Where Truth Lies

Where Truth Lies is an installation consisting of 13 works set in a simulated, office environment accompanied by audio sounds of people walking through the AGO’s Galleria Italia facade. 

The starting point for the installation is the statement, il n’y a pas de hors-texte(there is no outside-text) by French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. His statement is one of the foundations of deconstructivism semiotics and refers to the complex and unstable relationship between language, meaning and context, the elusive delineation between outside and inside and the blurry edges of perception. If there is nothing outside, then there is nothing inside either. If everything inside is a delusion then there is no truth, only the view of truth. 

The manipulation of truth is a weapon of domination and collective exploitation that has coercively supported ideological interests of power with clear, objective, and structured approaches. 

The works in Where Truth Lies all comment on the instability of our perceptions, the fluidity of truth. Bookself for example is a bookcase with books on various subjects, such as politics, behavior and religion. The books have been manipulated by drilling large holes through them. Printed material has the power to validate, persuade and make information credible. The act of modifying the texts is intended to make the observer question the absence and presence of a text’s rhetoric. 

We are living in a world of bubbles, separate clusters of information that hold different cultural principles. We have become invisible to each other, but at the same time hyper visible where crossing different barriers can be insurmountable and dangerously perishable. Don’t Hurt Me comments in a delicate way on bullying, abuse and the hatred and confrontation that arises from different beliefs. It’s not enough to want absolute truth, it also seems necessary to impose one’s reality by force.  

To put yourself in someone’s shoes is an idyllic dream from a time when narratives had only one meaning. Now with the diversity of stories, we can choose what to believe. Are we now more liberated in our beliefs and values? Where is the truth? Who tells us the history of the present and the past? Whom can we trust? Elegy to Victory consists of trophies, representations of athletic human figures, altered by melting. The idea is to question the concept of victory, competition, and success, which can only exist with their counterparts, loss, surrender and defeat. It speaks to a toxic cycle, which is continually perpetuated.

Everything in pop culture is full of subliminal propaganda and unclear proposals. Books, magazines, games, everyday objects are driving a sense of belonging and telling us what we have to do, what we need to consume, that we have to have a nice body, a big house full of things and that we have to be cool and have a lot of success and so on. Reframing Memory is made from children’s puzzles. The separated pieces are inverted and mounted on wood veneer. In one puzzle showing a typical Canadian scene, the faces of children have been excluded. The work speaks to lack of identity and the idyllic American dream that exists only on paper.

Kirigami Box is a metal, Canadiana biscuit box. Inside are brochures and booklets from museums and galleries, which have been cut into decorative shapes. This work is an allegory to the playful and illusory work of artists who, in the end, are nothing but an ephemeral delight to please the palate of mass consumption. 

From a distance everything about Where Truth Lies looks normal, innocent, until you get up close where something very different is revealed. The attempt of Where Truth Lies is to discuss the concept of common-sense and power and contrast the established with the notion of representation and deconstruction through a dystopic setting. At the end the Truth is just a broken mirror that shows the deception of our own reality. 

Helio Eudoro

October 2019