"Children" at the New Media Gallery, New Westminster, B.C., November 25, 2016 – February 5, 2017

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Kerry Tribe, "Here & Elsewhere," 2002

two-channel video installation, 10:25, Photo by Jason Brown

Since the opening two years ago of the New Media Gallery in New Westminster, B.C., director-curators Sarah Joyce and Gordon Duggan have presented ambitious and provocative technology-based exhibitions. Their latest, Children, is a group show of videos by six international artists who demonstrate that representations of children have long since evolved from romantic depictions of childhood innocence to equivocal and multi-layered portrayals of children as complex individuals. 

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Installation view of "Children" at New Media Gallery, New Westminster, B.C.

installation view showing on right Lenka Clayton's work, "The Distance I Can Be From my Son," 2013, single-screen video installation, 6 min. Photo by Jason Brown

Parents will particularly relate to Lenka Clayton’s The Distance I Can Be From My Son, in which the British artist calculates the actual distance in yards that she allows her toddler to wander before running to collect him, attempting to measure her need to protect her child against his desire for independence. Clayton produced the video during her self-established Artist-in-Residency in Motherhood, created to enable her to “…fully experience and explore the fragmented focus, nap-length studio time, limited movement and resources and general upheaval that parenthood brings and allow it to shape the direction of my work, rather than try to work ‘despite it’.”

Chiharu Shiota, "How Did You Come Into The World?" 2015

Candice Breitz, "The Character," 2011

Young children are also the subject of Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota’s multi-channel video How Did You Come Into the World? Shiota videotaped preschoolers’ creatively playful responses to questions about their birth memories, with one boy’s answer to “What did you do inside your mom’s belly?” an amazingly prescient “I sleep and swim and dive down there.” In contrast, Indian students aged 10 to 16 in South African artist Candice Breitz’s The Character display a burgeoning maturity and social awareness when asked to analyze the behaviour and motivations of the lead character in an unidentified film. More remarkable yet is the poise and self-assurance of the 10-year-old girl in American artist Kerry Tribe’s Here & Elsewhere as she responds to her off-camera father’s metaphysical questions about time, space, memory and identity.

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Christian Jankowski, "The Matrix Effect," 2000

single-channel video installation, 24:54, Courtesy Lisson Gallery, Photo courtesy New Media Gallery

In German artist Christian Jankowski’s The Matrix Effect, children aged 7 to 10 impersonate a contemporary art curator and well-known artists such as Sol LeWitt and Janine Antoni, who participated in an exhibition series at the Hartford Atheneum in Connecticut. The children humorously attempt to repeat the artists’ actual recorded words, often mispronouncing artistic terms, clearly without understanding what they are saying. Also featuring children as actors but with a very different tone is Italian artist Elisa Giardina Papa’s need ideas!?! PLZ!!, composed from clips found online of preteens asking – sometimes begging – viewers for ideas for YouTube videos. Bored, vulnerable and needy, they exemplify the growing tendency for children to seek attention by acting out their lives online rather than pursuing interpersonal relationships and real-time experiences. This disturbing trend is one of many thought-provoking issues raised by this absorbing exhibition and its diverse representations of contemporary childhood.