Tragedy Plus Time / I Laughed, I Cried, I Split My Side

One of the books launched at the Publication Launch and Bad Art Night hosted by the Dunlop Art Gallery on March 28 was Tragedy Plus Time / I Laughed, I Cried, I Split My Side, which included an essay I had written for the exhibition I Laughed, I Cried, I Split My Side at the AKA Artist-Run Centre in Saskatoon.

Catalogue cover with Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed's Your Lupines or Your Life, 2012. 

The book was published in 2015 by Black Dog Publishing in partnership with the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina and AKA to document two exhibitions in Saskatchewan during the Summer of 2014 which coincidentally focused on similar subject matter. Tragedy Plus Time at the Dunlop explored the political dimensions of comedy in art while I Laughed, I Cried, I Split My Side explored the intersection where humour and horror meet.

I posted about my essay, "The Great Stone Face," when it was published as an e-text by AKA for their exhibition last summer. In the essay, I asserted that the artists in the exhibition I Laughed, I Cried, I Split My Side are not your garden variety comedians. They are different, as Dagmara Genda noted in her curatorial essay.  They are deadpan.

There is a void in the deadpan. As Genda notes, the artists in I Laughed, I Cried, I Split My Side can’t be trusted; they put you in an awkward position of indecision. It is disquieting because you can’t guess what they are up to. The deadpan is a mirror that doesn’t return your image or respond to your reflections. It establishes and exacerbates a non-reciprocal relationship. What’s worse, it greets you with indifference. Confronted with the deadpan, we overcompensate with nervous laughter.