Art Burn

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Madame Zsa Zsa (Andrew Harwood) burns sage in preparation for a ‘psychic reading’ at the opening of Séancé, his solo show at PLATFORM on Friday, Jan. 13. (KAREN ASHER)

Primary motifs in Séancé, Torontonian-Winnipegger Andrew Harwood’s current exhibition at PLATFORM centre, the seance and the gay bar share striking commonalities. Both address longings for one or another kind of "contact;" each has equal potential to excite and disappoint, and, notably, both are kept dark, as not to bring to light the little frauds that might otherwise spoil the evening. The medium conceals her props and sleights of hand, while the clubgoer might wish to camouflage his age, his weight, or any trace desperation written on his face.
   
Séancé likewise supports itself on flimsy constructions that don’t necessarily hold up to scrutiny or daylight, but this makes sense. The show looks… rough (unless you squint a little), but a pervasive shabbiness is central to Harwood’s peculiar logic and aesthetic; critically, it lends pathos to what might otherwise seem a flamboyant piss-take. After all, the show’s title is a timely-but-still-terrible portmanteau of "seance" and "Beyoncé," and the opening-night performances on Friday the 13th consisted of Harwood, as Madame Zsa Zsa, his terrifying drag alter-ego, delivering "readings" (cue Venus Xtravaganza) at a table bedecked with a mirror ball, candles and cans of orange soda; querents "anointed" themselves with microfine glitter after each session.
   
The gallery looks the part of haunted nightclub: lights out, walls black and windows shuttered, everything shot through with digital projections of queasy-making moiré spirals that equally suggest Vasarely and vaudeville mesmerists. This atmosphere lends context to Discoplasma, a series of large-scale photo installations encircling the space. Seemingly cellphone pictures blown up until their JPEG artifacts are visible even in the half-light, the photographs are simple portraits of men at a club, their faces obscured by lurid patterns of green and pink laser projections. The photos bow out from the walls like funhouse mirrors, lit from the front by bare black-light bulbs and from behind by hidden strands of blinking fairy lights. They eloquently draw together references to turn-of-the-century Spiritualist photography (early snapshots that purported to capture streams of "ectoplasm," a fictitious, ghostly goo, issuing from the medium’s body at the height of her trance) and the disquieting cocktail of gallows humour and sexual yearning that has informed modes of queer self-representation since the harrowing early years of the AIDS crisis.
   
Flanking the seance table, diaphanous curtains made entirely of hot glue and sequins glimmer among the myriad projections. Arresting for both their beauty and chintzy materiality, these ably perform as set-pieces here but would merit close attention in any context. Elsewhere, Ms. Knowles makes her one (physical) manifestation in a video of remixed performance footage. Delightful as I find imagining Beyoncé to be some kind of phantasmal entity transmitting messages from beyond, it serves mainly to justify the show’s titular pun, looping away in a corner like a nearly-muted nightclub television.
   
Visiting the following afternoon, I had hoped for a better look at those flimsy constructions, the extension cords and bits of fishing line supporting the work, empty cans and eddies of glitter littering the floor, but the house lights were still down and the gallery since tidied. Nevertheless, now exorcised of the crowd and throbbing DJ set, Séancé lingers at its eeriest and most bizarrely moving.
   
Steven Leyden Cochrane is an emerging artist, writer and educator from Tampa, Florida. He expects to find stray glitter in his clothes periodically for the next few months — that stuff is anthrax in Zsa Zsa’s hands.

Andrew Harwood: Séancé
Until Feb. 25, PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts