Ron Tran: It Knows Not What It Is
At the Charles H. Scott Gallery until April 17

Walking into Ron Tran’s installation, It Knows Not What It Is, mimics the experience of entering a place of worship. Electronic chimes on the soundtrack enhance the sense of an ecclesiastical setting, as do rows of candles in ornate sconces. At the far end of the gallery, high on the east wall, a softly glowing form in white neon is mounted like a cross between two “liturgical” hangings, which are beautifully painted with the same image that is drawn in light. That image, a stick with a bifurcated top, looking a bit like a truncated divining rod, recurs throughout this “holy” place. It’s also the installation’s raison d’íªtre.

A Vancouver-based artist with a growing international reputation, Tran works across many media, including video, photography, and sculptural installation. Here, he has taken a stick—a found object that he acquired on the street from someone who had cut it from a city tree—and has experimented with ways of investing it with meaning. Given the installation’s reverential look and tone, that meaning appears to be more entangled with ideas of the sacred than the sentimental or the materialistic.

In creating It Knows Not What It Is, Tran invited 11 artists and writers, including Angus Ferguson, Pietro Sammarco, Kevin Chong, Erica Stocking, and Paul Kajander, to collaborate with him in creating artworks based on the stick’s form. Their works are mounted here along with Tran’s, but without labels or any other individual attribution. If you know each artist’s practice, you might guess who made what. Otherwise, it’s as if anonymous members of the congregation, working with the minister or priest, created a series of liturgical decorations for the good of all and the glory of the stick.

Among the works that compose the installation is a small, iconlike painting of a star-filled sky dominated by a stick-shaped constellation. This lovely little piece evokes, although at a different scale, Gathie Falk’s 1979 Night Sky paintings, which, not incidentally, were inspired by Giotto’s 14th-century frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy. Echoing the image of a constellation, in a less church-y, more new age-y way, is a cloud of lighted crystals, small and large, embedded in the walls of the opposite corner of the gallery.

Nearby, a sticklike object, wrapped in black cloth and placed in a vitrine, mimics a holy relic—the shinbone of a saint, perhaps. Projected high up on another wall is a squared-off, diagrammatic representation of the stick, rotating in undefined space. Elsewhere, a live-action video depicts the stick as if it were an alien creature probing the reaches of an artist’s studio. The spoken dialogue here is minimal, but includes the lines: “I’m not sure that it will give me an answer, I’m not sure that it won’t give me an answer.” We’re not sure, either.

The project is engaging and well-executed, and it certainly stimulates our thinking about the ways in which meaning is constructed. It also alerts us to our human need for sacred objects, to revere and to represent an idea of God. On a more art-worldly rather than otherworldly note, Tran’s installation poses questions about the politics of collaboration versus the assertion of individual authorship. It’s worth a visit—and perhaps a small prayer.