"Peter Freitag at Gallery TPW"
by Gary Michael Dault
The Globe And Mail;
Toronto; July 12, 2003
on the soloshow of Peter Freitag "Examples for Communication"
June 26 through July 26, 2003
at TPW Gallery
80 Spadina Ave. #310
Toronto, Ontario M5V 2J3
Phone: 416.504.4242
For his first exhibition in Canada, Berlin-based artist Peter Freitag
is showing a strangely unsettling suite of 16 digitally altered colour
photographs which together make up a project he calls Examples for Communication.
The exhibition might just as well have been called Examples of Miscomunication,
however, for what Freitag has done is to begin with a clutch of cheerfully
bland images lifted from European travel brochures and then, employing
the surgical precision of which digitalization is so capable, carefully
extricate from each of them "all movable objects" - dishes, books, pictures,
everything portable and non-architectural. This sounds simple enough -
though it has been deftly done - but the effect is quietly devastating.
Now, instead of enjoying a happy holiday meal, a family - mom, dad and
two kids - sit at a table and grin foolishly at each other across an expanse
of nothing. Now a man gently touches the knee of a woman sitting on one
of the room's twin beds. Because there is now no context for this act
of implied intimacy, the two of them look static, sculptural, robotic.
The act of connection suddenly seems as profoundly emptied of meaning
as the banal room that contains them. And so it goes, in photo after photo.
As Berlin-based critic Stefanie Heckmann puts it, in her essay accompanying
the exhibition, ''Without the enlivening presence of the objects with
which the figures were originally involved, the other furnishings become
frozen into mere scenery. The rooms resemble empty stages, on which the
figures are abandoned and act in seeming isolation from each other." Is
this all it takes to dehumanize us? Maybe so. By our objects and accessories
shall ye apparently know us.
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