Cheryl Pagurek

The Tea Cups series consists of short videos and photo-based digital prints made by projecting contemporary global news imagery into vintage tea cups, and recording the results. An immigrant to Canada, and typical of women of her era, my grandmother collected and displayed beautiful china cups and saucers which are now mine. Many feature uniquely rich colour and design. With turbulent news images and footage projected within them, the cups become vessels containing a window onto the world. They bring worldwide events ‘closer to home’, both literally and figuratively, while evoking the tensions and intersections between private and public, past and present, order and chaos. Despite the scale reversal, the fine china appears barely able to contain the raw energy of the miniaturized scenes. Indeed, the careful ordering and arranging of cherished collectibles seems but a thin veneer of control in the face of a world beset by indiscriminate turmoil and crisis. The contextualizing frame of the tea cups also serves to acknowledge the filter of individual experience through which our perceptions are shaped, as we try to comprehend far-reaching events around us. The baroque, dramatic lighting that models the outside of the cups, and the glowing projected light that emanates from within, together impart intensity and solemnity to the work.

Following in the long tradition of re-contextualizing found imagery, the prints reinterpret news photographs by projecting them into porcelain cups, and by employing varying degrees of opacity and focus/blur to create a shallow depth of field. These techniques highlight one or more individuals within a larger scene of trauma, fostering empathy and a sense of our shared humanity. Incorporated into the new art work, the selected media images reach beyond the specific details depicted to suggest the universal and basic commonality of what it means to be human.

The most recent photographs from 2018 are a culmination of the series. Involving more complexity in composition and concept, they more deeply explore the expressive potential of the project. In Stacked Tea Cups / Cox’s Bazar, the instability of a volatile situation is heightened by projecting imagery into precariously stacked china. In Gilded Tea Cup and Saucer / Srinagar, human drama plays out on the stage of the saucer, more vulnerable without the shelter of the cup. Crowd of Cups: Then and Now evokes both contrast and commonality by projecting two different images onto a diverse crowd of mismatched cups. The projections are segments of two larger photographs, dispersed across the many cups. The 1913 sepia photograph depicts immigrants arriving by ship in New York City; the 2017 contemporary image shows the Rohingya arriving in Bangladesh.

See installation views of the Fragile exhibit featuring this series of work at Ottawa’s City Hall Art Gallery, 2018

See installation views of the SHATTER exhibit featuring works from this series at Patrick Mikhail Gallery Montreal, 2019

See installation views of the Fragile exhibit featuring this series of work at Patrick Mikhail Gallery Montreal

The push and pull between tea cup and world event, held in tension within the photographs, unfolds over time in the short videos. The changing, abstracted reflections and refractions of the projected imagery continually bring our attention back to the surface of the cup itself.  The projected videos were edited together from many news clips to form loose narratives that center on the human dimension of the reported events. See excerpts from the three videos at the bottom of this page.

The video stills below are from Yellow tea cup: refugees at sea, the first video in the series. It encourages a more intimate view of a larger geopolitical crisis.

 

In Green tea cup: collectivities, the second video in the series, the projected news footage focuses on group dynamics in protests, marches, vigils, and rituals spanning the ideological spectrum. The fragile china can barely contain the raw, explosive energy of those moments when, through their numbers, individuals transform into a larger collective identity, empowered in celebration, in support, in mourning, and sometimes in rage. Again, the cup becomes a window onto the world, merging past and present, private and public, order and chaos.

In White saucer: surveillant eye, the third video in the series, a vintage saucer becomes the lens through which we observe projected footage of natural disasters, world events and a drone’s-eye view of one individual’s daily activities. The camera angles tracking her movements match those in the news, police and military sources. Public and private worlds collide as the omniscient gaze cast by the aerial perspective parallels the wide net of electronic surveillance and data collection that monitors and captures our everyday communications, transactions, and locations.

List of sound clips in White saucer: surveillant eye that are sampled from freesound.org

Cheryl Pagurek gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the City of Ottawa.

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