If Toronto-based artist Luis Jacob’s mid-career survey at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art can be said to be about any one thing, it’s about seeing and more specifically, about how we see art. Jacob establishes the theme at the door with a giant photograph of a woman stretching apart the skin around her eye: the first work inside the exhibition is Eclipse (2009), consisting of a prosthetic eye set inside a velvet-padded box.
“I’m very curious about how we perceive things,” Jacob told me yesterday during a tour of the MOCCA show, called Pictures at an Exhibition. “When we open our eyes we see things – people, objects – but HOW we see them, the manner in which we see, the point of view we take, is invisible. So this is an attempt to almost objectify how it is that we see; to physically take out the instrument of vision and have a relationship to it as an objective form.”
Jacob’s pre-occupation with vision continues in the main exhibition space: a small monochrome from around 1993 is called Little Eye and the largest works in the show are from a series titled, They Sleep with One Eye Open. The colourful, monumental paintings have to be seen to be truly appreciated, towering as they do above the space at nine and a half feet tall.
Work from this series will constitute a major public art installation to adorn the new Dufferin underpass this fall. “They won’t look identical to these works but they’ll have the spirit,” says Jacob. “There’s a kind of animism to them, they’re not just to be looked at, they look back at you.”
It’s rare for a self-taught artist like Jacob to achieve his level of art world recognition. In 2007, his video work, A Dance for Those of Us Whose Hearts Have Turned to Ice, was included at the prestigious Documenta 12 exhibition in Kassel, Germany and he’s had solo exhibitions in Mönchengladbach and Hamburg, and in Canada at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and Musée d’art de Joliette. In 2010, his work was featured at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, in the exhibition Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, and in the Kunsthalle Bern in the exhibition Animism. And now Jacob is enjoying this mid-career survey, a version of which was mounted at Montreal’s Darling Foundry last year.
“I have a suspicion that because I didn’t go to art school, I see my art practice in a very open way,” Jacob says. “I don’t see myself as a painter or as a sculptor or as a video artist, I think of myself as an artist. I think in art school one is encouraged to focus on a medium and identify with a particular medium and that approach is very foreign to me. I think not having gone to art school has freed me to see it as a very open field.”
For Pictures at an Exhibition, Jacob has selected pieces from the beginning of his career and very recent work with nothing in the middle. Some of the earliest pieces show signs of mildew damage, the result of being stored in a crawl space beneath his mother’s house.
“Luckily they survived, more or less unscathed,” says Jacob. “In my 20s I moved every year, things got banged up or lost so for me it’s actually a treat to see them again. What I find fascinating is that the work I was doing back then, [his so-called Heaven Project] has a similar spirit to what I’m doing now. And that’s the kind of thing you only begin to understand when you get to this mid-career place, when you have some distance from the early work. You can see unconscious relationships between works and you can see how your unconscious works. So I wanted to highlight that.”
In addition to his own exhibition, Jacob has curated a tandem show called Cabinet (NGC Toronto), a collection of works from the National Gallery of Canada. Jacob’s selection includes work by Dan Flavin, Murray Favro, General Idea and several others.
“I visited Ottawa and went through the National Gallery’s storage and online resource,” says Jacob, “but I feel like I barely scratched the surface.”
He may not have benefited from a formal art education but Jacob has devoted himself not only to studying art history, but to really thinking about it. He can talk the “art speak” talk as well as any academic but he doesn’t use the knowledge to distance himself from his viewer, whoever he or she might be.
“I love art theory,” he confirms, “but I don’t like it when it’s used to obfuscate things. For me personally I have no need to . . . I want to engage people through my work and I think theory can help but it can also get in the way. I want this show to be very accessible. I think it requires thinking, it requires an active viewer to think about the introductory panel and then the Eclipse work and then after that you see this and this and this. So it requires active viewing, I don’t think the understanding is just going to happen. But on the other hand I don’t want it to be an esoteric show, I have no commitment to that.”
WHERE/WHEN: Luis Jacob, Pictures at an Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (952 Queen Street West, 416.395.0067), Tuesday – Saturday, 11 am – 6 pm; free admission.
Photos by Christopher Jones
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