Deferred Promise
Andrew Harding’s Intravenous Dove at Blouin Division
Intravenous Dove, 2024, installation view, Blouin Division, Toronto. Photo: LF Documentation
The title of Andrew Harding’s solo exhibition at Blouin Division’s project space, Intravenous Dove, is cryptic and beguiling. “Intravenous” typically describes penetration on a biological level, the puncture and alteration of the internal and its amalgamation with an external substance. Meanwhile, the image of the dove has the benign-ness of ubiquity: it is so culturally and symbolically overburdened, so overused, it verges on meaningless.
In ancient Mesopotamia, the dove was associated with sexuality, love, and war. In the Old Testament, a dove carrying an olive leaf signals the promise of dry land on a flooded planet to an ark of survivors. In the New Testament, the Holy Spirit manifests as a dove during Jesus’s baptism to indicate immanent divinity. From this historical foundation, the dove became associated with purity, innocence, and peace. Today, “Dove” is a beauty brand selling cleansing products. The dove is the harbinger of victory, refuge, and soft skin. Across its various associations, it would seem, a dove is unanimously good but tends to point toward something that is yet to be received: a precursor, a promise. In a cultural landscape that has digested and exported Christian imagery into virtual omnipresence, the symbol of the dove is intravenously internalized. In Harding’s solo exhibition, this association-laden figure acts as our slippery protagonist.
Intravenous Dove was curated by Angel Callander and was on view from February 8 to April 20, 2024, at Blouin Division’s project space in Toronto. Former gallery manager Lesia Miga initiated the space in 2022 to exhibit focused bodies of experimental work by local artists. Later that same year, Callander, an independent curator working as a gallery director for Blouin Division at the time, took over the space and produced five exhibitions there during her tenure. These shows represent a departure from Blouin Division’s typical programming, curated locally rather than from the gallery’s flagship Montreal location.
Upon entering Harding’s exhibition, I feel an uncanny sense of déjà vu; I am placated by vignettes with the alluring smoothness of familiar industrial surfaces: vinyl, clear acrylics, brushed steel. Directly in front of me stand two unusually tall car seat headrests, titled Skypiercer 1 & 2 (2024), detached from their seats and elongated on metal poles to about eye height. Each neck-like stand seamlessly connects to a metal base bent into the outline of a dove, simplified like a logo. And each headrest has a small 3D printed dove embedded in the leather. Fittingly, Harding purchased the preset virtual forms of these doves from a CGI asset bank. To fit the physical curve of the headrest’s leather, each dove had to be digitally sliced apart and reconstructed. It appears to have made violent impact with the headrest, rather than just perching atop it; it looks like shrapnel, the evidence of a splintered narrative, the headrest a soft stand-in for the cranium.
Intravenous Dove, 2024, installation view, Blouin Division, Toronto. Photo: LF Documentation
On the walls to my right and left are two more sibling pieces, Dovetail (2024) and Skyworks (2024): layers of frosted, laser-cut acrylic decaled with photographic prints. Both works prominently feature elongated dove silhouettes, mirrored to create a symmetrical composition. The images adhered within these silhouettes depict vast horizons at sunset or sunrise: cinematic times of transition. A large, printed curtain hangs in the back alcove and presents an image of a similar horizon, this one interrupted by fractalized, abstracted black silhouettes. I am struck by this trompe-l’oeil-esque mimicry: the image of an outside printed on a curtain that obscures the gallery’s side door, a symbolic departure blocking an actual one.
These pieces suggest a shared scene: a car driving on an empty road, the sun is low, the sky is bright. It is a trope of the popular imaginary, seen in the opening or close of so many films. On the one hand, it is like the dove: so overburdened by its repeated symbolic deployment that it becomes meaningless; on the other hand, it invokes the repressed vocabulary of the highway, the manifest destiny of chasing the sunset, the masculinist promise of the open road, or the billboard advertisements that scatter the sides of highways, depicting their own quietly predatory vision of a “good life.”
Harding’s works distill the affects of late capitalism into narrative assemblages of referents and visual gestures. The landscape invoked by the exhibition points toward a better life available just over the horizon, achievable only by the viewers’ participation in commodity fetishism. In her book Cruel Optimism, scholar Lauren Berlant ruminates on the contradictory promises of late capitalism. While initially intoxicating and pleasurable, the subject’s complicity in the reproduction of capitalism is actively exhausting and demoralizing: “The affective attachment to what we call ‘the good life,’ which is for so many a bad life, . . . wears out the subjects who nonetheless, and at the same time, find their conditions of possibility within it.” Berlant describes the capitalist attachment to a particular lifestyle as a constantly deferred promise that keeps subjects in stasis. The “labor of reproducing life . . . the violence of normativity, and the ‘technologies of patience’ . . . enable a concept of the later to suspend questions about the cruelty of the now.”1 In this context, the dove seems to stand in for this notion of the “good life,” which in itself implies a marriage of capitalism and Christian morality and immanence. The interdependence of Christianity and Western capitalism is clear in the violence of imperial expansion, but it is rendered more insidious in the neoliberal push toward individualized, self-governing subjects; the notion of morality is leveraged to equate the subject’s deservingness of this “good” life with their usefulness and productivity as a laborer and consumer, a false promise.
