Kevin & Robert Yates: Usher the Fall of the House
Susan Hobbs Gallery
October 2013
A conversation between Alex Millington and Quintin Teszeri published in Artichoke Magazine
Q … a cool dude. You said you didn’t get a chance to speak with him?
A No, I didn’t know what he looked like so I couldn’t pick him out of the crowd. I probably bumped into him, or made crude remarks in front of him. But earlier you were talking about the Yates brothers. That might be an interesting way to lead into this conversation. You said they look somewhat alike and the exhibition description suggested that the creepiness of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher is enhanced by a doppelgänger factor. We had just briefly touched on how the idea of twins or doubles is pretty apparent in the work.
Q Reflections, doppelgängers, mirror images, perfect mimesis. They’re captivating, surreal devices.
A The description said that the doubling effect, that mirror image, is unsettling. And I was thinking to myself, “Is this exhibit really unsettling?” I’m not sure.
Q I wouldn’t say unsettling. Perhaps unsettling in a Hitchcockian way. Hitchcock would tilt horizons just a little. If you ever see a picture and it’s just a little bit off, it feels odd – slightly disorienting.
A So you think the resulting effect is found in Yate’s work?
Q It’s not unsettling in an alarming way. It’s quite the opposite. It’s like a trance or a dream. An eerie calm, disoriented but comfortable, lost but peaceful.
A It’s arresting, not alarming or unsettling. You know I thought there was a profound stability there.
Q It’s arresting and visually spectacular. It does have interest, but once you get past the initial bang, there’s more to it.
A I think the unsettling effect would have been more apparent if the works looked perilous. There’s really only the one sculpture that’s like this – it seems like we both have the dresser/aquarium sculpture, Usher the Fall of the House – in mind while we talk about this. That and the little houses were the keynotes, of course. But instead of it seeming perilous or unsettling in a physical, toppling kind of way, it seemed very stable. Like one solid tangible object as opposed to one that is reversed on some mysterious plane. Something like a face, divided, but two essential aspects of a whole structure.
Q Naturally symmetrical.
A Which means the only real unsettling aspect is the positioning of the aquarium on the dresser. It’s just slightly off to one side and the skeleton with the stake in its heart was off to the left. That was the only thing straying from that vertical division.
Q Was it slightly to the left?
A Yes, and I don’t know if you noticed, but there was something that looked like a coffee stain on a corner of the lower dresser that was even reversed on the upper dresser.
Q The top and bottom both had mirror spots, patches, and drips. The craftsmanship was pretty incredible. It’s not often we get to see such meticulously built sculpture.
A The little truck that was sinking – it wasn’t wheels to wheels, but halfway up the door. That’s the way things would look if they were really sinking into water, and I respect him for not taking the easy route about that sculpture. From a craftsmanship standpoint, it’s a lot of work. He’s probably one of the better artists I’ve seen around Toronto in a while.
Q Craftsmanship, along with the creation of that unpopulated, post-disaster domestic environment, is definitely one of the most notable aspects of the show.
A Oh, and you made a good point about the use of domesticity before recording.
Q The show’s atmosphere and its literary inspiration remind me of There Will Come Soft Rains, a short story by Ray Bradbury. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, a house continues to perform all of its futuristic robot tasks, unaware that some sort of nuclear weapon incinerated the family it served. Upon receiving no response to what poem the missus would like to hear, the house selects one of her favourites by Sara Teasdale:
There Will Come Soft Rains
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools, singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Susan Hobbs Gallery
October 2013
A conversation between Alex Millington and Quintin Teszeri published in Artichoke Magazine
Q … a cool dude. You said you didn’t get a chance to speak with him?
A No, I didn’t know what he looked like so I couldn’t pick him out of the crowd. I probably bumped into him, or made crude remarks in front of him. But earlier you were talking about the Yates brothers. That might be an interesting way to lead into this conversation. You said they look somewhat alike and the exhibition description suggested that the creepiness of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher is enhanced by a doppelgänger factor. We had just briefly touched on how the idea of twins or doubles is pretty apparent in the work.
Q Reflections, doppelgängers, mirror images, perfect mimesis. They’re captivating, surreal devices.
A The description said that the doubling effect, that mirror image, is unsettling. And I was thinking to myself, “Is this exhibit really unsettling?” I’m not sure.
Q I wouldn’t say unsettling. Perhaps unsettling in a Hitchcockian way. Hitchcock would tilt horizons just a little. If you ever see a picture and it’s just a little bit off, it feels odd – slightly disorienting.
A So you think the resulting effect is found in Yate’s work?
Q It’s not unsettling in an alarming way. It’s quite the opposite. It’s like a trance or a dream. An eerie calm, disoriented but comfortable, lost but peaceful.
A It’s arresting, not alarming or unsettling. You know I thought there was a profound stability there.
Q It’s arresting and visually spectacular. It does have interest, but once you get past the initial bang, there’s more to it.
A I think the unsettling effect would have been more apparent if the works looked perilous. There’s really only the one sculpture that’s like this – it seems like we both have the dresser/aquarium sculpture, Usher the Fall of the House – in mind while we talk about this. That and the little houses were the keynotes, of course. But instead of it seeming perilous or unsettling in a physical, toppling kind of way, it seemed very stable. Like one solid tangible object as opposed to one that is reversed on some mysterious plane. Something like a face, divided, but two essential aspects of a whole structure.
Q Naturally symmetrical.
A Which means the only real unsettling aspect is the positioning of the aquarium on the dresser. It’s just slightly off to one side and the skeleton with the stake in its heart was off to the left. That was the only thing straying from that vertical division.
Q Was it slightly to the left?
A Yes, and I don’t know if you noticed, but there was something that looked like a coffee stain on a corner of the lower dresser that was even reversed on the upper dresser.
Q The top and bottom both had mirror spots, patches, and drips. The craftsmanship was pretty incredible. It’s not often we get to see such meticulously built sculpture.
A The little truck that was sinking – it wasn’t wheels to wheels, but halfway up the door. That’s the way things would look if they were really sinking into water, and I respect him for not taking the easy route about that sculpture. From a craftsmanship standpoint, it’s a lot of work. He’s probably one of the better artists I’ve seen around Toronto in a while.
Q Craftsmanship, along with the creation of that unpopulated, post-disaster domestic environment, is definitely one of the most notable aspects of the show.
A Oh, and you made a good point about the use of domesticity before recording.
Q The show’s atmosphere and its literary inspiration remind me of There Will Come Soft Rains, a short story by Ray Bradbury. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, a house continues to perform all of its futuristic robot tasks, unaware that some sort of nuclear weapon incinerated the family it served. Upon receiving no response to what poem the missus would like to hear, the house selects one of her favourites by Sara Teasdale:
There Will Come Soft Rains
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools, singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.