Dress Parade

A favourite device of Shakespeare’s, the play-within-a-play describes a scenario in which the characters of a theatrical production mount their own theatrical production that we, the audience, watch alongside them. By parroting its own structure, the play-within-a-play implicates audiences into theatre’s artifice, creating a mise en abyme in which, to bastardize Shakespeare, the whole world becomes a stage. Dress Parade picks apart this famous adage to explore the relationship between performer and audience, observer and observed, on stage and off. This troupe of eleven artists approach questions of theatricality and performance through painting, drawing, photography, and sculpture. The works presented are both deadly serious and tongue-in-cheek, totally surreal and completely mundane. Together they offer a peek behind the curtain of a production in which we are all merely players.

The allure of theatre hinges on its ability to transform fantasy into reality, a principle articulated through the work of Fatine-Violette Sabiri and Gérald Lajoie. Working across photography and sculpture, the artists find magic in small details: a crown made of twigs and coins, an unexpected vision, a surprise in the sole of a shoe. A similar dreamlike quality emerges in the work of Amy Bravo, Yelena Yemchuk, and Trevor Bourke, three artists whose paintings appear plucked from the depths of the unconscious. Here, the surreal takes centre stage, revealing a cast of fantastical characters: a hybrid creature with the head of a human and the body of a chicken; a scattering of cheerleaders, pointed cones strapped to their arms; a performer parting the curtain of an eye to look hesitantly upon his audience. These artists grant us front-row seats to the otherworldly, those images and anxieties only glimpsed in dreams or imagined on the stage. Through their work we see the absurd, the whimsical, the breathtaking; a reminder that life is about sitting back and enjoying the show.

And how do we realize that show? What work is required to get to opening night? Sets must be built; lighting cues developed; lines rehearsed and committed to memory. If blocking maps movement across the stage, then set design decides the contours of that movement, and the body is the instrument that brings it all to life. The triangulated relationship between space, movement, and the body is reproduced in miniature in the work of Max Keene, who presents a series of maquettes dotted with mirrored silhouettes stretching across each piece. In a related gesture, Brittany Shepherd, Cristine Brache, and Corri-Lynn Tetz dissect the repetition of embodied performance through a series of carefully crafted portraits. Using ballet as a lens through which to examine the pains and pleasures of feminine performance, Shepherd presents only a fragment of her subjects—a bruised shin, a criss-cross of pointe shoes—to draw our hungry eyes to the action presumably happening just off stage, while the hazy portraits of Tetz and Brache, painted from film stills and found photographs, evoke the softly lit melancholy of vintage Playboys and Turner Classic Movies. In all three cases, the artists leave us to wonder who the subject of each painting might be: a company soloist, an amateur drag queen, or another ingénue ready for her closeup.

An important element of any good performance is camp, the wink and nod that lets an audience know that everything is make-believe, a play-within-a-play. Sontag defines camp as a sensibility, something so sacred it can’t be named, a dictate exhibited in the work of Em Kettner, whose glazed porcelain tiles, each encased in a wooden frame, depict figures who either demure or revel in the act of being seen. The discarded headshots of Hollywood hopefuls scramble together in the work of Nadia Belerique, who combines these found photos into a selection of Frankenstein’s monsters. With eyes and mouths overlapping, these aspiring actors collapse into an indistinguishable mass of features awaiting appraisal, an image of our own desire to see and be seen.

What makes a performer different from an audience? The artists in Dress Parade suggest the difference is a matter of perspective, one that can easily be flipped on its head through the manipulation of material, composition, scale, and light. In Belerique’s accompanying sculptural work, the artist tips the rectangular panel of a marquee on its side, transforming public signage into the private sanctuary of the dressing room mirror, its perimeter lined by lightbulbs, but in this mirror we find no reflection, only our warped shadows staring back at us, a self-contained world, a play-within-a-play.

Text by Cason Sharpe