Artichoke
Western Canada's Award Winning Visual Arts Magazine
Fall 2003, Volume 15, Number 2
Fiona Kinsella
Prescribing Behaviour (balance)
by Priti Kohli and David Brace

TRANSIT GALLERY, HAMILTON,
ONTARIO
MARCH 4 - 30, 2003

A prescription is a determined set of rules that apply to a limited period of time.

Kinsella uses absurd wrappers as containers for an array of serious issues. The works are framed in Victorian "egg and dart" mouldings, a gaudy reminder of life and death and a symbolic taste of the product within. Her products – tablecloths, smashed duck eggs and appropriated images, sealed and protected (shrink wrapped for consumption by future generations) – are at odds with the air of authority conveyed by the museum style shadow boxes: the museum is a place of reorder, reconstruction, control and inquiry. The shrink wrap suggests a cheap commodification; a six pack to be torn open, used and disposed of. Eggs (the six-pack), emptied of their logical contents and positioned in nests of manufactured lace, are further displaced and decontextualized. Each egg is reinscribed with an image or an object, such as anonymous portraits, fifty year old medical imagery, historic pop culture iconography, or hair. As a tour guide through a geneaology of mid-twentieth century artifacts, Kinsella's imagery is familiar and recognizable; but, all is not as it appears. Looking through the glass, through the clear plastic, and then through the transparent acetate inside the eggs, we find a narrative already in progress with a layering of numerous possible meanings and interpretations. It is our undertaking to make sense of the order placed before us. Her artistic position requires us to become researchers, simultaneously subjects and students of the social and cultural sciences that give order and meaning to our lives.

As attractive and amusing as these works are, it soon becomes apparent that there is something incongruous, even uneasy about the combination of elements. Eggs and lace fabric, for instance, can connote a sense of nurturing, comfort and domesticity. Yet, repeated images throughout the series, such as fire or the human heart, suggest the opposite: a volatility, instability and vulnerability on physical, mental, and emotional levels. On the other hand, the same imagery conveys the vitality of passion, anticipation and excitement. Layering imagery and words disrupts the viewer from becoming comfortable with, let alone comforted by the nostalgia that the materials trigger. One egg in "Prayer II" contains an image of a woman praying; in the egg above it, the image is that of a hand pulling a rabbit from a hat. The surrounding eggs hold images of fire, sparking the question: which system of belief will it be when faced with danger, potential tragedy and loss – faith or magic? – when faced with danger, potential tragedy, and loss. How can one know for sure? Thrown into the mix is a sense of urgency: how long before fire takes over and time runs out?

Tick-tock, tick-tock...time conspires against women in patriarchal societies; a woman only has so long before her biological clock runs out – a socially constructed notion that confines women to the institutions of family and motherhood – then she is no longer a (re)productive member of society. Kinsella challenges the assumption that women's fates are so predetermined. For instance, in "Courage IV," the top centre egg contains an image of a quintessential screen kiss; bottom centre holds an anonymous portrait of a man with symbols of science, reason and technology; in the four corner eggs the same image repeats: a woman stands, superimposed over a heart, turned away from the embracing couple and the man of science. The Victorian components of Kinsella's boxes lend themselves to a reading that emphasizes the social controls imposed upon women at the time: sex, science and technology, according to the Victorian era and during the fifties, were not considered appropriate subjects for women. As Foucault points out, though, there are always multiple and competing discourses at work (1). And, so, we might also read the women in this context as rejecting social norms and pressures.

Heterosexual relationships (the kissing couple) have been defined as the means to fulfilling the goal of motherhood, whereas new reproductive technologies (Mr. Science and his apparatus) emerge as alternatives for women whose bodies will not cooperate with societal expectations. Kinsella's cornered women reposition themselves to look outside the box and create new social structures. These figures are no longer held by the cinematic male gaze in which women are positioned as objects of male desire, nor are they passive recipients of masculine knowledge in the form of scientific inventions.

Social norms, control, and institutional power are part of our lives from an early age. Messages about behaviour come in a variety of forms and can be as simple as "do not play with matches," as in Hope II. There, the voice of authority combines with the consequences for not following the rules: fire gets out of control as quickly as a young boy's curiosity. Kinsella's care with juxtaposition exposes the gaps where the foundations of society are less solid than they seem. In Courage II, an image of Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz appears in the bottom centre egg. She is a character whose explorations are confined to dreams and fantasy: Dorothy stands in as an early lesson for adolescent girls, and boys, about gender roles in society. However, unlike Sleeping Beauty, whose sleeps a dreamless sleep, Dorothy's dream is open to various and contradictory interpretations. The images that Kinsella uses to surround Dorothy's portrait reflect the tenor of the movie: fear and excitement (beating hearts on either side of her), knowledge and power (anonymous pair of disembodied hands manipulating scientific apparatus, top left and right) and a higher, untouchable, authority (portrait of a man laughing, top centre). While Dorothy's world whirls out of control during the twister, her dream allows for social norms and gender roles to turn on their heads. In the fantastical world of Oz, Dorothy leads the male characters through the unknown in search for home, courage, compassion and intelligence. Her search exposes the man in power who stands behind his own mechanical devices so that he might appear bigger than life. When his elaborate system breaks down, the smoke and mirrors are, in part, a letdown at the same time that they create an opening, a new place to begin.

In this cycle of life and knowledge, Kinsella recycles material and cultural baggage by way of an offering: these memorial moments remind us that narrative and discursive interventions are possible.


Endnote:
1. "We should not be content to say that power has a certain need for a certain discovery, a certain form of knowledge, but we should add that the exercise of power creates and causes to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information"
Michel Foucault.


This review appeared in the Fall/Winter 2003 issue of Artichoke, Vol. 15, No. 2., and is reprinted here with permission of the authors and publisher.