Rodney LaTourelle: Hallway Monitor

Double vision and doppelgangers abound in a new installation by Winnipeg-trained, Berlin-based artist, architect and critic Rodney LaTourelle. Examining the effects of spatial transformation, colour association and the superimposition of architectural spaces on the human body, LaTourelle’s most recent project, titled Interval, is a set of twin constructed corridors installed at the University of Winnipeg’s Gallery 1C03 and Hamilton Galleria.

Referencing the “high-tech” style of the university’s Centennial Hall, where both exhibition spaces are located, and the rhythmic “supergraphics” designed by Ursula Ferguson that originally decorated its walls in the 1970s, Interval offers viewers an immersive environment of colour, light and customized seating areas that temporarily alters our orientation in otherwise familiar spaces. The undulating, chevron-shaped corridor LaTourelle has created in a spectrum of commercial paint colours exemplifies the artist’s aim to create “three-dimensional paintings” with his installation work, prompting questions about when painting becomes architecture and architecture becomes painting.

Just as his 2003 interactive environment, Pharmakon, created in collaboration with artist Michael Stecky, aimed to create an affective and healing experience through gradual shifts in tone, colour and sound, Interval aims to create a sense of spatial displacement through mirroring. By prompting this paradoxical mix of recognition and dislocation in constructed spaces that are similar, but not quite identical, LaTourelle’s carefully constructed project provides wry commentary on a contemporary condition where cultural amnesia and false memories are increasingly common, making it all the more difficult to distinguish the original from its replicas. (515 Portage Ave, Winnipeg MB)