the writing shed (in the woods)

2011-08-26T10:05:00.001-06:00

This blog may be moving to wordpress, via new blogger rules about links and other content. Move TBA.

Wanda Koop at The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, February 18 - May 15, 2011

2011-06-20T12:30:00.010-06:00

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Wanda Koop: On The Edge of Experience, recently at The National Gallery of Canada, surveyed the artist’s work from the early 80s to the present, including a room devoted to Koop’s research and studies, and an installation of paintings devoted to her recent collaborative work Hybrid Human. The survey format revealed a shift in Koop’s work from relying on an aura emerging from the empty loop of images out of context, to a focus on some of the unpredictable effects and affects of how technologically oriented perception has changed how we look at images in contemporary daily life.

Koop’s selected early work, including her plywood paintings from the 1980s to her canvas works from the 1990s up to 2004, are large-scale and painted exclusively in acrylic, wherein paint handling operates within an immediate sense of surface. In these early pieces and particularly in Tear (1996) and Helicopter (1986), the large scale emphasizes weaknesses in the medium, magnifying technique to the point where unevenness appears amateur, and virtuosic flourishes appear superficial. Koop has chosen to tackle these limitations of acrylic paint through a shift from an empty illustrational handling of traditional frontal subjects to a devotion to the optics and illusionism of colour. The monumental scale of her work, entirely in keeping with her interest in evoking painting environments, merely maintain that these paintings operate like generic subway billboards within the quiet intimacy of the gallery space.

In a room devoted to staging Koop’s working environment, a tightly organized collection of research (including maquettes of idealized installation spaces) tries very hard to impress, evoking a comical hubris. Surrounded by several smaller works, a large unstretched painting from her 1995 Green Room series surprises with its modest power, suggesting the artist’s rare trust in the subtlety of tones, stains, and acrylic glazes. Here, landscape is interior space. In a finely-textured sky of washes, fluid grey-blues pool and fade, describing a space only possible as paint. A central orange-red orb-eye, reminiscent of ink on glass, tints the surrounding terrain with imperceptible warmth. The ability for this single painting to affect so strongly in the context of an exhibition of such consistent showmanship reveals that Koop’s recognizable tonal fields of paint are more effective when freed from jarring, optical hooks and their vies for viewers’ attention.

In selections from Koop’s Sightlines and later Green Zone work, semi-nocturnal landscapes demarcated by hard-edged shapes of colour resemble Koop’s earlier cherries, hockey masks, and baby faces in that they are all images fetishized and imbued with fixed symbolic roles. She has stated in a recent interview: “I want the effect of my art to be as if I had taken a camera and spun around 360 degrees, so that I take in everything in all directions”. For the most part, Koop’s paintings go out of their way to point to a fixed, vacant immediacy, while their conceptual possibilities remain tied to ideas of the mediated gaze as cold or even violent. Hal Foster’s 1986 description of late-80s painting and its simulated modes of abstraction using “standard design shapes and meticulous representations of quasi-sci-fi devices, structures and signs” could be a direct reading of Wanda Koop’s work during this period.

Her most recent work in Hybrid Human continues to explore the appropriation of emptied-out motifs (the monolith, the drive-in screen, the lone figure in a landscape) as candy-coloured, simulated signs of new technology. Koop’s continued preference for generalized, mass-comprehended symbols is particularly contrived in a large-screen video of a collaborative piece performed on opening night. Choreographed by Jolene Bailie, dancers dressed head-to-toe in black slink around the exhibition space with mime-like deliberateness. These dancers, the press release seems to imply, are our robotic counterparts who encounter a shadowy, spectral landscape of mediated, technological isolation. Of the majority of work in the exhibition, Human Hybrid appears to be taking the most direct position for the idea of painting needing to stand its ground in the face of alienating, mediated experience. The work seems to claim that painting can only be taken seriously when subservient to populist, theatrical caricatures of itself; the idea of painting as a screen must be driven home with un-ironic bombast. In contrast to the quieter, painterly handling in Koop’s grey nocturnes, her conceptual screens fail to situate themselves as paintings within a global, electronic temporality which is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.

Koop’s work characteristically imagines, then allegorizes spaces of social and technological existence, while in her most articulate tonal paintings, she allows a more suggestive sense of this existence to be located within a toned-down subtlety of paint. Her masterful paintings in grey, both monochromatic landscapes and psychic spaces, show the artist’s trust in the inherent communicability of her chosen medium, and a trust in the viewer to want to engage on less confrontational and more personally affective terms.

Works cited:

Foster, Hal. “Signs Taken for Wonders.” Painting, Terry R. Myers, ed. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011. Pg. 47.

Enright, Robert. “Wanda Koop’s 360-degree vision.” 2011. The Globe and Mail 22 Feb. 2011.

*see images of Wanda Koop's work here*

*this review was written to accompany my notes on Sandra Meigs; both were collected for a Grad Seminar class assignment in April, 2011*

Sandra Meigs at The National Gallery of Canada

2011-04-07T08:59:00.019-06:00

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What the Inside Sees 2007
Acrylic on linen
194 cm × 305.3 × 4.2 cm
Purchased by The National Gallery of Canada in 2008

The following is a collection of notes taken during a recent visit to Ottawa:

Sandra Meigs' painting 'What the Inside Sees' is originally from the exhibition "Sandra Meigs: Strange Loop," curated by Diana Nemiroff, and exhibited at the Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa, in 2009. The painting has been most recently shown in the exhibition of new acquisitions "It Is What It Is", at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

"Strange Loop", as written about by Nemiroff, started with “an invitation from the National Arts Centre to participate in BC Scene, a city-wide festival of music, theatre, and visual art celebrating the arts in British Columbia.” In ‘Strange Loop’, “it is human nature that provides Meigs with her enduring subject. When it appears in her work, landscape is imagined as a psychic place, an embodiment of states of consciousness...Her world, superficially comic, plumbs the unconscious for primitive themes of love and death, innocence and sexuality, reverie and nightmare.” (7)

Meigs is well connected in the Canadian art scene through her exhibition history, and she’s particularly connected to two of the three curators of ‘It is What it Is’: Andrea Kunard and Josée Drouin-Brisebois. And, as I already mentioned, she also has a connection to former National Gallery curator Diana Nemiroff.

Nemiroff curated and wrote the catalogue essay for Meigs’ ‘Strange Loop’ exhibition in 2009, Andrea Kunard, curator for National Gallery-affiliated Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photoraphy wrote about Meigs' work in C Magazine in 1990, and Josée Drouin-Brisebois, Curator and Head of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery reviewed her ‘Strange Loop’ exhibition for Border Crossings magazine in 2009.

Droun-Brisebois reviews her work in ‘Strange Loop’ with expectedly generic, superficial language like: “Meigs's ornate interiors become the stage where this game between the public and private self is played out, where the viewer is at once drawn into the work, as in a maze, and kept out by its formal qualities and flat surface, effectively becoming caught in a strange loop.”

Nemiroff goes into detail about the exhibition’s theoretical and site-specific background. Meigs made trips to Newport, Rhode Island, and Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York to visit several 19th century American Shingle Style houses. Her painting ‘What the Inside Sees’ specifically depicts the lobby and grand staircase of the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York City. Meigs made many drawings of the interiors, and translated the drawings to large-scale paintings. Her history of flat paint handling is used in the majority of the works in the exhibition, although less sculpturally and more in keeping with the schematic look of her original drawings, although her usual cartoony faces and eyes are still there.

The title and concept for this exhibition comes from the book ‘I Am A Strange Loop’ (2007) by cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter. In his book he writes: .”...the self...is an epiphenomenon, a “large-scale illusion created by the collusion of many small and indispudetly non-illusory events.”...[the] ‘I’...is an “abstract, locked-in loop” within our brains...a “strange” loop...a paradoxical structure, cycling from one level of abstraction to the next, yet always returning to the point where it started: in short, a “level-crossing feedback loop.” (13) Meigs has written: “The idea of this loop around the microcosm that we understand as the ‘self’ and the macrocosm that is the world is an important realm for the artist to explore. I believe that, within this loop, the imagination takes form...” Meigs herself writes in the catalogue of an experience of near-fainting, wherein her “cellular structure melded with the microscopic structure” of her surroundings, which she found articulated in Douglas Hofstadter’s writing.

Meigs is a painter who has, in her own way, played with painting as sculpture, so I’m a bit surprised by her choice to depict large-scale conventional painting using this repeating cartoony-schematic style of flat white on grey. Nemiroff writes: “Grey feels like the right colour for such internal spaces, whose firm architectural framework seems softer and more porous than the objective world, ready to yield and absorb us at the first sign of complicity....the solipsistic universe of the imagination” (12)

Nemiroff continually glosses over Meigs’ work in the catalogue, using words like imagination and unconscious more poetically, vague, or cliched than critically, saying things like “As we let ourselves be drawn into the metaphors for consciousness that Meigs has created in Strange Loop, the paradoxical loop between outside and inside pulls us into the maelstrom.” (23) And “it is the function of the stairs to transport us from one level of consciousness to another.” (26)

The cartoony eyes, faces, tongues and brains in these paintings, according to Nemiroff, can be associated with the id, ego and super-ego. “the face pulls us into the painting, making us part of its ‘strange loop.’” (26)

Since I haven’t seen any of the paintings in ‘Strange Loop’ in person aside from 'What the Inside Sees', my visit to the exhibition ‘It is what it is’ in Ottawa was an experiment in testing all claims of the works’ complex psychic looping despite its flat, 2-D content.

Entering the exhibition "It Is What It Is" at the National Gallery, immediately I wasn’t impressed with the tunnel-like, rooms-within-rooms exhibition format of the show, and I was surprised by how fragile and defused many of the works operated in person, from the visible duct taped scalp of Valerie Blass’s furry creature to Tim Lee’s sterile photographs, to the leached and pristine male choir version of Madonna’s ‘Live To Tell’ by Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, which covered the first few rooms with its dull ache.

Also in this first room, a wall text promised works which are all “tackling the world's larger social and political issues...choosing modes of self-expression to transcend traditional categories, materials, and genres. These works document and offer alternatives to colonial narratives and environmental crises, challenge notions of identity and representations of the body, and question our culture of media-driven consumption...offering a gentle critique of a perceived general state of complacency in modern society." Which is specific and vague enough to cover the 70+ works without suggesting how or why they will tackle and offer and challenge.

Just a few brief examples of other work that made an impression: I passed David Altmejd’s flat-toned installation ‘The Holes’, squished into one room, wherein drawn lines and spray-painted stains on the mint plinth were more successful than any of the overkill werewolf-as-crystaline growth (which has been more successful in the past with his smaller works). I passed Stephen Andrews’ work, which I was disappointed with, as it appeared to be painted by a computer, and was in its own way as vacant as Roxy Paine’s “manufactured” sculptural “paintings” in another part of the NGC. Wanda Koop’s installation of paintings successfully made them ineffective and merely decorative. Her larger works, including her solo show in another part of the NGC, were masterful grey landscapes blocked violently and needlessly by loudly-coloured, cold, monolith-shapes.

Sounds from Steven Shearer’s huge PVC-pipe sculpture covered most of the remaining exhibition with a much-needed layer of alarmingly loud and physical dread that was like construction noise mixed with movie monsters broadcast through IMAX speakers. Once in front of the piece, you could follow the sound as it moved through the pipes, while feeling it in your stomach and feet. In a wall text, Shearer claimed wanting to “[absorb] social discord, then trying to digest it”.

In a nearby room were works by Gareth Moore, Alex Morrison, Mary Anne Barkhouse, Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky, and Sandra Meigs. Meigs’ single painting ‘What The Inside Sees’ was stranded on the left corner of the room, wherein the work could be linked formally to the surrounding pieces, but still appeared to be alienated from the other works because of its cornered placement. The exhibition text fails to come up with an interesting alternative reading of the room's installation, saying “these works are all animated somehow by the presence of incongruous elements..and a fascination with materials, objects, and stories.” Up close, Meigs' painting’s application is flat yet not slick: mapped but not sharp; what I thought Koop's greyness might be doing without its token monoliths was happening in Meigs’ work, but used more optically; the painting is a segment from a series, so looks a bit interrupted and weak in this context. Spending some time with the piece and thinking about it beyond paint handling, I could imagine myself in the painting’s grey, schematic room, not blacklight, not Tron, not Avatar, but as if my body and sense of space had become 2-D and grey. What does it mean to become 2-D and grey? I would merge with my surroundings too easily. Personal bodily space/constitution would be breached. Boundaries are gone. I would become invisible. Since these observations were made before reading Nemiroff’s text on ‘Strange Loop’, it was interesting to think about the similarities between my connections and Meigs’ interest in phenomenological and psychic space. The painting’s placement was in a spot not meant to be an un-interrupted or central look, so spending time with the painting was a constantly compromised process, as I had to make room for people moving between rooms.

I started to compare Meigs’ work with other works in the show, including Jeff Wall’s photograph ‘Cold Storage’, which appeared in person so static and humorless in comparison, and Etienne Zack’s more crowd-pleasingly illustrational painting “Heads”. Meigs’ painting, in contrast to many of the other 2-D works in the exhibition, had a complexity that would eventually override its immediate surface. The placement of Meigs’ painting in the exhibition prevents this kind of close-reading that would otherwise have survived being seen in person, as the exhibition seemed to have done with the majority of the work crammed into its cave-like rooms, like so many flat, stranded fetishes of what the show claims are “the best and most innovative works being made in Canada today.”

