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TAP Art Space / Montreal / Summer 2019
September 20th to October 12th

Curated by Ellen Belshaw

TAP Montreal

20.09.19-05.10.19

Remember that photo you took out the window of a train.
The scene of the mountains at golden hour was so beautiful, how could you resist – but when you look at the picture later, it’s riddled with reflections of the train car, your bag, you. Our brains are able to to look at or through glass, while the objective lenses of our devices catch both. ---

The extravagant use of glass is a trademark of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s modernist architecture, famous for its openness, its transparency, its absence. Yet it very much has a presence, an equal potential for reflection and appearance all its own. As Mies strove to strip away the unnecessary, these characteristics, along with ornamentation, were what he desired less of, to create more space. Made famous by the modernist architect, the statement ‘less is more’ has become bigger than Mies himself, coming to symbolize a rejection of materialism and a justification for extreme minimalism. But what about all the ‘more’ that came out of this desire for ‘less’: all the glass in his architecture?

Architect and artist Gabriel Peña Tijerina has been studying the properties and potentials of glass throughout his career. He is interested in how a solid substance can be recognized as merely an absence, and his body of work explores different facets of this ubiquitous material: appearance/disappearance, presence/absence, transparency/reflection, inside/outside. More. specifically dissects this notion of ‘less is more’ by examining a Miesian pavilion in Montreal, and how, as with anything taken to an extreme, the master’s work may have inadvertently become focused on the ‘more’ rather than the ‘less’.

The former Esso service station on Nun’s Island, Montreal, was one of the last design commissions of the architecture firm of Mies van der Rohe in 1967. It wasn’t Mies himself who produced the project, but the office of Mies van der Rohe where his employees worked in collaboration with local architect Paul H. Lapointe. Peña Tijerina questions how such a thing came to be– how the work of an architect who’s ethos was to find underlying truth in form and seek a purity of architecture wound up designing a service station for a major oil company. Maybe it is only natural that capitalism would seep into these theories of purity of form, as it does with everything. If it can be marketed, then it will be. But the pavilion has since become a heritage building housing an intergenerational community centre, whose open concept allowed for such a change and continues to allow for a range of possible programming. In Tijerina’s continued research, the artist looks at ways that glass allows for opportunities to mediate our changing realities with our surroundings, through assembled environments of memory, events, emotions, place, and use. ---

To converse with architecture, sometimes it is necessary to develop new lenses for seeing into the architecture. For More III, Peña Tijerina installed a thermoform protrusion onto the exterior of the Nun’s Island MvdR pavilion. The warping of the glass makes the features of its surrounding reflections all the more apparent, yet also distorted – it looks almost like the building is blowing a bubble. In the gallery, the photograph of this intervention is mounted behind the thermoform sculpture itself, where it now becomes the bulbous glass of a standard picture frame, distorting yet another common use of glass whose presence is often overlooked. More VI, the design sibling and companion piece of More III, is installed on the outer-facing wall of TAP, confronting the viewer as they enter the space. Along with its companion, More VI brings attention to the material of windows, rather than what lies beyond them. These installations also brings attention to the space between modernist pavilion where it was installed in-situ and the residential garage where it is exhibited.

More IV & V relates to the commercial vernacular of the pavilion – the iconic oval of the Esso sign. Unlike the commercial version, Tijerina’s oval is not back-lit white, nor does it have the red letters, but rather is made of reflective glass as black as the oil it serves. The two pieces, hung opposite each other on the ceiling and floor of the gallery, constrict the already small space. More IV, pristine and glossy above, with the more beaten down, warped and matte More V below.

More VI, the miniature collection to accompany More IV & V, may be more obvious in their critique of capitalism and mass production. Briefcase-sized versions of the reflective black ovals, this edition of five were engraved to read ‘more.’ yet their legibility was impaired as they went down the production line. It can only be imagined how worn they would be if this series was made on a commercial or industrial scale. Since profit is the capitalist measurement of success, doing more with less became the capitalist approach to creation and production, which Peña Tijerina is highlighting here in relation to Mies’ architectural ethos.

There’s a good chance Mies may never have been caught dead in the garage of a small apartment building, yet with Less I Peña Tijerina is summoning the ghost of the architect into the exhibition space. Mies was never far from a cigar – the smell of smoke in the space brings a sensorial allusion to match the conceptual one. The granite mount starts off rough on one end, and slowly fades to polished stone the closer it gets to its reflective surface, to Mies’ apparent absence.

(There is one more work in this exhibition, but if your eyes are focused solely on looking through and not at, you may miss the word ‘more’ engraved into the powder room mirror.)

More IV, V Photography Morgane Clément-Gagnon

more II Photography Morgane Clément-Gagnon

Less I Photography Morgane Clément-Gagnon

more I and VII Photography Morgane Clément-Gagnon

more I Photography Morgane Clément-Gagnon

Casa los Lirios

Le Poids du Soleil / Sinking Sun