Charming teapots rattle and hum

Sometimes, when an artwork seems unduly difficult or even maddeningly opaque, it’s entirely fair to ask yourself if this difficulty (whether real or only apparent) is because the work is innately and thus necessarily hard to crack, or whether it’s just badly organized or awkwardly envisaged.

Such is the case with the pieces making up this new exhibition by Toronto-based artist Marla Hlady at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects.

Hlady’s work — which is unfailingly elegant and, if you ever come to the heart of it, poignant and often mordantly amusing — is really very hard to get at without the aid of the exhibition’s various attendant and supportive texts (some by Hlady herself).

The centrepiece of the exhibition is her Wah-wah Teapots (Landscape for Alvin Lucier)*, an eventually rather charming work in which two identical teapots, with bland, non-threatening pastoral scenes on their sides, are both motorized and somehow wired so that their lids lift and rattle and emit various segments and lengths of, for some reason, “49 seconds of signature Ry Cooder slide guitar taken from the opening scene of the film Paris, Texas.” The teapots’ fast-moving lids, as Hlady terms them, “create a crude analog version of a wah-wah effect.”

Okay, now what? Well, the Alvin Lucier reference is to an American sound artist who, according to Hlady, makes works which “explore the resonant character of spaces.” Her teapots, she adds, were (are?) one of those spaces.

How? Well, there are landscapes on those teapots, remember. So Hlady, wishing to conflate those landscapes with Paris, Texas and pastoral Toronto (principally High Park), walks through the park with Ry Cooder on a boom box, adding the cry of a hawk and the passing of a train to the now layered musical opening of the stark Wim Wenders film.

Why? I don’t know. Except that, as Hlady writes, this cut and folded music, once it is stuffed back into the teapots (where it is now concerned with “temporal proportions, not musical conventions”), “allows an unconventional music to unfold.”

The thing is, it’s well nigh impossible for anybody sauntering into the gallery to play back all this infra-dig info and make use of it.

The lids of the teapots jump and rattle, yes. And there’s a mushy, more or less unlistenable music that comes out of them. But as for the wah-wah effect, Paris, Texas, Ry Cooder, the hawk, the train, and ” the resonant character of spaces,” well, I suspect they’re going to remain more or less relegated to the realm of Hlady’s texts.

Gallery owner Jessica Bradley tells me she just enjoys the rattle and hum of the perky teapots. I guess. But that doesn’t seem like enough, while the rest of the show’s baggage seems like too much.

There are other works in the exhibition as well — a host of drawings and a highly hermetic piece involving a couple of cocktail shakers.

(this article was taken from theglobeandmail.com)