Is the exhibition, and Meigs’ painting in particular, a good fit with what Droun-Brisebois claims is indicative of “the strength of art created in Canada today”? When works are given enough room to breathe, such as many of the videos, Rodney Latourelle’s large sculpture, Shary Boyle’s installation, Susan Turcot’s drawings, and Sarah Anne Johnson’s work, this could potentially make sense. ‘It Is What It Is’, a show of recent NGC acquisitions, is apparently a Canadian Biennial show. If so, I’m not convinced that its cop-out, noncommittal-toned theme ‘It Is What It Is’ is a believably critical and serious theme for a Biennial.

Reid Shier, who also challenged the exhibition during the related 2-day exhibition panel, wrote aptly for Canadian art:

"The exhibition proposes to “take the pulse” of Canadian contemporary art by provocatively suggesting that what the NGC buys is, de facto, representative of what is most important now in art across the country. The failure of this proposition undercuts the exhibition’s core strengths, which are significant, and frames a real need for the gallery to mount two shows in place of this one—a collection survey and a national biennial. It also poses the question about how a biennial in 2012, should there be one, (and there should be one), might be shaped."

*these notes were collected for a Grad Seminar class assignment in April, 2011*

Jenine Marsh at Truck Gallery, Calgary

2010-11-17T18:24:00.004-07:00

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I've written a short text to accompany the upcoming solo exhibition of Jenine Marsh at Truck Gallery's +15 Space at the Epcor Centre for the Performing Arts in Calgary. The exhibition, Grotto, runs from December 9, 2010 through to January 27, 2011 with a closing reception on Thursday, January 13 at 7:00 PM. My text can be read here.

2010-09-29T16:44:00.003-06:00

(image source)

Coming soon - a review of Natalka Husar's paintings at Museum London, Ontario.

Chris Bowman at Untitled Art Society

2010-05-24T19:24:00.004-06:00

*("Cohesion", Chris Bowman)

My review of Chris Bowman's new work at Untitled Art Society can be read at Prairie Artsters here.

2010-05-01T19:05:00.001-06:00

('Shun' by Sondra Meszaros)

Read my review of the 'ACAD All Faculty Exhibition', Illingworth Kerr Gallery, at Prairie Artsters.

Min Hyung at Skew Gallery

2010-04-16T10:46:00.001-06:00

*(image source: www. skewgallery.com)

Read my latest review of Min Hyung's solo show at Skew Gallery at Prairie Artsters.

Glenn Ligon at the Illingworth-Kerr

2009-12-17T09:03:00.002-07:00

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My latest review - Glenn Ligon at the Illingworth-Kerr Gallery - can be read over at Prairie Artsters.

Bill Rodgers at Skew Gallery

2009-11-27T08:09:00.001-07:00

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My review of Bill Rodgers' recent exhibition 'Studies in Citizenship' can be read here at shotgun-review.ca.

an essay at HA&L issue #2

2009-10-20T11:48:00.001-06:00

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The new issue of Hamilton Arts & Letters is out! You can read my contribution, 'Residua, Daydreams, and Mineral Pitch' here. :)

'Painted Moon and River Teeth' at Quickdraw

2009-09-07T22:00:00.005-06:00

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'Painted Moon and River Teeth' - an installation by Leslie Bell and Kiarra Albina - at Quickdraw Animation Society

the running wild children with hair falling to the glue island floor,
ripping up hair threads from the forest floor, all wet and gluey, yellowed pulling sticky messes from the belly of the island.
ripp ripp
sticky feet pull up pull up
threadbare hairdogs emerge from the wet mess
and run with the wild children
(Kiarra Albina)

In contrast to the commonplace standards of seamlessness in popular cinematic effects like CGI, contemporary animation responds to a growing need and interest in the accidental and vulnerable, the low-tech, and the homemade. Viewers have become aware of the inclusiveness and tangibility of more human-scale animation techniques, where process acts as rupture and nonlinear motivator of narrative. Artists in turn have become aware of animation’s ability to operate in between other art forms, able to re-imagine the meaning of formal and conceptual boundaries. Similarly, the animations contributed by Leslie Bell and Kiarra Albina in ‘Painted Moon and River Teeth’ are in intimate relationship with their materiality, activating new spaces for both artists and viewers to explore.

Leslie Bell’s interest in animation relates to her practice in painting and installation, where subject is influenced by scientific, philosophical, and intellectual states of growth. For Bell, thinking about and visualizing painting is a meditative and creative state of suspension which has influenced her work. Also influential are multi-media artists who “are incorporating impurities or complex systems into their work, either as a generative function or as a simulation”, wherein there is an awareness of abstraction and representation not as definitive binaries but as a hybrid with limitless potential.[1] Bell has described her paintings as ecstatic structures, while her animations are the means to move in and out of those structures while simultaneously changing their physiology.[2] Taking on the role of the moon in ‘Painted Moon and River Teeth’, Bell’s animations evoke the world from behind glass, where an onslaught of raindrops are of swirling jellyfish of liquid color and inky orbs, later resembling the dizzy viewpoint of watching fireworks, each candied crystallization spinning slowly and sleepily, halved like inkblots in twinned orbits.

Kiarra Albina describes her animating process as grown out of original drawings which she then builds on intuitively, fueled by a personal symbology of extreme experiences which she has been exploring through a self-directed drawing practice.[3] In her drawings, stories are about bodies, about what they emit, and of what is emitted to other bodies; exudations pulse, stain, and drip syrupy limbs; forms resemble marshmallow, dough, bubblegum, lumpy pillows, and wet snakes of hair. The hand-drawn and painted forms in her animation are an extension of the heavily saturated figures in her drawings, appearing like space-crafts as environments for bodies which dream of layers of themselves. These layers appear as occlusions of their original bodies, operating as beings designed solely for the purpose of fugitive communication with the objects of their desire. Albina has mentioned graphic novel influences as well as that of artists whose drawings situate themselves and their motivations within similar psychosomatic spaces. To Albina, drawing and animation have the ability to describe, evoke, and perform immediate experiences of emotions, physical states, and fantastical bodies which can both extend and live beyond everyday life.[3]

Both artists have a similar interest in ideas of phenomena as events which continually build, evolve, and dissipate, not unlike the cycles and loops of animation which encapsulate narratives within narratives. This evokes writer Christian McCrea’s description of the complexity of animation’s spatiality as worlds which need not contain the integrity of a single identity, but are constantly re-envisioned by an inherent interior force.[4] McCrea suggests this creates the kind of movement which often “eats the signs which stand between it and our pure physical response…repurposing the body’s final moment”.[5] This boundary-less nature of animation is further discussed by writer Norman Klein, who describes animation’s particular ability to take on various states of physical and psychological fragmentation, making animation ideal for exploring "the loss of control, the loss of the past, the loss of representation” [6]. In ‘Painted Moon and River Teeth’, the process of animation allows both Bell and Albina to approach their practice in cross-sensory ways, wherein drawings and painting leave traces through and beyond their materiality, and lodges in the memory of the viewer.

