Imagining Haunting: 'Elsewheres and Elsewhens'

In our current moment we are experiencing a continuous conflation of time and space due to the rise of technology’s presence within our lives. The Internet’s virtual environment has brought human perceptual experience to a “place” where time and space becomes enmeshed within the same plane, converging simultaneously into the conventions of the screen. In Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, Simon Reynolds declares that “not only has there never been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its immediate past, but there has never been a society that is able to access the past so immediately and copiously.”

Within this algorithmic landscape, our social interactions and sense of space is rapidly changing. Physical space attempts to keep up with digital space. The constant interaction with our screenic devices is directly associated with how the real world is changing and adapting to these technologies in order to keep us engaged in the landscape of shortened attention spans and continuous consumerism. Automation is changing and adapting to new technological advancements and is changing the way that we think about work and the future of work. These factors are rapidly altering the way we consume information, address political and social issues, navigate social spaces and shop. However, this is nothing new. Similar to the advent of the printing press or the invention of the telegraph, new technologies and ways of communication continuously change the way society functions. In the context of visual art, the European avant-garde in the early 20th century ushered in an examination of culture and society that created a radical shift in challenging the relationship of producer and consumer. Presently we are dealing with not only the relationships of producer and consumer, but the ever-increasing merging of the real and the virtual through digital commerce. This is apparent within the slow death and decline of the North American shopping mall.

The geometric forms and motifs of modernist aesthetic have transformed into emblems of the past that have become entangled, recycled, and associated with consumerism and commodity goods. Modernism promised a utopia that never arrived. How we imagine the failure of this future is the focus of my Master of Fine Arts thesis and thesis exhibition Imagining Haunting: ‘Elsewheres and Elsewhens.’ In this exhibition, large scale oil paintings on canvas combine the pictorial language of geometric abstraction from the early 20th century European avant-garde with 1990’s American mall aesthetic. I consider the fusion of these time periods as a material means to incorporate recycled forms as a reference to the inherent optimism in a utopian future that has continually failed to materialize. Using the dying shopping mall as a point of departure for my work, this recontextualization is an attempt to illustrate that the past continually reminds us of the future’s failure in the form of haunting. I argue that failure is directly embedded within the very fabric of modernist aesthetics. Modernism poses a utopia within reach, but only delivers empty promises of failed hopes and futures that are struck with the harsh reality of anxieties. I believe this is a direct manifestation of the imagery itself: fractured, disintegrated and fragmented within its flat and desolate void.