“I should never be able to fulfil what is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever.” — Virginia Woolf
Ginny consists sparely of a single column of pale vases—foam replicas of those seen by the artist via YouTube video of Virginia Woolf’s Monk’s House home-made-museum in Rodmell, England—installed, to coin a phrase, within a room of their own, at the ceiling of which, woven through the ventilation grate, are to be found digitally printed images of the sky and trees of Monk’s House.
And by a simple wooden chair upholstered with a very slightly gaudy, mismatched pair of fabrics apparently lingering from Woolf’s era of the late 19th and early 20th century—she and her husband bought Monk’s House in 1919, nearly a decade before the two papers comprising A Room of One’s Own were written—we find a simple wooden coffee table. Are these part of the works? Are we meant to wonder as much? Is this intrusion by the domestic onto the public space a matter of convenience or calibrated critique? “I should never be able,” to quote Woolf, “to come to a conclusion.”
Wherever they begin, these works from interdisciplinary artist Ioana Dragomir mark the eighteenth installation from Support, a project space formerly based in London, Ontario, helmed by Liza Eurich, Tegan Moore, and Ruth Skinner, and now located in Montréal, Québec, the city in which Dragomir is now completing an MFA in Print Media.
And given Woolf’s (and my) own predilection, it’s the print media on which I’d like to focus for a moment. Consider “GINNY, AGAIN,” a found poem included in the MATERIALS accompanying the exhibition: it collages lines from A Room of One’s Own in meditation through flowers, those inert expressions of idle beauty, I mention with tongue pressed into cheek, so readily associated with the gentle sex; and I think the poem might just be brilliant. Have a look.
From the first word, we don’t see delicate or lithe blossoms but “gaudy” ones, a “lilac shaking its flowers” “carelessly flung,” “a rose / now a daffodil in the sun” whose petals “he must pluck.” Maintaining sense and shape and even easy slant rhyme to put a text in dialogue with itself while carrying forth the original text’s critical essence isn’t as easy as Dragomir makes it look.
And rather than simple homage, it is a continuation of Woolf’s work that Dragomir is involved in, it seems to me, because something Woolf might not have expected was the extent to which her words would find a staggering commercial audience and floor-to-ceiling “cuteified” iteration not to foster careful study but actually at its expense, as a bouquet of flowers or a column of pink-foam vases surrenders purposeful utility to aesthetic presentation.
Ginny will be open at Support—Local E602, 5445 Av. de Gaspe, Montréal, Québec—on Saturdays 2-5pm, or by appointment, until July 29th.
