Listers of Earthy (2017)

Althea Thauberger's Listers of Earthy (2017) is among The Polygon Gallery's N. Vancouver exhibition commissions.

Inspired in part by the Maplewood Mudflat squatters of the 1960s and the set builders who worked on Robert Altman's West Vancouver-shot McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971), Thauberger chose not to draw a direct line between the two communities (a number of the set builders lived on the Mudflats) so much as conflate them. Thus, instead of highlighting the architectures of place, Thauberger's three-channel enclosure emphasizes (with the help of artist-designer Natalie Purschwtz) the wardrobes of portraiture, allowing for a spatial-temporal mirage where communication belongs less to scripted speech than to improvised movement.

Watching Listers of Earthy brought to mind a number of literary works. Samuel Beckett's How It Is (1964) is one of them. Here is the novel's third paragraph:

past movements old dreams back again or fresh like those that
pass or things always and memories I say them as I hear
them murmur them in the mud

Another is Giacomo Leopardi's 1833 poem "To Himself" (as translated by Google):

Now you will rest forever,

or my tired heart. The biggest illusion is blurred,

that I had believed to be eternal. She's dead. Well I hear

that in me and in my intimate

not only hope is extinguished, but also desire itself.

He rests forever. You loved

enough. Nothing deserves

your suffering, nor human relations are worth

your sighs. Life is pain and boredom,

and never anything else; and the world is mud.

Calm yourself now. Give up hope

once and for all. Destiny is destined to the human race

he has not granted other gifts than death. By now

nature despises you, the evil one

power that, in secret, governs the world by doing evil to all creatures,

and commands on the uselessness of creation.

* photo: Casey Wei