Elyse Longair | On the Thresholds of Time

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Elyse Longair, "Collage" 2023

created during the Banff Artist in Residence Spring 2023 (image courtesy of the Artist)

The act of crossing a threshold simultaneously connects and separates; it joins and divides inside and outside, real and imagined, self and non-self. French philosopher Bernard Stiegler suggests “a threshold should not be crossed but experienced.” Thresholds are spaces of real and imagined experiences. They propose spaces of imagining and re-imagining unknown, unknowable and speculative realities. To experience a threshold is, at its most basic, to confront the relationship of self and world.

This exhibition, titled On the Thresholds of Time, presents recent work by Canadian artist Elyse Longair. Nine large-scale collages are arranged throughout the gallery, telling an impossible story; about a future that is envisioned using the past. Viewing individual works I experience moments in time, fragmented visions of possible futures. In one a constructed environment reveals layers of space – the de Chirico-esque shadow of a man invades the lower corner of the collage, as if about to climb down the near-by ladder. In another a man inspects plants in a small self-contained cylindrical glassed-in space – held on the top by a cylindrical metal form. Each collage tells a story of human and/or non-human futures. As a whole, I experience the exhibition as a clear and elegant unity of contradictory or multi-voiced parts in which the realities of the imagined experiences seem temporarily suspended, while still made present. Individual worlds speak with one another; they share forms and colours, spaces and thresholds, realities and non-realities. The red that dominates the image of a man in shirt and tie over-seeing a woman laying on a ground is reflected in lines on a ceiling, a person’s protective suit, abstract forms around what appears to be a doorway and the interior lighting of a dish. Longair imagines nine worlds that collectively guide me to experience a threshold that exists between future and past. Yet, this is only one of the exhibition’s subtle spatial acts. The artist’s works suggest introspective turns, and at the same time the exhibition's pairing of different views and visions and realities encourages reflection on what they collectively share beyond individual perspectives. Imagined extensions emerge through the interstices of Longair’s work that connects and separates possible spaces of experience.

by Julian Jason Haladyn