Titled ‘INT. Gallery’, this exhibit draws on the artist’s experience as a production designer on film and television sets to create an installation of vestigial sculptural and photographic objects. These objects that make up the installation refer to and are abstracted from their use within sets and scenographic environments, so that, here, their materiality and status as apparatus for a mise en scène are foregrounded. ‘INT’ in the title is a standard shorthand for the word ‘interior’ in script formatting. It communicates to the production crew that a shot or scene takes place in an enclosed space or inside a built environment, eg, INT. Office or INT. Living room, etc. With this conception, the artist then positions the gallery as an interior set housing various props (or his works of art) and materials for a potential scene or narrative. 

 

Key to the total pictorial design of any scene for a performance is an intricate, seamless orchestration of objects, lighting, and space (among other variables) through which audiences can immerse themselves in the framed artifice of the narrative and suspend disbelief. In the artist’s gallery of ‘interior’ here, he has isolated some of these variables that come together to create a believable constructed environment: props, backdrops, materials for light tests, etc. Some are presented here as mere inventory materials or research samples for a possible set design. Others are repurposed, divorced from their intended use, while still suggesting what they could’ve been used for. Our attention is drawn to them as the supporting armatures they already are, rather than to their function in stimulating cinematic illusion. 

 

In the basement, the artist has constructed what appears to be a segment of what could have been, perhaps, an abandoned study for an interior dramaturgic space. However, this would-be scene remains incomplete, in an in-between, surreal state, leaving behind an admixture of studio props and creating a new, uncertain narrative detached from the supposed intended production script.

 

Michael Mogatas is a Winnipeg-based artist whose practice often bridges painting, printmaking and installation. He earned his BFA from the University of Manitoba and has been working in film production as a set decorator and designer. His recent work is grounded in a fascination with how constructed environments—such as film sets—can contribute to shaping how we perceive space and reality. This new body of work explores the materiality of built and imagined spaces. His work has been shown at Platform Centre, La Maison des Artistes, Duplex, and Flux Gallery.