Review of Bite the Dust by R.M. Vaughan in the Globe and Mail

Lisa Neighbour at Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Until Nov. 27, 1086 Queen St. W., Toronto; katharinemulherin.com Toronto-based multimedia artist Lisa Neighbour (best known for her magical large-scale sculptures made from repurposed lamps, on display in venues across town) is not an artist one immediately associates with the word “shock.” If anything, the bulk of her work to date has arguably been dedicated to creating a soothing, slow-pulse atmosphere. Well, hold onto your hat (indeed, your head). Her new show at Katharine Mulherin Contemporary, Bite the Dust, is a suite of fogged-over drawings on creamy white mitsumata paper. Most are images of spectral, floating heads; heads encircling faces that appear to be either unconscious, meditating, or about to fall asleep. So far, so restfully … until you realize that the heads you are looking at, and are perhaps inspiring you to indulge in a calming nap yourself, are the heads of victims of decapitation. Sweet dreams are definitely not made of this. Sourced, I was informed by the gallery attendant, from various news and citizen-journalism outlets, Neighbour’s recreations of the aftershock of decapitation are simultaneously grisly and gorgeous. The people look neither obviously frightened nor in pain. But, of course, they must have suffered both. Furthermore, Neighbour’s drawing style, which moves in and out of focus from high-realist to smudgy, blurred photo-like near-abstraction, refuses to take any didactic or moral stand. Death by decapitation may be either an agonizing demise or an ecstatic release. I’ll never know from these drawings, and I don’t want to find out the obvious way. Some viewers may perceive Neighbour’s deliberate inconclusiveness as offensive: a mere artist’s game being played with some very real, very cruel injustices. But I concluded that Neighbour’s visual ambiguity is a result not of a lack of concern for her subjects, but the opposite – the desire to give dignity, via the turning of horror into loveliness, to the dead. Furthermore, the ambiguous dialogue that Neighbour establishes with her viewers plays an enormous role in how the works are viewed. If you saw these works and did not read the information sheet provided, you would be unlikely to fully recognize what you were seeing. Neighbour’s partial negation of her own presence as a witness – a negation arrived at by both her non-determining presentation strategy and her sometimes hard/sometimes feathery pencil work – returns the power of the gaze to her subjects and thus, by extension, to us, their viewers. In other words, if you want solid answers from these works, you have to get them from the depicted, not the depicter.

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