Current Exhibitions and Programming: Current Exhibition 'CANDICE BREITZ: SAME SAME'
19 September—15 November 2009
Opening Reception
Friday 18 September 2009
8-11 PM / FREE
The Power Plant presents ‘Candice Breitz: Same Same,’ the first North American survey of internationally acclaimed artist Candice Breitz. Breitz investigates contemporary media culture using the language of the entertainment industry, including pop music, television and Hollywood films. Straddling the sometimes ambiguous terrain between art, entertainment and consumerism, she edits, re-contextualizes or otherwise re-interprets familiar elements of our mediated mass culture landscape to produce aesthetically dazzling and critically engaging multi-channel video installations. In addition to being technically accomplished and conceptually rich, Breitz’s works engage a wide range of participants and audiences from diverse backgrounds thanks to their committed engagement with the codes of popular culture.
‘Candice Breitz: Same Same’ features a selection of Breitz’s multi-channel video
works plus a major commission generously supported by Toronto benefactors Partners in Art. This new work, Factum, made in Toronto and focusing on identical twins, is the fifth installment of The Power Plant’s Commissioning Program, launched in 2006. Breitz’s work consistently explores the performance of identity, the tension between what she has termed “the scripted life” and self-fashioning.
The epic Legend (A Portrait of Bob Marley) (2005) presents a chorus of thirty Bob Marley fans singing along to his famed Legend album – recorded one by one in Kingston, Jamaica, but presented in harmony. Legend exemplifies Breitz’s many collaborations with fan communities, showing how they are shaped by their specific localities. In a similar vein, Becoming (2003) features Breitz’s own mimicry of stars like Cameron Diaz and Reese Witherspoon acting in Hollywood chick flicks in a kind of celebrity “body karaoke.” Representing her work with found footage, Four Duets (2000) perversely reduces performances by Annie Lennox, Whitney Houston and other female vocalists into infantile, syllabic loops of love-song
“I”s and “You”s. The two-room installation Him + Her (2008) is a mesmerizing
distillation of Hollywood’s male and female archetypes, animated by Jack Nicholson
and Meryl Streep. Throughout these works, Breitz investigates the construction and
performance of the self in dialogue with a globalized popular culture.
Finally, with Factum (2009), its title referencing Robert Rauschenberg’s 1957 set of near-identical paintings, Breitz finds in identical twins a fascinating case study of how we negotiate the “script” of genetic inheritance and social conditioning. Interviewing several sets of twins – and one set of triplets – in Toronto, each separated from their sibling but asked the same questions, Breitz created a series of dynamically edited video portraits. Factum explores the myriad ways that twins
differentiate themselves in a world that values nothing more than the individual.
Woven together, their recollections and opinions both collide and harmonize,
thereby conveying the simultaneous senses of sameness and difference experienced
not only by twins but by ‘singletons’ (as twins call non-twins) too. Staging the
relationship between the individual and the double, Factum shows how one’s subjective integrity is both threatened and affirmed by the presence of a mirror image that is never an exact duplicate.
Candice Breitz (born in Johannesburg, 1972) studied fine art in Johannesburg
before pursuing graduate studies in art history in the United States. Breitz has
participated in biennials in São Paulo, Istanbul, Taipei, and Venice, and been
the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including at the New Museum, New York
(2000), Modern Art Oxford (2003), Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2005), and the Temporäre Kunsthalle in Berlin (2008), where she lives.
11TH ANNUAL RBC CANADIAN PAINTING COMPETITION
21–29 NOVEMBER, 2009
Links: www.candicebreitz.net
About Us: The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery at Harbourfront Centre opened in 1987 and has since established a reputation as Canada’s leading non-collecting contemporary art gallery. The gallery supports the development of international and Canadian contemporary art through a dynamic mix of exhibitions, commissions, public programs, publications, and events. The gallery’s exhibitions feature the most exciting art being made today while its publications are renowned around the world.
