Lost Art: A Cargo Cult Romance

Description:

In her video installation Lost Art: A Cargo Cult Romance, Vera Frenkel constructed a shrine for an imagined cargo cult centered around a composite drawing of a winged prison toilet. Created collaboratively by Jean Duryea, Wanda Nowotko, Doug Haynes, and Doug Morton at the 1977 International Seminar of Rendering in Banff, Alberta, the drawing was later gifted to the Banff Centre’s Permanent Collection, where it subsequently vanished.

In Lost Art, Frenkel interwove archival footage with documentation of a 1984 press conference that launched a formal search for the lost work. Through video, tableaux, symbolic props, and the dramatic restaging of these events, Frenkel reconstructed key moments surrounding the artwork’s disappearance, offering multiple and contradictory framings that questioned the role of institutions, the allure of false messiahs, and the persistence of millennial fantasies under neoliberalism. The viewer was guided by a red carpet into a shrine-like space where the interplay of objects and illusions charted an emotional and intellectual maze, shifting fluidly between fact and fiction.

Presented as part of Luminous Sites.

Curated by Daina Augaitis and Karen Henry.

Video documentation is available upon request.