By Kim Neudorf

Works cited:

[1] Bell, Leslie. leslie bell. 15 August. 2009. http://lesliebell.ca/home.html.
[2] Bell, Leslie. Qtd.
[3] Albina, Kiarra. Qtd.
[4] McCrea, Christian. “Explosive, Expulsive, Extraordinary: The Dimensional Excess of Animated Bodies”. Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol 3(1): 9–24, 2008. Page 14.
[5] McCrea, Christian. “Explosive, Expulsive, Extraordinary: The Dimensional Excess of Animated Bodies”. Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol 3(1): 9–24, 2008. Page 15.
[6] Klein, Norman. The Vatican to Vegas : a history of special effects. The New York Press, 2004. Page 253.

an interview with Shon Anderson

2009-06-18T21:04:00.015-06:00

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Shon Anderson's paintings, photographs and video work have shown recently at Untitled Art Society in Calgary. Shon's statement for the show reads:

Pigment, oil, cotton, plastic, space, viewer, wall, memories, pheromones, film phonics, hokey-time playfights, referencing allegory, suburban drudge, urban sludge, sex organs, lungs, eyes, colours to make you cry, negotiating your hang-ups, involuntary smiling, compulsive self-mutilation, denial of childish vanity, air-tight street cred, a thought-fractal universe, I am you but the other you, patchwork countenance, subtle racism, overt compassion, naturalized angles and planes of flat, panic sailing on a warm breeze, frustrating youth, business plans, leisure viewing, their appearance; a play to watch.

Below is my interview with the artist:

KN: What currently informs your work?

SA: A desire to understand people better and to influence them in ways that helps us mutually. I often have an abstract idea of an image that I'd like to see in front of me, and my work is in realizing this image. This process takes me outside of the studio to take photos or make sketches in preparation for an as yet undefined work of art. This process illuminates meaning in the once abstract ideas, and leads to new ideas for work. When I'm looking for images to record, I decide upon the ones that seem to have a personality, or some presence that distinguishes them from their environment. It is a very spontaneous process in that I pick an area, walk around, and snap away. Painting simple subjects from life taught me that a good image can be found just about anywhere, if it is cropped in an interesting way. A lot of what informs the finished pieces is their material components. For example, the richness of a glossy red patch of oil paint or network of lines in a photo of an electrical tower can have a great influence on my aesthetic decisions.

KN: In your paintings, photographs, and video work, I see an interest in unrelenting noise (external and internal), sudden lightning bursts of focus in spaces of tension, nature or the organic as a space for quiet individuation and autonomy, artifice, the spaces of the pictorial in snapshot photography, and an interest in a kind of science fiction narrative. Are these themes and motifs deliberate focuses in your work? How did you become interested in them?

SA: Some of those things are deliberate, such as artifice and autonomy within an organic space. I suppose my interest in books such as the 'Foundation' trilogy by Isaac Asimov and silly movies like 'Silent Running' have left a strong impression on me. These stories hypothesize a future of humanity that has compromised its own existence by trying to make life, or business, better. I can see the echoing of these fears in my pieces that feature multiple images which have been collaged or superimposed. The science fiction themes are definitely an unconscious aspect. Since the images are all taken from life there is no fiction outside of their placement within the same space and the fact they are illusions of real spaces and things. I think my painting of a shed made of a patchwork of found panels has a certain post-apocolyptic feeling, but my intention with that was to show that the building serves its structural function (for years now), and has a unique aesthetic charm, even if it is probably not up to code.

The sudden focal points and noise are related in my mind. There is almost always sound and light around us, and most of what we percieve is a lot of noise from which we parse the things we want to concentrate on. Despite using noisy spaces a lot in my work, I was most aware of it when making the video, the difference being that in this, the noise is, as you say unrelenting, and doesn't allow for moments of focus. Both visually and sonically I used layer upon layer to create a cloud of sensation that could, at times, be overwhelming. The reason for this was that it was made to show at a "noise" music and video event regularly held at Emmedia called 'Discord', which is fueled by a mixture of camaraderie and angst, a strange mix to be sure. These shows remind me of a kind of punk show where people are there who want to commune with their friends but require dressing up the event in arch-nihilism so as not to feel too intimate. These are great events in that one could perform anything (you could just clap your hands if you wanted to), and its cool to just sit and watch or scream and participate if the mood strikes you.

KN: The spaces within your work are often sightings of spaces that are displayed or interpreted as partially formed or “in-between”. Does this come out of an interest in the digital and pictorial as spaces which can never be traced back or remembered definitively, but more subjectively or as phenomena?

SA: I think that is a fairly accurate analysis. The experience of looking at an image for the first time is phenomenal, so an accurate description of a subject seems important only to the extent that certain information triggers recognition. Disparate temporalities and sensations connect in one's imagination to make up a memory. I wanted to create spaces that resemble memories rather than reality. This relates to the nature of digital memory and pictorial records as well. I don't want to necessarily challenge the authority of these systems as truth telling devices, that point is moot as those are great means of education and recording, but moreover exploring the space between truth and interpretation that is created by our reliance on them.

KN: Watching your video piece made me think of this quote from Maurice Merleau-Ponty: "what is past or future for me is present in the world." Were you thinking about a tangible and audible sense of past, present, and future when creating this piece?

SA: I like the thought of being able to experience a work that is an interpretation of reality coexisting with an observed reality. A drive through the mountains has been coloured by previous road trips and its winter state is pronounced by the traces of summer. The vastness of the mountains and tracts of forest in the Rockies are quite sublime and the densely layered, recurring sounds and images echo this sublimity.

KN: Your painting techniques seem to have evolved from carving into the paint, to optical strategies, to delicate studies in light and shading. Are you planning to focus on other techniques and strategies in future work?

SA: I have no idea. I will try to seize opportunities and keep practicing drawing and guitar. If the process is not at least somewhat spontaneous I lose interest. I am getting more adept, and understand what works for me better, as I make each new piece.

KN: How does your work relate or differ from other painters who work with the photograph or found/manipulated image?

