In this fascinating, unnervingly ingenious new work, artist Candice Breitz deploys her therapist, her parents and herself to redub a trio of key scenes from David Cronenberg’s eerily personal 1979 horror film The Brood, flushing out the film’s universal themes of relationship disintegration and parental anxiety.
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A shared interest in the interplay between the clinical and the cinematic brings Candice Breitz and David
Cronenberg uncomfortably close in Treatment, a multi-channel meditation on Cronenberg's The Brood.
Breitz has selected three key scenes of the film, each unsettling interactions between Dr. Hal Raglan,
a radical psychiatrist, and his patients: an infantilized male and a rage-filled woman who produces
embodiments of her emotions as fetal monsters dropping off her body. Breitz's piece recognizes The
Brood as Cronenberg's most autobiographical work, a cri de Coeur about his failed marriage, and his
fears around parental influence. She meets the director on his own terms, enlisting her own therapist,
herself, her mother, and her father to redub the scenes in a studio, on camera. Their portrait-like line
readings are positioned in the gallery directly across from Cronenberg's original scenes, underscoring
the universal anxieties and discomfiting emotions his work elicits in audiences. The result is highly
personal and frighteningly precise — a response to a filmmaker baring his soul.
NOAH COWAN
Presented and organized in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 952 Queen Street West. Runs daily, September 5-15. Exhibition continues until December 29. Co-curated by Noah Cowan and David Liss.
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Once schedule information is available, it will be shown here.