­ern the­ory in the 1980s, incor­po­rat­ing a used the­atre cur­tain and a 1987 copy of the British film jour­nal ‘Screen’, encased in plexiglass.

Although skep­ti­cal of the reduc­tion­ist impulse in much of the writ­ing on sci­ence and aes­thet­ics, Radul’s inter­est in ‘neu­roaes­thet­ics’ (an emerg­ing and much con­tested field which explores the poten­tial neu­ro­log­i­cal basis for aes­thetic expe­ri­ence), orig­i­nated in World Rehearsal Court (2009) through her use of neu­ro­sci­en­tist V.S. Ramachandran’s mir­ror box for heal­ing phan­tom limb pain. Ref­er­ence to the brain as an image, as well as a source of images, appears in The Brain Dis­play (2010) and Mid­town Plaza-end of the autopsy (2011). The new sci­ence of the brain is inten­sively remap­ping this organ, whose image exists as a kind of ulti­mate self-reflexive image.