Catherine Menard’s work demands your attention. She doesn’t share space. She dominates it. Her process isn’t ideal for your typical group show, or any conventional, white box exhibit. She needs room for her creative impulses to thrive, and now Unveil Gallery in Irvine has given it to her. Her new show Pillar to Post stands alone, peerless. Catherine has created an insular, demanding one person show that feels timeless and urgent. And it is a “show.”
Catherine is the mad director who rediscovers old washed-up talent in the form of discarded found objects. She reinvents them by casting them in this moody ensemble piece. Nothing in this gallery is precious, but everything has value and purpose. Giant decorative Christmas ornaments, painted black, hang by chains draped loosely from the ceiling—careful lighting accentuates the shadows, like a German Expressionist film, creating menace across the gallery walls. The shadows are not superficial; they are fully realized supporting characters. Nearby, a bed headboard and baseboard stand like the eerie ruins of a set-piece from some long forgotten one-act. Other objects are more removed from their original purpose, including a once more practical wooden spinning wheel-like device that now hangs weightless on another wall. Spotlights give the wheel its moment. The rest of the room contains other small secrets, and Catherine has given great attention to every grim detail.
At regular intervals, a video is projected on the opposite wall showing four grubby, pale arms, several feet high, set against a black backdrop. Their scale holds up against the other sculptural elements in the room. These arms become the featured act for several minutes. They move slowly at first, and you realize you’re looking at one pair of arms doubled, mirrored in a way that becomes obscured when the interactions between them become more tense, then frantic, intimate, and ultimately combative. The choreography resolves itself, much like it started—like the life cycle of a doomed relationship. The accompanying composition is a repeating single drop-tuned note combined with manic, building percussion that keeps the mood charged and looming. The arms resemble the elegant, disembodied appendages of two Martha Graham dancers, damned to perform this melodrama for all eternity. It’s quite unsettling, and, God forbid, beautiful.
Soon after the video, light is projected at a dangling white plaster bas-relief disc, creating a black circle on the nearby wall with a blue glowing ring around it, like an eclipse—a signal of the end, or is it the beginning? With this, you move around the space, and it becomes clear that you are the final player in this show. When you exit, it goes on without you, because it must.
By James Hillis
May 2, 2024, 2:30pm
James Hillis is a writer and editor who attended the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and University of Arkansas Writing Program. He has worked as a creative writing teacher, and as a script reader for CAA. He currently edits manuscripts as well as maintains his own writing practice in South Los Angeles.