SA: It is similar in that I use photos to some extent, which lend certain distinctive qualities to a painting. It differs because I made it, not those other painters. The major distinctions are location and time. I'm dealing with different spaces than any other painter and I have a touch, which, whether I like it or not, betrays my hand any time I paint. With my collaged works I find stylistic connections to surrealist photo collages, but mine feel less absurd just to be absurd. I know the photographic realism is a major hang up for people, I had to discuss at length the validity of using photos during critiques at school, and some other students rejected the prospect of using them in their own work outright. Sometimes I'll see a sketch of mine and for a second I can't tell if it is from a photo or from life, until I remember where it came from. Drawing or painting from life is always preferable to photos as there is more information and the result can be an interesting blending of planes, but if I only did that, then I could never paint a close-up of the moon's horizon if I wanted to. But your question was what is similar or different about my work. I like the way Peter Doig uses photos and found images as a starting point, where the fun is in his interpretation, I have definitely stolen things from his work. Richter, Tuymans, Dumas, Kilimnik etc. all treat photos very minimally, in that they rely on the basic information of the photo to convey meaning, but use loose stylistic conceits to distinguish their images from the photographic. I suppose I do this too to some extent as photos are still magical, but their form is so everywhere and their meaning is often lost in the shuffle. I think sometimes I take a picture and it is an image that doesn't require further treatment and I print it and it's done, but often the ones I use for a painting end up with a totally different quality from the source image or source of the image. Sometimes the best images to draw from, are too small, out of focus, or black and white, and in painting them I can make them look the way I want them to, and in a way that doesn't conflict with the thing being referenced.

KN: Do your painting techniques link to any specific styles, and do you relate or differ from the artists linked to those styles?

SA: No specific styles come to mind. There are aspects I emulate from a range of painters, from the careful and elegant illusions in classic dutch painting; Van Eyck, Vermeer, etc. to the richly emotional latin masterpieces like Velazquez and Caravaggio, but that is the old stuff. I draw more heavily from modernist styles like cubism, vorticism, lyrical abstraction, photo-realism(somewhat), abstract expressionism, and post-Impressionism. The lifestyles of these artists, who had few royal commisions and fewer stylistic doctrines to adhere to, seems more akin to my own lifestyle as someone with a day job and small studio. The most recent paintings of mine have conceptual underpinnings influenced by social realists like Manet and Courbet.

KN: Do you live within an accessible community of artists who influence your work?

SA: I am deeply influenced by the work of my friends and those whose work I see locally. Andrea Williamson, David Foy, Jennifer Saleik, Chris Millar, Kim Neudorf (hey that's you!), Wilford Barrington, Tia Halliday, Wednesday Lupypciw, Ryan Scott, Larry Mcdowell, Lisa Benschop, The Arbour Lake Sghool dudes, Mikhail Miller, Chris Joynt, Roby Cataniag, Jon Bride, Jason de Haan, Michael Coolidge, Keith Murray, Samantha Walrod, Jessica McCarrol, Peter Reddecopp, Noel Begin, Jolie Bird, Shelley Ouellet, are some local and formerly local artists and community organizers I've met who are doing good work. There are also a lot of other artists around town that are making this a worthwhile place to be an artist.

KN: Who did you learn the most from during school? Do you find your work presently relates or differs from any dominant themes or techniques that surrounded you during school?

SA: I can't say for certain who I learned from the most, but there were a few instructors whose ideas influenced me more than others.

Chris Cran immediately comes to mind as someone who gave me the best personal advice in regards to my work. He seemed to consider what I was trying to do rather than assume an "I've seen this all before, and you're just a kid" kind of attitude. Also, his paintings are often very good. Their meaning would always creep up on me days or more later, and punch me in the back of the head. A great person, but everyone knows that already.

Ben Fullalove's 'Canadian Landscape' history class was a revelation, in many ways. His enthusiasm, and broad knowledge of our local art and social history helped to dust off a subject I once felt had become static, and is now quite dear to me.
Mary Murphy, I must mention, whose 'Chinatowns' English class I took. She is a strong, very intelligent woman, who effectively challenged me and was a hoot to be in class with.

Bill MacDonnell definitely taught me the most about contemporary painting history (the interesting stuff anyway) and was a cool cat too. He seemed to be of the most open minded teachers at ACAD. Too bad for new ACAD students he's retired now.

Don Simmons' art fucked with my head. I couldn't understand how such a brilliant and kind person would make work that seemed to say fuck you to everyone. With that said, his work could also be magic, if not scary and gross. He was a good teacher who personally encouraged and challenged me in a very respectful way.

I know my work is linked to the styles and techniques of my teachers and peers, even if its not always apparent to me.

KN: Have you seen any recent exhibitions that had a strong impact on you?

I have been busy with my own work, then showing it, and now moving into a new house, so I haven't seen many shows lately. The last neat thing I saw was a performance by Larry McDowell and his band at 'Discord'. They've played a few shows and are starting to find a unique sound, they make a big racket that is much more interesting than a mere sonic assault, very cool.

I enjoyed Ryan Sluggett's show at the last Artcity, both for its daring scale and his technical proficiency. Will Barrington's drawings at 809 gallery were really choice portraits of his friends and acquaintances, their simplicity along with a subtle humor and attention to detail made for a good show. Wednesday Lupypciw showed a video of collaged domestic dramas at Emmedia that managed to be funny, sexy, mysterious, well crafted, and lo-fi, all at once. Keith Murray's show at Truck Gallery was a wonderful spectacle of unique florescent sculpture-animation hybrids that dazzled the eye and dealt in stupefying, yet playful, politics. Dave and Jenn showed a new free-standing painting before it went to Scope Basel, and it was gorgeous, filled with little details to keep your eye exploring and discovering.

updated updates

2009-06-15T12:53:00.002-06:00

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Look out for my interview with artist Shon Anderson, whose paintings are on view at Untitled Art Society in Calgary until June 19th, as well as another writing project with Hamilton Arts & Letters!

an interview with Andrea Williamson

2009-03-25T10:16:00.014-06:00

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*Andrea's exhibition "Eyes as skin and shapes cut out" will be available to view by appointment at Untitled Art Society until April 10, 2009*

(image source)

KN: Are there certain themes or motifs that you always work with?

AW: No, I don’t always work with the same themes or motifs, but I’ve tried to find a common thread throughout the process of looking, or “pay attention to what I’m paying attention to.” I respond to objects and spaces that carry “personality”, emotions or bodily reactions. I like to draw attention to the ways we’re all affected by physical, concrete situations. To drive in this point, I often go for alienating or inviting interiors and make walls or surfaces of the built environment the subject (which seems minimal and abstract but can be evocative nonetheless and so much of my experience with modern built spaces is this way.) Similarly, I pay attention to skin, bodies, animals, decoration, design, hand-made objects, natural objects, and public or private signs.

KN: What informs your work? Does this also have an immediate influence on your daily life?

AW: I’ve been taking lots of digital pictures of objects and surfaces for a while in an attempt to form my own image bank. Also, to form a visual language of forms that articulates (helps me understand) my conceptual concerns- body awareness, concrete experience, an ethics of care, personal expression informing public discourse. Photos are neat because they insist on a context in the everyday world but can also point to the existence of personally meaningful objects or situations found in that “external” world. So I act like a schizophrenic relating things in the world back to my own desires when I do this digital capturing exercise. It’s like finding proof of myself outside of myself, and so proving inter-subjectivity as well. I also have an interest in language and read linguistics, psychoanalysis, cultural theory and phenomenology, which informs how I want to live and interact with others including through art.

