The works in Dumb Slate are preoccupied with celebrity. Celebrity that typifies the height of identity performance and aesthetic idealization, that holds an eerie non-existence even as it is perpetually eternalized in a glut of glossy images. The celebrity is everywhere and nowhere, ubiquitous yet impenetrable. Hollywood is a fairytale, history is a ghost story, and these are the places where mortals are rendered undying. But what haunting absence is implied by such a magnitude of presence?

Cristine Brache and Michael Thompson engage archival cinematics in pursuit of a greater intimacy with our collective cultural history. Through the loud recognition of iconography, their works hum a yearning tune. While acknowledging the past as a glitzy construct, the artists search out the private pain behind public performance. Amidst the melancholic tone of time passage and inconsistent memory retrieval, the works possess a sweet curiosity to engage bygone subjects with whom we can no longer convene.

In Brache’s video-sculpture “Peeper,” a keyhole in a heart-patterned door grants viewers a glimpse at Playboy bunnies in their dressing room. The women primp to the words of a poem by Dorothy Stratten (sung by a barbershop quartet), a playmate who was murdered by her estranged husband, to whom Brache has dedicated many works. Through the peephole we hope to view the true emotionality of these commodified women, behind the faked camera smiles, the brutality of fame, the cellophane wrap of iconography. Glamor, in its archaic defi- nition, is an enchantment, a bewitching spell. Elsewhere, in “Disneyland,” Stratten is found fuzzed-out and lossy, the Playmate of the Year appearing on Johnny Carson. Brache’s works present a glamor that is aware of its own falsity. Although the show must go on, its files corrupt and glitch as the technology required to suspend disbelief becomes obsolete.

Thompson paints a disco ball sparkling in a red room. A diamond-fingered kiss, a wedding-day photo as a document of a more personal sort of performance. The framing of Elvis’ gold lamé suit in “A Study in Stroll,” reminds us that the idol’s feet did really walk our earth. In stacking the duplicated images, the piece calls to mind a film strip, but also the fact that Elvis was born a twinless twin, forever haunted by an absence. You’ll never walk alone, he sang. Working with found images from decades past, Thompson zooms and crops, painting only a particular fraction of a photo. These paintings onboard the language of film photography and video that define collective memory, while the new medium removes the context provided by motion, instead emphasizing surfaceness.

The overall effect of Dumb Slate matches a strained attempt to recall from the montage-ma- chine of the mind, peering through the darkness to discover just how much has been lost to time’s compression. Both Brache and Thompson seek the invisible realm that exists behind highly visible cultural artifacts, with the loving interest of someone looking through old family photos. Sharply aware of the link between memory and image, both artists confront these concepts as fallible and disintegrating, with the pained knowledge that they are the only tools we have to access what came before us.

- Text by Olivia Whittick

Cristine Brache is a New York-based artist, writer, and filmmaker. She received her MFA in Fine Art Media from the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Brache predominantly works in encaustic painting, sculpture, and film, often using obsolete media, acrylic, readymades, and textiles. Her work circulates around constructs of the female body and psyche, broken histories, masking, and the inevitable power dynamics accompanying these themes. The artist is also interested in mortality, nostalgia, and solitude. Select solo exhibitions include those held at anonymous gallery (New York); Locust Projects (Miami); and Anat Ebgi (Los Angeles). She has exhibited internationally at galleries and institutions like Berlinische Galerie, Perez Art Museum Miami, and ICA Miami. Her films have screened in festivals like the Florida Film Festival (Orlando); Miami Film Festival (Miami); and Slamdance (Park City). Her work has been critically reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.

Michael Thompson (b. 1997, London, ON) is a painter living and working in Toronto. Thompson’s practice investigates the translation of photographic images into paintings and is often informed broadly by conceptions of history. His recent work examines the documentary nature of photography and employs painting as a space to traverse uncertain and complicated grounds. In 2019, he completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at Western University and became a resident artist at the Slade School of Fine Art in partnership with the Camden Art Centre (London). In 2022, he received a Master of Fine Art from the University of Guelph. Thompson has recently been included in exhibitions in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. His most recent solo exhibition, Chorus Coda, opened at Franz Kaka (Toronto) in 2023. Thompson will be included in the upcoming Greater Toronto Art 2024 at MOCA, Toronto, the artist’s first institutional presentation.