Andrew Harding, Sky Piercer 1, 2023. Steel, leather headrests, 3D print, 68 × 27 × 15 ½ inches. Courtesy of Blouin Division, Toronto. Photo: LF Documentation
In many ways this is an exhibition of surfaces that, like the many materials and metaphorical promises of capitalism, are completely excavated of substance: exoskeletons devoid of their meat. And yet, the point at which the pieces interface—the narrative thread with the dove at its center—is intentionally left unresolved. The trajectory of our protagonist is deferred, and we are suspended in a plotless limbo, left only with clue-like ciphers, hovering ambiguously. Fittingly, the material play between transparency, translucency, and opacity in Dovetail and Skyworks highlights this strategic play between visibility and obscurity, admission and disavowal.
Harding produces these works through commercial fabrication techniques, such as laser cutting and 3D printing. Much of Harding’s past work has a similarly mass-produced quality, yet these are all one-off objects, like prototypes or manufacturing errors. Intravenous Dove Armour (2023), an X-shaped sculpture embedded in the center of the back wall like a thrown blade, beckons menacingly. The highly manufactured quality of the work gives the impression of a readymade: functionality is implied but never delivered. I am reminded of handles, something made for hands to grasp, something used to gain access to a concealed space, but there is no concealed space to find. Like the collateral damage of the hyper-productive “move fast and break things” pipeline, this beautifully moot object is divorced of any function. Rather than simply reproducing the aesthetics of mass-production, the suturing together of incongruous objects points toward failure and contradiction, opening space for a critique of this material vocabulary while finding an alternative mode of meaning making within it.
Andrew Harding, Skyworks, 2024. Frosted acrylic, custom decals, 11 × 15 inches. Courtesy of Blouin Division, Toronto. Photo: LF Documentation
During a studio visit, Harding and I discuss the difference between ingestion and intravenous administration. We both think of our practices as a kind of metabolization of affect, where the conditions in which we live are internalized, rendering us partially complicit. But where does the intravenous (as opposed to metabolic) consumption of a cultural landscape leave our bodies? While metabolic processes require consumption, deconstruction, and eventual discard, absorption via intravenous drip is a subtler, yet more invasive process. Paul B. Preciado describes the biopolitical turn of late capitalism as an economy of pharmacopornism, where desire, sexual or otherwise, is weaponized as a coercive technique on a biological level: “The body no longer inhabits disciplinary spaces but is inhabited by them.”2 I read the phrase “Intravenous Dove” as exactly this kind of interpenetration, in which control is leveraged on the axes of desire and thus much more easily internalized. Yet, if this historically overburdened symbol can be intravenously pumped full of late capitalist disciplinarity, can it not also be reinscribed with alternative meaning?
by Sophia Oppel
Sophia Oppel is an interdisciplinary arts practitioner and researcher, and an incoming PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. Oppel deploys transparent substrates—glass, mirror and the screen—as a framework to consider the paradoxes of legibility under surveillance capitalism. Oppel is interested in addressing the complicity with, and refusal of, biometric capture on a bodily scale. Oppel received a Masters of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto in 2021, and has exhibited locally and internationally, including exhibitions at Ed Video (Guelph), Blouin Division (Toronto), Inter/Access (Toronto), and Supermarket Art Fair (Stockholm, Sweden).
“Yet, if this historically overburdened symbol can be intravenously pumped full of late capitalist disciplinarity, can it not also be reinscribed with alternative meaning?”
Andrew Harding, Intravenous Dove Armour, 2023. 3D print, chrome paint, 9 × 12 inches. Courtesy of Blouin Division, Toronto. Photo: LF Documentation
In Harding’s exhibition we never see the dove in its entirety, we see fragments, shadows, silhouettes. The dove is alluded to in multiple forms and mediums but is ultimately a figure in flux, an unreliable narrator. The slipperiness of Harding’s dove operates as both a critique of the predatory promise of consumption and, perhaps paradoxically, as a gesture toward greater possibility. What I find most exciting about the work is that it manages to occupy both the hollowness of this consumptive premise and, simultaneously, to wrap me in a state of excitation as its vocabulary points toward another promise. In the splicing together of disparate objects, a seam emerges in the landscape of commercial fabrication, beckoning toward an actual site of possibility through amalgamation and reinscription, where perhaps we can locate a different protagonist for ourselves.
Andrew Harding, Dovetail, 2024. Frosted acrylic, custom decals, 11 × 15 inches. Courtesy of Blouin Division, Toronto. Photo: LF Documentation