KN: Does the work you make now link in any way to what interested you during childhood?

AW: I think I’m always trying to address the sophistication of our desires, needs and obstacles, some of which remain the same throughout life. As a child we experience ourselves as separate from others as well as joined at times through communication, empathy, and shared experience. During childhood, this dissolution between self and world happened so much more often. And I like that experience of immersion and wonder because it can be subversive and desires (big and small) are a large part of everyone’s reality.

Other than that, my interests are pretty different, but sensibilities probably similar.

KN: Is your work autobiographical?

AW: No, I don’t have a story yet to tell that interests me. Plus, that would be too personal for me even though I say I like personal work. I guess I like it to have the sincere individual experience come through, but not the focus on ego, unless this part is self-aware. I don’t mean that autobiographical art is egotistical, because sometimes it tells a story with an audience in mind, or with community in mind. This is almost necessary when someone has lived a story of political or social gravity. Also, I am not an expert with story-telling so I am more inclined to pick up some pieces of the pieces of what happens to myself, or others, in our lives rather than something developed over time requiring a context like an autobiography. It does relate to my own experience, my being in the world, but not my memories, events or narratives, which might not interest anybody or myself enough to be part of my art.

(image source)

KN: Does your work involve a lot of 'happy accidents' or do you try to plan everything out beforehand?

AW: I just try to start with something that is detailed enough to make me excited about copying it. And I enjoy copying, because it lets me look at things intently. But sometimes I will see some parts of an image as more important or exciting than others and this is one way the piece differs from the plan. I plan some inspirations but it only proceeds in the process, with responses to the materials and what I learn from seeing it.

KN: How does your work relate or differ from painters who work with the photograph or found/manipulated image?

AW: Well I’m not sure how I want to use the photograph. I like it because it has a lot of information. I also like that that information is recognized as being discernible or a social reality because this is where I want to negotiate the ideas of the self. This is similar to Tuymans use of the photograph. I take the photos with the painting and the paint and large scale in mind. I use photography as information like any other image and I don’t do what some photo realist painters do when they are chiefly commenting on the nature of photography and its role in contemporary experience. Photography is very subjective and I am framing my experience for others to later see in a very subjective way. The photograph is only a record of lived time with detail and variety. And you’re free to make variations on the theme of what looks real, changing tones or adding things, etc. I’m working on this part.

(image source)

KN: Do your painting techniques link to any specific styles, and do you relate or differ from the artists linked to those styles?

AW: I’m still working on feeling out my own best style with paint. In my drawing, you can see similarities to David Hockney’s drawings and those of Elizabeth Peyton. I relate to Peyton’s immediacy of colour and simplifying other things to get at expression. As far as I can tell, my style is washed out, thin application of paint, and sometimes calculated marks, sometimes-confident ones. I’m not going to stay with the calculated marks. I’ve decided they aren’t “me.” I do like the style of Karen Kilimnik whose hand seems quick and efficient and emotional. I know what I’m doing when I’m depicting natural things better than straight lines of course and this is maybe where my natural style shows, but I want to keep experimenting with style because there are lots to choose from.

KN: Do you live within an accessible community of artists who influence your work?

AW: Yes, there are many young and successful painters (including you) in Calgary. This is great to see their path and gusto, determination, and ambition. Although, I don’t feel like I have a community of people here who like my work very much. I kind of have to imagine this. I think its because I didn’t go through school here and that’s where strong relationships and sympathies are formed mostly.

KN: Do you try to control how the viewer reads your work, or do you try to leave readings completely open?

AW: Sometimes I’m only concerned that the meaning is there for me because I’m the one interacting with the paint and asking it where to go next. I trust that this is the strength of painting that it opens up on a world of subjective vision. We can all empathically relate to another person as a pair of eyes and body, and feel for other people all the time. Amelia Jones talks about how the self is constituted through a reversibility of seeing and being seen, and this entails a reciprocity and contingency for the subject(s) in the world. So we can always look at someone else and see him or her as a subject, or at the work and see it as somebody’s own expression. I think people get my meaning if they really look at the painting and try to see what I have seen. But sometimes I have failed because they are confused and don’t know what they’re looking at. This means I assumed too much. At some point you have to use reason to figure if other people will be able to see what you see. When it’s a case of people knowing what they’re looking at, but not knowing what it means, I think the meaning can be in a metaphorical reading of the images, but its also just in the formal choices and how I interacted with the materials and pursued my own aesthetics. I try to make it communicate on a very sensual level so there are as many readings as there are bodies.

KN: Who did you learn the most from during school? Do you find your work presently relates or differs from any dominant themes or techniques that surrounded you during school?

AW: I had about eight teachers at NSCAD that really elaborated on the things I cared about and I know there were other teachers there that I didn’t get a chance to be in a class with but I would have loved. Together, they sparked my interest and familiarized me with the deconstruction of language, the way the self is embodied, the importance of emotion and beauty in work, process, idiosyncratic languages, and social relevance.

(image source)

KN: Taken from a quote by writer Charles Worth, do you think that painting has "artistic agency in a culture dominated by the mass-produced mediating image"?

AW: Yes, it is the alternative that can overturn this so called cultural domination by images produced with a mass audience (of generalized, simplified public) in mind. I don’t think we are satisfied with technology alone and images removed from imaginations. I think there will always be a fascination for hand made, expressive things, but this may be a cultural thing to say because there is more fascination for this kind of thing when it is not the norm. In my experience everyone values painting because it is made by a human and involves talent. Even the great rap stars like a painting of themselves.

KN: Are there any specific texts or ideas that ultimately define painting for you, or do you approach painting continuously and on your own terms?

AW: No, painting eludes definitions for me. Some ideas are helpful, but I don’t really hold onto any each time I paint.

KN: Do you think that the artist's public persona is an extension of the work? Should the artist's persona be performative or depicted as performative by media coverage, or should the work be the central subject?

AW: It depends on the artist. I value a lot of work that takes place beside or outside of the object itself, because meaning can be found in the process and action. It’s ultimately hard for an artist to hide (the self) behind their work because work that gets attention involves putting oneself in the work. But I don’t really need to know biographical information about an artist once I’ve been struck by their work. I care about what they were trying to say. I think the media will cover personalities when they become a parallel site of art (performance, fashion, conceptual) to the other art works they make.

KN: Have you seen any recent exhibitions that had a strong impact on you?

AW: The Tim Lee exhibition did because I tried to redeem its value for others and myself as some friends weren’t liking it. I got lots of mysterious experiences from looking at the work and I love work that I can’t understand at first!

2009-03-23T13:11:00.002-06:00

Coming soon - interviews with emerging artists Andrea Williamson and Shon Anderson. Andrea's paintings are currently on view at Untitled Art Society.

