Against the Tyranny of Reality
Prop Performance and Camp in Contemporary Video Art
We live our lives and experience the world through materials, objects, things. In return, these things are how we construct and affirm ourselves; we choose them because their properties help us interface with and navigate the world. From the associations we make with these objects and what we read as their anthropomorphic “behaviours,” meanings erupt, turning our relationship with the thing into one that is simultaneously extremely personal and highly political.
Exposing one’s own interconnection with the material world as an affirmation of deviance from the norm calls for a reconsideration of the banal. Indeed, purposefully enhancing the humour and theatrics that already emerge from the disclosure of our strange and personal relationships with things can be a method of unveiling otherwise unseen truths from a complex and entangled world.
Susan Sontag described the essence of “Camp” as the “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” But isn’t the disclosure of our intimate relationships with things, as strange as they could seem, natural in itself, an innate action part of the quest for the expression of our full-fledged identity? Closely associated with queer aesthetics, camp marks the search for a hidden truth through a rearticulation of reality. The body is changed by its interaction with objects; props and costumes engage it in the expression of a new, liberating identity, unmasked and unrestrained, critical of the ordinary, of the conventional, of the palatable, of beauty. Against the tyranny of reality.
The works chosen for this exhibition show how, through their manipulation and display, objects are by default imbued with an innate theatricality. In the performances enacted onscreen, they take the role of “props”— simple tools or vehicles enhancing a given gesture—or they populate the environment in which the performance happens, enhancing the dramaturgy to the point of exuberance—qualified as camp. This selection of video works surveys a spectrum of approaches, sketching a gamut of expressions possible through the material: from the poetic, through the personal, to the zany and to political. These artists demonstrate “stuff” as a way to reach a depth in nuance not possible with gestures or text alone.
Curators : Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau
Artists
Maya Ben David, Mike Bourscheid, Edith Brunette and François Lemieux, Océane Buxton and Salesforce Child, Marissa Sean Cruz, Rah Eleh, Erica Eyres, Beth Frey with Phth, Séamus Gallagher, Geneviève Matthieu, Lenore Claire Herrem, Marisa Hoicka, Mathieu Lacroix, Amy Lockhart, Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau, Elizabeth Milton, Bridget Moser, Sin Wai Kin
Biography
Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau
Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau are installation artists who work across video, performance, sculpture, sound, text, and photography. In their collaborative practice rooted in the theatrical and the choreographic, they examine the slippery and complex relationships between bodies and inanimate objects. These subjects are examined through the lens of chronic illness. They are based in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton) and have worked collaboratively since 2000
They have exhibited widely, notably at the Esker Foundation, Calgary (2022); the Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee, Scotland (2020), the Center for Books and Paper Arts, Columbia College, Chicago (2015); the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2019, 2011); the Kunsthalle Wien (2010); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (2009); Whitechapel Project Space, London (2007); the University of Texas, Austin (2015); the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Charlottetown (2014); and the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto (2012). Their performances have been presented onstage (La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines, 2025; OFFTA Festival, Montréal, 2016) and in galleries (Fonderie Darling, Montréal, 2015; Latitude 53, Edmonton, 2019).
Their work is in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec, Concordia University Library (Montréal), the University of Maryland Art Gallery, the University of Northern Iowa Gallery of Art, BMO Corporate Collection, KPMG Corporate Collection, and many other public and private collections.
Winners of the RBC Arts Rising Prize in 2022, they were selected on the 2015 Sobey Award Quebec Long List and as finalists for the 4th MNBAQ Contemporary Art Prize in 2020.
Partners
Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau acknowledge support from AXENÉO7’s Autorésidences 2020 program for this project. Against the Tyranny of Reality is the fourth iteration of this exhibition, which started as an instalment of the dv_vd screening series presented by Vidéographe at Dazibao in Montréal in fall 2023, with the title We Made This Mostly at Home with Stuff We Already Had in Our Apartment: Prop Performance and Camp in Contemporary Canadian Video Art. It then was developed as an exhibition for the University of Alberta’s FAB Gallery in fall 2024, and for AXENÉO7 in Gatineau in winter 2025.
