Lueurs oniriques

Ludic, Luminal: On Manon De Pauw’s Lueurs Oniriques 
When someone disappears into the screen of a phone or a tablet, where do they go? Media images of rest today show us bodies haloed by the glow of a touch screen, enraptured by what they see. Screens steal our sleep, but they are also like sleep, leaving us dead to the world. Our screens are the new succubus.—In 1896, Maxim Gorky called the first moving pictures onscreen a “kingdom of shadows” that “begins to disturb and depress you. It seems as though it carries a warning, fraught with a vague but sinister meaning that makes your heart grow faint. You are forgetting where you are. Strange imaginings invade your mind and your consciousness begins to wane and grow dim”. The last century is one of a creeping ever closer of the glow of images, into our homes, and now, into the palm of our hands, and the companion fear that their light dims our own. But with a phenomenon so pervasive, we need much more curiosity about the allure of such encounters, because something is still happening within the relational ecology of light, signals, flesh, screens and bodies, making and remaking us. Screen media are ethically agnostic—they can function for better or for worse—but our task is to experiment with them for any small openings in the deadening forces of capitalist capture and its signals, in search of new ways of being ourselves.—In Lueurs oniriques, Manon De Pauw, with choreographer Pierre-Marc Ouellette and their collaborators, expand the experimental threshold of this contemporary relation. Here, all the affordances of light, touch, reflection, ambiance and capture become matters of play. The rabbit holes of this exhibition are less portals to an elsewhere than a suspensive space of a something happening. Making screen content pure light and mirror, the gestural what-ifs of Lueurs oniriques refuse to settle into singularity and sameness. The invitation: to take the lure and amplify the shadow, the realm of the half-thought, the unfulfilled gesture, the testing ground, the maybe. In the soft zone of screen light, what is the risk of contact with a ‘you-but-not you’, the mirror image who (as they are not one), does not take your place? In this exhibition’s fragmented reflections, you are invited, as on the glittered dimness of a dance floor, to move in a collective where you can no longer tell what bits, what impulses, what attractions belong to which body.

—Alanna Thain