Diana Thorneycroft at Skew

2009-03-02T11:55:00.001-07:00

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Over at Prairie Artsters, I've written a short review of Diana Thorneycroft's latest work at Skew Gallery. Read it here.

Aïda Ruilova at Walter Phillips Gallery

2009-02-16T13:14:00.004-07:00

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My review of Aïda Ruilova's work at Walter Phillips Gallery is now available to read at shotgun-review.ca. :)

Blake Senini at Skew Gallery

2009-02-01T12:16:00.002-07:00

My new article on Blake Senini's new work at Skew Gallery can be read here.

Coming soon - Aida Ruilova at the Walter Phillips Gallery!

Sarah Anne Johnson at the IKG

2009-01-19T14:20:00.004-07:00

My short review of Sarah Anne Johnson's work at the IKG has been posted over at Prairie Artsters - read the review here!

Moving Right Along

2009-01-16T13:52:00.002-07:00

Coming soon in January, I'll be reviewing Sarah Anne Johnson's work at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, and in February, look for my reviews of Blake Senini at Skew Gallery and Aida Ruilova at the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff!

updates - interviews, shotgun-review launch, etymologies, and lectures

2008-12-17T20:14:00.004-07:00

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Earlier this month, I asked artist Melanie Authier some questions through e-mail, and her thorough response can be read here.

Also, last week at Truck Gallery was an official launch for shotgun-review.ca, wherein many of my fellow local writers (as well as the creator, Joseph del Pesco, of the US-based version - shotgun-review.com) were in attendance (Joseph via skype, wherein he seemed like the Wizard of Oz with coffee cup and steely gaze). I am in the picture below (on the left, and near the giant green phallic painting).
(Photo credit: Erin Belanger)
(Photo credit: Erin Belanger)

Lastly, might I direct your eye to the right, wherein there are four new/old links to a few very short posts -------->

an interview with Melanie Authier

2008-12-17T20:05:00.005-07:00

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The following is a conversation I had with artist Melanie Authier by e-mail, which she has kindly allowed me to post here (Melanie is the mysterious M in the interview):

K: Who were your favorite artists and visual references in undergrad and in grad school? Who/what have you been looking at most recently?

M:
UNDERGRAD

It is hard to remember back that far… The work I was making at the time was employing reference to the human interior as metaphor, and translating it into the realm of abstraction - linking it to ideas of a terrain or territory – almost like a mapping process (only the work did not look anything like a map). As a result, I was looking at a lot of women artists who were working with ideas about the body… Concurrently I was also interested in ideas of neo-expressionism and abstraction.

Sue Williams
Nancy Spero
Janine Antoni
Kiki Smith
Betty Goodwin
Joan Mitchell
Georg Baselitz
Anselm Keifer
Helen Frakenthaler
Lee Krasner
Francois Lacasse
Michael Daigneault
Lise Boisseau

MFA

Pipilotti Rist
Annette Messager
Titian
Tintoretto
J.W. Turner
Henry Fuseli
Kandinsky
Toby Ziegler
Bernard Frize
Giovanni Battista Piranèse
Inka Essenhigh
Pat Steir
Fiona Rae
Neo Rauch
Brice Marden
Matthew Ritchie
Julie Mehretu

CURRENTLY

Tomma Abts
Juan Usle
Hernan Bas
John Stezaker
Paul Klee
Amy Sillman
Christian Ward
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein
Thomas Helbig
Franz West
Jonathan Lasker
Douglas Walker
David Altmejd
Martin Golland
Garth Weiser
Mark Grotjahn

K: Sometimes there is a strong formal sense of containment or boundaries within your paintings, wherein areas of color, texture, and drawing are interrupted from escaping or fighting with other areas of the paintings. Are boundaries and interruptions things you think about when you're painting?

M: Absolutely. I am interested in these ideas but more in relation to creating a sense of disorientation or disjunction. The combinations of space that I work to produce in my paintings are achieved through dynamics of abstraction and reveal elements of the irrational as a means of encouraging the evocation of unfathomable spaces.

K: There are delicate layers of drawing with paint in some of your paintings which remind me of illustration and printmaking - are you influenced by those techniques?

M: I have always been interested in the integrity of the hand-drawn line and how it functions in and describes the space it navigates within.

K: I found a quote on your work where your process is described as "clearly attempting to evoke the sublime in her work rather than, pace Pollock, performing the sublime in the making of her paintings. These works are not a record of the artist's gestures or performative traces but an attempt to represent the sublime through graphic play"; how can painting evoke rather than perform the sublime?

M: The sublime is a tricky concept in that it has been continually redefined. The word “represent” is a bit troublesome because in this case I would not want it to be confused with the idea of illustration. I agree with Eyland’s idea “rather than perform” the sublime. My work is not about illustrating the sublime. It is not trying to be sublime but rather, it peripherally investigates and engages characteristics associated with the sublime. In an attempt to eliminate confusion I feel it is important that I discuss the definitions and or characteristics of the sublime that have been most helpful in relation to my work....

The conventions of beauty and the sublime invest landscape with a sense of yearning and longing. These conventions that have existed since the 18th century can be looked at introspectively to help locate and critically diagnose our own yearnings today. Our current cultural predicament includes the realization that the concept of “nature” is a social construct. Nature is a provisional category that is ideologically determined. The artistic movements of the picturesque and the sublime were the early symptoms of a continuing relationship with nature and landscape as something that is romanticized and lost. I am interested in the emotional exploration of these sites of longing, yearning and desire. My paintings express the idea of a landscape or “nature” that is mediated. They probe both the ways that landscape is presented to us and the ways that we experience it in the 21st century, while remaining attentive to all the rhetorical possibilities of the languages of abstract painting.

Each of my paintings is a journey that engages with problems of painterly invention involving issues of control and chaos. This visual journey is constructed through a maze of marks that form complex pictorial systems referring both to organic and artificial realms. Each painting is its own unique entity with its own identifying set of formal hierarchies that include planes and forms that flip up on themselves and on one another to further confuse the space. Morphing forms and planes twist, contort and interweave, at times complicating and at times challenging any sense of order in the work.

The birth of the sublime has been traced back to an unfinished Greek treatise called “Peri Hypsous” or “On the Sublime,” attributed variously to either Dionysus or Longinus, and written in approximately the 1st century A.D. (Mc Evilley 57). This text stands as the beginning of the discourse on the sublime. According to Longinus, a state of transport and exaltation – hypsos is his term for this - is the mark of sublimity (Freeman 127). Longinus defines the essence of the sublime as sheer chaos - irrational, beyond order and beyond the finite (Mc Evilley 59). I am interested in this definition because these three aspects relate to my work, and because chaos is not necessarily fear inducing. My sense is that Longinus, (unlike Edmund Burke) did not emphasize the aspect of terror as being essential to his definition.

