In a dimly lit gallery in Sechelt, the figure of a woman is sitting at an electric typewriter. Its carriage clatters into action every couple of seconds. Through its roller is wound an unbroken spool of ticker tape that accumulates riotously on the floor. On the paper is imprinted a record of eight hours of concentrated labour: “No, no, no,” typed thousands of times in succession.
The premiere of the new multimedia work by Deirdre Hofer, No, took place during a public reception at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre on Sept. 6. Hofer is an interdisciplinary artist working out of studios in Vancouver and North Vancouver.
Her installation and looped video (which runs for a full eight hours) represents her return to the Sunshine Coast; in 2022 she collaborated with artist Carly Butler to install metaphorical interpretations of weather at the Tidal Art Centre in Lund.
In its theme, No is a dramatic departure from Hofer’s earlier atmospheric ruminations. Within the spartan office environment pictured in her video loop, only the fleeting shift of shadows suggests the presence — somewhere — of sunlight. Behind the typist (portrayed by Hofer herself during a real-time video shoot on an autumn day) the hands of a clock creep toward closing time.
Occasionally the subject cranes her neck to glance at the hour. She leaves the desk on three occasions, simulating the austere contours of an office routine. The video rolls on. Even without the presence of its principal actor, the scene reflects the machinery of drudgery and the subtle resistance by a living, breathing human conforming to its confines.
“I’m not process-driven,” said Hofer. “I start with the idea as a whole, and become obsessed with it.” Hofer, in the course of her real-life office job at an auction house, occasionally began to feel like she was losing eight hours a day for the sake of a wage. “I wondered if this is what it takes to have a productive workforce,” she recalled. “Is this what it takes to make the world work? And is it healthy?”
She scrutinized fellow commuters on city buses, hypothesizing about their destinations and guessing at their feelings about the monotony of work. She gathered the ingredients: the desk, the clock, the typewriter. “What would it look like if someone who was fully entrenched in this type of world suddenly realized they did not wish to be, but couldn’t find a way out?” she asked. “My work is the documentation of a mini-rebellion.”
Hofer’s tangible meditation on the interplay between labour, purpose, and resistance evokes media theorist Marshall McLuhan. “With the arrival of electric technology,” McLuhan wrote in 1964, “man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself.”
The nervous rhythms of Hofer’s typist are intentionally eclectic. “She’s not quite a machine because her rhythm is subject to all the human idiosyncrasies,” she explained. “And ‘no’ is the most concise word of denial, but it seems to be the most often ignored.”
Hofer (a fine arts graduate of UBC) works in wide-ranging mediums; she has previously used graphite and acrylic to represent the shifting colours of snow. In 2023, she completed a bronze sculpture depicting an ice cream cone snagged by an oversize fish hook.
The mesmerizing simplicity of No is something else entirely, affording viewers an opportunity to contemplate their own forms of mutiny. “If you’re not satisfied, perhaps a little trickle of rebellion will come out,” Hofer said. “This is what I wanted to imagine.”
No by Deirdre Hofer remains on display at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt until Oct. 5.
