Enough White Lies

Linda Duvall: Enough White Lies to Ice a Wedding Cake

Given the opportunity to reinvent your life, what would you do and who could you become?  In Enough White Lies to Ice a Wedding Cake, Saskatoon-based artist Linda Duvall examines the ambiguity of personal identity and our notions of truth and falsehood. Duvall is concerned with the interstices of science and art, and how we apprehend, interpret, and construct ourselves through narrative, scientific apparatus and perceptual representations. Duvall’s artistic strategies mimic those of investigative journalists, anthropologists or sociologists, however, her work is less concerned with quantifiable truth than with exploring the role of the imagination in the construction of identity and how the viewer interprets representations as true, false or something in-between. Her projects examine narrative and how it  can be reinvented, falsified and altered in the construction of individual and social identity. The exhibition includes two works: Reinvented and Polygraph. In the former piece, six video monitors show a number of people telling a particular story – six different scenarios given to them by the artist, one for each monitor. Duvall gave each of her subjects an opening line from a story that she constructed, for example: “I grew up very poor, but didn’t realize it until I left home.” Their re-counting of this story is often contradictory or may overlap with events in the narrator’s own life; real events and imagined ones merge, blur or become indistinguishable. In this piece, Duvall encourages a kind of playful yet wary free association, which weaves its way through realms of truth and fabrication.

The second work Polygraph, consists of a three-channel video installation. Four participants were given a statement about a traumatic past event and then asked questions by a polygraph tester about their involvement in this event. You are here because of the reopening of an investigation into a serious injury that happened many years ago, when you were much younger. According to the reports filed at the time of this event, you were present when this happened. We would like to hear your version of what happened. As the viewer looks at the three video projections and compares the participants facial expressions on one screen with images of the polygraph readouts (which capture the moment of a lie) on another, questions arise about how we measure, perceive and judge truth or falsehood.

In Duvall’s words, Reinvented and Polygraph are concerned with, “the ease with which we can and do lie and the presumption that a listener can readily distinguish the ‘truth.’…I am most interested in our assumptions that we can tell when people are lying, and in our desire for absolutes in this very grey area. We readily make assumptions about the veracity of specific narratives based on our own experiences, and by using cues such as body language, missteps, etc. Much research has focused on the ability of science to isolate the point of a lie.” These concerns seem especially relevant today in light of the proliferation of deliberate misinformation by government or corporations, (see “weapons of mass destruction” or Enron), which lead to decisions on social, political and economic policy as well as personal opinion.

– Dan Ring/Linda Jansma

Enough White Lies to Ice a Wedding Cake is a co-production of the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon SK and the Robert McLaughlin Art Gallery, Oshawa ON.  Curated by Dan Ring and Linda Jansma. Funding support from The Canada Council for the Arts, Saskatchewan Arts Board, Sask Lotteries and the City of Saskatoon is gratefully acknowledged.  The artist would like to acknowledge project assistance from the Saskatchewan Arts Board and Long & McQuade Musical Instruments, Saskatoon and Oshawa. A catalogue with essays by the curators as well as a web site will be developed to accompany the exhibition.

Then link to Polygraph and Reinvented