Lyla Rye is necking with her daughter. Or so it appears to some.

In the twelve-second clip that forms the basis of Byte, Rye’s eight-minute video installation, the Toronto-based video artist and her eleven-month-old daughter bring their open mouths together, making inarticulate noises and grunts, until baby gets some of mommy’s lip between her teeth and bites. The tension of whatever was going on breaks.

Of course, Lyla Rye isn’t necking with her daughter. Any such interpretation means imposing a great deal of misunderstanding about oral engagement and sexual gesture onto the image of a mother and child playing with their mouths.

At the same time, that’s not hard to do. On display this last July at eyelevelgallery in Halifax, N.S., Rye’s Byte, a video loop that played twenty-four hours a day in the gallery’s storefront window, was seized by the Nova Scotia Vice Squad and held under lock and key until the show was effectively over.

Charges of obscenity were raised but not pressed. Of the thousands who passed the storefront before the seizure, intentionally or unintentionally viewing the installation, only five complained to police.

“The storefront window space is relatively new for the gallery,” says eyelevel’s administrative assistant Christine Kleckner. “We moved in here just over two years ago, so the idea of presenting art to the general public, to people who aren’t actually coming here to view it but might simply be passing by, is less charted territory.”

That unintentional viewing may be part of the problem. After all, for more than a month prior to the Halifax seizure, Rye’s same work was on display inside the Grimsby Public Art Gallery, in Grimsby, Ontario, with absolutely no complaints.

The irony here is that the criminal code definition of obscenity is intentionally vague — it’s meant to be determined with reference to “community standards” that are consistent across the country. Presumably, a viewing audience in small-town Ontario would serve as an adequate litmus test for this standard. All of which makes the Vice Squad’s decision to seize the video and, more particularly, to retain it until the end of the gallery show, all the more questionable.

“My intention was to raise questions and point out disturbances, sure,” says a confident Rye. “But obviously I wanted viewers to go beyond that, to not just stop at the discomfort and turn to some official body to mediate it for them.”

There is, as Rye points out, very little variety in the images of children, or of parent/child interaction, available for viewing in our society. It is one of the most fundamental and complicated of human relationships yet we are almost entirely limited to sweet, smiling, ever-lovable babies and happy, relaxed, ever-loving moms. Any mother will tell you it’s not like that. And any mother with any wit about what’s going on will tell you it’s self-defeatingly dangerous to try to make the real, day-to-day, pablum-in-the-hair, shit-in-the-diapers, what-do-I-do-now? existence constantly fit the pretty picture.

“I think what this incident brings to the fore, more than the issue of censorship, is the question of what kind of images of children are available in the public domain,” continues Rye. “The actions and feelings of mothers are very controlled and monitored, from the intrusions of complete strangers who want to tell you how to parent, to this, the Vice Squad seizure of a tape showing a mom and baby playing a singing game with their mouths.”

Rye’s purpose in making the tape was also to play with how media images are frequently manipulated to reveal only parts, or “bytes,” of the same story. In the video loop, the twelve-second base clip plays over and over while parts of the image are blacked out, slowly revealed or slowly concealed. A soundtrack of mom and baby’s voices plays here and there, but never entirely in sync with the image. The result is that the viewer is forced to make their own sense of the images and, by extension, the viewer becomes aware of the range of possible interpretations.

“It makes me wonder if those who complained didn’t think I knew what I was doing,” Rye comments wryly. “As if I was unaware the sequence could be read as disturbing, or that I’m not deliberately interrogating the mother/child dynamic and how it, as well as other manipulated, selected images, are viewed and interpreted. In a way, the tape succeeded in that it made viewers consider the limitations of certain kinds of representation. By being censored in this way, it will hopefully open up larger discussions about the appropriateness of those limitations.”

eyelevelgallery has since modified the storefront exhibition space by making information pamphlets available on the outside. “Giving people information about what they’re viewing, especially if they’re viewing it accidentally, might help to alleviate some of the fears,” explains Kleckner. eyelevel is also in the planning and fundraising stages for a symposium early next spring, addressing the issues raised by the seizure of Byte.