Tyler Tekatch’s Terrors of the Breakfast Table by Chris Hampton 3

Tyler Tekatch • Terrors of the Breakfast Table by Chris Hampton             In the gallery space, the viewer sits at a table, watching the boy. The rhombiform contraption that Tekatch calls “The Octahedron” glows. Each breath into the Octahedron flushes colour into the grey winter forest and causes the organ’s tune to drift in — a piece of generative music designed by Joseph Browne. Its dissonant, incomplete-sounding phrases are reordered and reassembled with every breath. It’s a slick introduction, a moment of calibration, acquainting the viewer with his or her own powers within the work.               Then the boy is in an attic, watching as an old man flicks through pictures. The Octahedron appears on-screen transformed into a slide carousel, projecting the images onto a curtain. Here, your presence feels like an intervention in their space; your breath blows violently through the room, billowing and distorting the projector screen, perhaps a nod to experimental filmmakers Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage, and R. Bruce Elder.  Terrors of the Breakfast Table by Tyler Tekatch. Installation view, Art Gallery of Hamilton, 2014.             The next cut finds the boy standing over the father figure, now on his deathbed. The Octahedron is his ventilator; its bellow echoes the rise and fall of the man’s chest until they both cease. Contrary to intuition, your breathing does nothing to help, but instead causes light from the edges of the figures to flare and blur like the aureole of old religious art, or as if your eyes were full of tears.    [  >>>>>  FORWARD  ]   Share [Distillate © HA&L + Chris Hampton  |  {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.] [Also see an Excerpt from a Video Installation by Tyler Tekatch] [This article is sponsored by Charles P. Criminisi • Agro Zaffiro LLP, acknowledged with thanks by the Editors & Samizdat Press.]