New Mexico-born, Montreal-based artist Jessica Mensch brings a techno-primordial experience to Visual Voice Gallery with new paintings produced in conjunction with a video and soundpiece, collectively called The Fuzz.¹

The video depicts an underworld through which four characters, almost like archetypes, pose, skulk, and dance in a quasi-ritualistic ecstasy, the narrative culminating in a wild love scene. The world they inhabit is one of saturated neons, shadows and scrim after scrim of painted white paper; certainly Mensch’s experience as a scenic painter (for the Segal and Centaur Theatre in Montreal) adds another dimension to the project. The video is accompanied by an abstract soundscape composed and produced by Mensch and her creative partner Emily Pelstring.

The work is rich in references without being overly explicit or too conceptually rigid, giving the viewer enough room to simply take it in. It evoked for me the late-70’s and 80’s New York post-punk art and club scene, but as has been noted, it also draws upon post-apocalyptic science fiction movies such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and further back, German Expressionist filmmaking of the 1920’s, such as Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. The gallery press release has described the thematic of The Fuzz as “a picture of the underworld as it is loosely defined by Plato in the Phaedo: Hades is a place of invisible looks – where ideas are projected into space from bodiless minds.” The video is collective hallucination of the four, projected now as a visible reality.

As Gallery director Bettina Forget remarked, it is common enough for an artist to explore various media that nonetheless remain somewhat autonomous from each other in practice and presentation. In Mensch’s work, by contrast, they are mutually constitutive and reflexive. For example, the characters in the video will sometimes hold a position for several seconds, as though posing for their portrait; indeed the paintings are based on video stills. What the paintings give back to the video is a prolonged frame, an opportunity to look closely at the scene and observe the many details that make the work so interesting. However, you couldn’t say that one medium clarifies the other, that it “answers” questions about what we are seeing in the other. The wonderful and confidently done paintings, while representational in one sense, are their own world of semi-abstraction and kaleidoscopic hallucination. Moreover, both the paintings and the video–in which three-dimensional sets made of paper form the physical space–vascillate between two-and three dimensions. This paper world reminds us that none of it is about representing the objective world, but rather leads us further down the rabbit hole. I only found myself wishing that the gallery had been darker and the music louder…

The scope of this beautiful, strange and original project merits a trip to The Fuzz. It will be freaking gallery goers out until October 27.