February 2008,Michael Routliffe, victoria film festival

THE DEVILS APPLE

multi-media exhibit, victoria film festival

words by dylan k petley

One would likely miss the gallery space at the Community Arts Council of Greater Victoria if not actively looking for it. Diminutive, unannounced, it sits quietly at the back of a courtyard between a cappuccino bar and a hair salon, at the foot of the Gotham-esque Sussex Building. It might be stumbled across, discovered like a poignant truth, but again, only if one’s eyes were open.

How fitting, then, that the CAGV played host to Michael Routliffe’s exhibit, ‘The Devil’s Apple’, which was featured as part of the burgeoning fourteen-year success story that is the Victoria Film Festival.

More than merely an exhibit, ‘The Devil’s Apple’ is the creative extension of Routliffe’s Thornapple Productions, a lifelong project that epitomizes the core, so to speak, of the artist’s message. This exhibit is an intriguing, atonal cacophony of vignette, feature film and photo manipulation. A brazen, yet thoughtful challenge to adjust, or at least examine, our perspective as human creatures. But first, Routliffe forces us to acknowledge our cog-like compliance to the social creature – a technological machination of soulless function, The defining cage of our existence. He elaborates:

“(The Devil’s Apple) is the Angel’s Trumpet flower seed-pod containing one of the most toxic substances on the planet. When ingested, it is a true hallucinogen, as opposed to LSD or mushrooms. There’s absolutely no lucid context. No distinguishing the experience from reality. Of course, the Adam and Eve allegory lends itself to this premise as well, the ‘apple’ in the Garden of Eden being key in awakening self-awareness as administered by the serpent, Lucifer, whose name interestingly enough, translates as ‘Light Bringer’. The poison is symbolic of enlightenment. A total shift in perception on both an individual and societal scale.” 

The film, starring Buddy Neighbours as Atum, portrays one man’s metaphoric journey from doubt, fear and insanity into a pristine understanding of his individual context in a world where information is the fabric of reality and where stability is in constant flux. The artist masterfully constructs this surreal, Dada-esque tale using scarified film aesthetic and silent movie dialogue boxes to drive the subtle narrative. Consequently, one is left with a dialogue-free, undulating dance of organic and inorganic form. The emotional cadence is kept by way of a soundscape that begins in the velvety clutches of noir jazz but steadily ramps to a crunchy, industrial din and then a frenetic counter-rhythm of tabla drums, before receding to a serene, ambient denouement.

“The music provides in its repetitive beats, the context for his (Atum’s) realization that something is going on here beyond his comprehension. He attempts the same actions over and over again, hence the visual loops, the repeated attempts on the Kafka-esque doorway. Trying to go to the same place again and again and finding only darkness. Or going to that doorway of authority and discovering it to be locked.”

A kaleidoscopic vignette on a small television set unobtrusively re-enforces this thematic rhythm in a collision of industrial and organic imagery, the iconic eye of enlightenment as focal point. But it’s the supporting photo manipulations that most clarify this piece as a whole. That most punctuate the artist’s expression. They also speak most about Routliffe as an individual.

 “What really influenced me, what started it all was watching movies as a kid. Watching science fiction movies a lot. That was basically, the beginning of my cultural education. When I hit about thirteen or fourteen, I started reading a lot of existentialism. Both my parents have a psychological and sociological background, which prompted my interest in cultural analysis. From there, I started moving into surrealism and romanticism and a lot of the traditional art mediums, eventually moving into film and experimental film.”

 Through the medium of photography, particularly multiple black and white overlays with Photoshop-generated opacity, the artist re-enforces the concept of the cage we find ourselves not so much actually in, but more intrinsically, an actual part of. His images are a marriage of the familiar, even familial, and the disturbing. ‘Giger Polycarbonate’, a piece inspired by the celebrated Sci-fi illustrator of the same name, evokes a nightmarish sense of beauty, the soft, symmetry of a woman’s back invaded by the visible presence of a composite metal spine and vertebrae. Similarly, ‘Robowife’, ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Mech Farmer’, create a disturbing amalgamation with technology and particular human forms that are vested with typically deeper levels of emotional subtext -- the faithful wife, the innocent child, the nurturing farmer. Conversely, ‘Entheogenica’ is a study in the industrialization of nature; the gentle fauna of coniferous needles locking together like gears in a machine.

“Again, this is a reflection of nature interacting with humanity. Humanity becoming part of the machine. I believe there is, to steal a Geiger term, a biomechanic that drives the universe. Genetics moves as a living entity. Now, information moves as a living entity. Now, we’re looking at people as a commodity. We go to a place that the establishment actually calls ‘Human Resources’. Amazing. I am a box. Pass me around. I have a skill-set. Use me like a hammer.”

One piece stands alone, however: the incongruous, ‘Xenophobia’. A pop-art poster piece in which exists a distinct lack of color saturation, manipulation, or in fact, anything that screams Photoshop. It is simply the image of a wall with a sign that reads, “XENOPHOBIA IS HERE”. And next to it, as a reminder, Kafka’s symbolic door. This, I believe, is the ‘Coles Notes’ of the Routliffe collection, if you will. Clear, concise, simple:

Beware the foreign object. Beware the machine. You are an individual. I will show you the door. 

Suddenly, it strikes me that the onus now lies with us.

“That for me, is something people forget. The more technology advances, the more we can do amazing things with it but people are getting a god-allusion. That they can do whatever they want. That they can control nature. That they can save it. The planet’s just fine. It’s humanity who is in danger. We need to save ourselves. What I intend to do with all of my work is to take that specific thing that people understand and shake it, bringing it into a different context for them. Make them see thing from a different perspective. Bringing the dream into the every day.” 

Routliffe challenges us to disassociate from the machine. To find our points of reference elsewhere. He doesn’t free us. Doesn’t tell us how to free ourselves. Doesn’t rob us of our subjectivity. 

He only reminds us that yes, we are indeed able, if we choose, to eat the devil’s apple as well.