Floria Sigismondi: Renaissance woman
Jaime Jeske
Wednesday, February 26, 2003
Renaissance woman
By KRISTA FOSS
Hamilton - Floria Sigismondi signs autographs with a rock star's
flourish. Clusters of black-clad twentysomethings approach her nervously
hugging copies of Redemption,the sold-out limited-edition book of her
photographs, as if they were personal diaries.
She brushes back a shard of black hair, steps forward on her stiletto
heels, and with her lace cuffs trembling, lets fly with a black marker.
Behind her, another fan edges forward.
Autograph seekers and public art galleries are not an obvious mix,
except in Sigismondi's world.
An art-school graduate who first made a splash as a fashion
photographer, she's had a decade of success at creating nightmarish and
apocalyptic music videos for Marilyn Manson, David Bowie, Tricky and
Leonard Cohen.
She has also put her talent to work directing quirky commercials for
clients such as Target department stores, Cadbury Flake and Adidas. She
created the Busby Berkeley-style "aubergine" campaign that was the most
memorable part of last-ditch efforts to reinvigorate the failing Eatons
department-store chain.
And last week, she opened GOTH[narcot]IC: The Art of Floria Sigismondi,
at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, her third solo exhibit to be shown in
Canada.
Not surprisingly, hers is an artistic life where boundaries get blurred.
The surrealist images and yes, famous faces, from her rock videos end up
framed and hung on gallery walls. (In Hamilton, it is her photo of
shock-rocker Marilyn Manson, shot such that the whites of his eyeballs
sit on his face like hard-boiled eggs while his lips are splayed
tortuously by a metal frame, that immediately nods to her rock-video
roots.)
Likewise, celebrity has seeped from her clients into a puddle of cultish
adoration around her too. The autograph hounds come with the territory.
"I suppose the celebrity aspect is something that I struggled with,"
admits Ivan Jurakic, the Hamilton curator who pursued Sigismondi for
three years before she agreed to mount a show in her hometown.
"But the distinctions that we draw between the commercial and the
private should be collapsed. I think being an artist is a broad
terminology. The kind of stuff one may do as an artist is not precluded
to working in one medium and not precluded to even working privately or
commercially.. . ."
Several hours after attending her Hamilton opening, Sigismondi, who
divides her time between homes in New York and Toronto, is back
collapsing the boundaries. She's en route to Los Angeles to start work
on a new video for the moody postpunk band Interpol.
At age 37, her schedule is such that Toronto artist representative Patti
Shaw manages Sigismondi's video projects, art exhibits and movie
ambitions full-time. There are scripts in the mail weekly. A
second-edition printing of Redemption from its Berlin publisher is about
to be released and meanwhile, she is developing a new book of
photography. Her most recently completed music video, a haunting vision
of children playing in a postnuclear world, was screened during a
performance by the Icelandic band Sigur Ros at the recent Sundance Film
Festival. Exhibits of her work are planned in Paris and Glasgow this
year. She's writing her own screenplay.
What energy and time she has to spare, she applies to sculpture,
photography and mixed-media installations. She's had solo exhibitions in
New York; London; Brecia, Italy; and Gotenborg, Sweden; and has
participated in nearly a dozen group shows around the globe. Respect in
the Canadian art scene has been hard won.
"Film brought everything together, set design, wardrobe, photography and
lighting and sound for me," she says. "But this -- painting and
sculpture -- is where everything began. It feeds me in a different way
than film does because I can get very hands-on."
The daughter of two opera singers who immigrated from Pescara, Italy, to
the steel city of Hamilton, Sigismondi was named for a character in
Tosca.
Her father gave singing lessons to a visual artist who repaid by
teaching the young Sigismondi daughters the basics of light and shade
and sketching. (Younger sister Antonella is also an artist.)
Both the influence of opera's lush costumes and the grim alienation and
decay of industrialism mix company in her aesthetic.
The gothic sensibility meanwhile has become an umbrella for her evolving
tastes in music, fashion and ideas that plunder the murky netherworld of
the mind and society.
"For me it has always been about curiosity and looking into the dark
corners with a flashlight," she says. "I learn about myself so it is
never a light thing for me because it is a real discovery of the
subconscious while bringing it into a more conscious realm."
The vehicle for expressing this discovery is the human body. Sigismondi
uses images of it as the messenger of repressed fears, alienation and
eroticism.
The Art Gallery of Hamilton exhibit is anchored around Sigismondi's
photos of medical specimens from Philadelphia's Mutter Museum: a human
face hanging on stitches of wire, and a crimson human heart, suspended
in an aquarium of amber light.
Her sculpture Breed Me,which was also part of her 2001 Come Part Mental
exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) in Toronto,
features a female mannequin with rams' horns and four breasts, lying
flat on a gurney with a baby cleaving her body in two.
There is resistance to her work, says MOCCA curator and director David
Liss, who was responsible for her first Canadian show.
But he insists it's the kind of suspicion people have when an artist
aspires to do more than one thing. "The resistance comes from people,
often older, who think of artists in categories," Liss says.
It is no surprise that Sigismondi's work might be most appreciated by
those familiar with her rock-video canon, which has garnered her
nominations for a Juno, MTV best-rock-video award and British Music
Award.
Liss used her video work in continuous play as part of the MOCCA
exhibit. "What distinguishes Floria in the pop world is that she is an
artist. You don't call her into to direct a video for the latest
boy/girl band," Liss says.
For Sigismondi herself, the question about whether being a rock-video
director distracts or detracts from her credibility as a visual artist
is moot.
"I don't differentiate between them . . . how I create the video work is
how I create the ideas for the other work, it is one and the same," she
says before disappearing into a throng that's gathering for her gallery
opening. In anticipation of the autograph seekers, she wields a black
marker.
GOTH[narcot]IC: The Art of Floria Sigismondi is at the Art Gallery of
Hamilton until March 23.
Copyright 2003 "The Globe and Mail."
Jaime