Loner Culture at Inter/Access
To be a loner today is to raise suspicions. We know now that Alek Minassian, Adam Lanza, Dylan Klebold, Elliot Roger, and many others, stayed in their rooms, alone, until rage and frustration drove them out, in a frenzy, to commit mayhem.
Loner Culture, the exhibition currently on display at Inter/Access is about something else. It’s about trying to connect. It’s social. And weirdly, to be social, is to exclude one group in favour of another. That’s the human way! Sometimes the exclusion piece means solitary confinement in a pink bedroom. But it’s temporary — a brief, high-drama interlude, an emotional eddy on the river towards self-actualization.
The exhibition re-creates vestiges of the long lost bedrooms where the tender, new self was honed and tested.
Above: Installation at Loner Culture
I chatted with one of the artist’s in the show, Suzanne Kite, through her live link on the Discord Platform. She described how in her late teens and early twenties she traveled hours on connecting buses to make the scene. In her case, the scene was an all ages DNB Happy Core Trance House DJ event in some off-the-beaten track warehouse in a remote corner of sprawling LA. That is dedication! That is really wanting to be there! Needing to get it absolutely right and knowing that the others at this event are just like you!
By the way, if you do not know — like me– the difference between DNB (Drums and Base) and Happy Core you can watch a tutorial above:
Suzanne Kite identifies herself as a Oglala Lakota performance artist. When the movie Pocahontas came out in 1995 Suzanne Kite’s parents bought her absolutely every conceivable Pocahontas tie-in item.
According to Wikipedia:
… promotional tie-ins included Burger King distributing 55 million toy replicas of the film’s characters with kids’ meals, Payless Shoes selling a line of moccasins, and Mattel peddling a Barbie-like Pocahontas doll.[93]
Payless! Obviously Indigenous youngsters, especially girls, were starved for dolls, toys and anything else Mattel and Payless could come up with that somehow related to them. Suzanne Kite has carefully saved these items. They are displayed on the walls of the gallery overlaid with projections of posters from her youthfully intrepid music life.
Detail of installation by Suzanne Kite titled “Better Off Alone”
Installation view of Suzanne Kite artwork “Better Off Alone”
Typing on the keyboard filled the large space at Inter/Access with Suzanne Kite’s favourite music from that era:
Video of interactive installation by Suzanne Kite
With all the memorializing of the past bedrooms of origin it is hard to keep the decades straight. Patti Smith, Michael Jackson, Lydia Lunch and B52s must mean late seventies or early eighties. But no, nostalgia has already kicked in. This is a moment in the early 2000s where icons from twenty years prior are revered.
Above: Installation detail from Loner Culture exhibition, re-creating a bedroom from the 2000s.
Both Thirza Jean Cuthand and Fallon Simard presented bedroom-ish settings and both featured monitors.
Installation by Fallon Simard
In Fallon Simard’s piece the utterly bland dresser, standing alone in the rather cavernous, grey space, has a bleak feeling. It is free of knickknacks and/or personal items of any kind, something that might indicate an era or anchor a sensibility. Instead there is a cold sense of isolation and detachment. The monitor displays anti-homophobic/transphobic internet memes with vague, delicate, pastel backgrounds.
Art work by Fallon Simard
A camera is clipped to top of the monitor in the Fallon Simard piece. Are we observing or being observed?
Installation by Thirza Jean Cuthand
Thirza Jean Cuthand provides a heap of cushions and head phones to kick back and watch videos. The tapes by Thirza Cuthand have a graceful poetic sensibility throughout. The artist is fearless: sex, insecurity, fear, sex, mental illness, rage, grief, sex, youth, race, sex. All the topics that are endlessly pondered in bedrooms around the world are covered here in an inventive and original voice.
annetteandquebec 