In his essay “Turned Upside Down and Torn Apart” Thomas McEvilley (found in The Sticky Sublime, edited by Bill Beckley) observes that Longinus “not only initiates the conversation on the sublime but also the dichotomy between the sublime and the beautiful” (McEvilley 57). In Longinus’ text there is a passage that suggests that the sublime began as an extreme form of beauty. Thomas McEvilley quotes Carter Ratcliff (who summarizes it thus) adds:

Sometimes, a poet or painter touches the audience in ways that violate the rules of a genre or the canons of taste. If the effect is sufficiently elevating, the offense is not only pardoned but praised as sublime: an instance of beauty that carries the imagination beyond the usual bounds of the beautiful (Ratcliff 227).

In this argument, beauty has the potential to function as a catalyst to the sublime. I am interested in the potential of beauty as a vehicle for the sense of awe. I believe that the two concepts can co-exist and even profitably collaborate, adding complexity. My paintings endorse the compatibility of beauty and the sublime by visually interweaving and contrasting the two qualities.

K: You had mentioned Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe in an artist statement, and I was able to find his essay on the 'new sublime'. What are your thoughts on his statement: "...nonrepresentational painting might now find itself concerned with a sublime founded not in a relationship between beginning and end, and origin and potentiality, but intstead imagined as an indefinately decentered context of deferral, an androgynous sublime that collapses orders of priority-figure and field, surface and support, color and drawing-into one another to propose a temporality other than that of nature, a temporality of simultaneity and sameness, in the sense of painting as a body-a completeness-that is not so much a continuum as a combination of continua." ?

M: I enjoy this quote. It brings up several ideas and does relate to aspects at play within my work. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe is essentially talking here about the technological sublime. In his book Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe offers a current definition of the sublime. He proposes that there is today a “new” sublime grounded in a technological limitlessness. He maintains that recent changes to the artistic environment are themselves contingent on the broader environmental and social changes in the culture at large. Our relationship to technology has altered how we describe and perceive the world. Technology has also inflected our understanding of the sublime. He explains that current non-representational painting inevitably refers to artificial colors

[…] either affirmatively or by ignoring them: Their presence is implicit. Having replaced the colors of nature, they are the naturalized intensities that now constitute the colors of everyday life: [they are] the basis of the colors that are used in cosmetics, the colors of the video screen (Gilbert-Rolfe 34).

This idea is crucial in relation to the development of my palette as well as the flat opaque forms in my paintings. Gilbert-Rolfe relates the colours of the technological to the realm of plastics. His argument that the technologically produced image is incapable of returning to the reality of “the world” supports his concept of technological limitlessness. The technological sublime is not interested in “being an idea of nature” but in replacing the concept of “nature” (Gilbert-Rolfe 67). This becomes his model for the “new” sublime. Thus the tradition of the sublime, first engaged within a geographical reference, has shifted into one of technological mimesis. He writes,

The ornate grandiosity of the Victorian railway terminus was meant to astonish, and therein lay its sublimity. Burke described astonishment as related to that terror whose object is the sublime, and describes it as the highest sensation on a sliding scale which runs from there down through awe, reverence, and respect. It is not, he says, a positive pleasure … the sublime proposed by contemporary technology may be terrifying but it is couched in terms as far away from astonishment, awe, reverence, and respect, as it can get (Gilbert-Rolfe 121).

Gilbert-Rolfe removes his notions of the technological sublime from the emotional responses characteristically associated with the sublime. This where I part ways with Gilbert-Rolfe because I do not believe that we can ever be completely removed from an emotional response.

Some of his ideas (both in general and in the quote you provided) relate more to my work than others. The idea of combination, the virtual infinite, and artificial/ synthetic colour and are characteristics engaged to varying degrees within each of my works. But this is only half the story… The flipside to that is that my abstract works are often created with a representational type of space in mind –often a type of space found in landscape. While I do employ the traditional “question and answer” approach to constructing an abstract painting, I also use the techniques of foreground, middle-ground and background as well as scale and texture relating to traditional landscape painting. What is crucial to the work is that there is a play within these two approaches of constructing a painting. I will at times orchestrate a form to simultaneously imply the presence of flatness and depth depending on its positioned context in the painting. Within my paintings there is always a negotiation of opposites: flatness vs. depth, the organic vs. the artifical, the natural vs. the synthetic and the everyday vs. the sublime. As a result, with “the collapsing of surface, color and drawing” I do have a problem with the idea of the overall collapsing of these elements because although I do often create a confusion of hierarchies of the elements and forms in the work, I wouldn’t say that I would ever permit a complete collapse

K: Should contemporary painting be "a handmade sublime made out of refraining from the look of the technological and, in that, evoking it" ?

M: I don’t understand exactly what is meant by a “handmade sublime”. Contemporary painting should not have a “should”. It may have the freedom to be whatever it needs to be and take necessary liberties within the territories that a contemporary painter chooses to navigate within. I think it is about challenging and stretching preconceived boundaries and definitions, and investigating a variety of peripheries. I am not that directly engaged with the technological but I accept it as an element of influence. I certainly play with ideas associated to the technological but I am not interested in evoking it. Contemporary culture is such that the seam between the natural and the technological becomes increasingly blurred.

2008-12-10T09:31:00.002-07:00

My short article on Melanie Authier's solo exhibition 'Vista Blitz' is now online at shotgun-review.ca - read it here!

Also, read my extended interview with Melanie here!

Shary Boyle at the IKG

2008-10-02T18:01:00.002-06:00

My new article on Shary Boyle's installations 'The Clearances' and 'Skirmish at Bloody Point', as well as her recent performance 'Dark Hand and Lamp Light' with Doug Paisley can be read here.

a lecture by Janice Kerbel

2008-09-15T15:12:00.000-06:00

As most people are experiencing it during the past couple of weeks, September reveals the fruits of summer's incubation period for the new mutations of colds and flu. Instantly infected this weekend, I went to an artist talk by Janice Kerbel, wherein I mainly took notes on the structure of 'a good artist's talk' and 'symptoms of exaggeratedly distant work'. Feeling sick beyond mere fatigue weighs on the brain and fills it with damp fog while at the same time, concentration has never been more clear (upon, say, a middle-aged business woman on the bus watching '13 Going on 30' on her I-Pod). The sickly, fixated and foggy brain is not unlike Janice Kerbel's laundrette gardens where plants love the moisture but hate the vibrations from the machines, and the plants themselves are like "messy balls of laundry". The two pieces which seemed to exist beyond being containers for Kerbel's interest in "obsolescence, invisibility, deception" and "developing characters out of specific conditions" were the audio sample of her radio play for the love stories of insomniacs as nocturnal plants, and the freak-show-text poster for "The Shyest Person Alive" who would be "masterfully eclipsing your glance" if ever you saw fit to visit her. I can relate to a fascination for describing the conditions of an event to the detriment of allowing anything to ever be realized in real-time.

Painting: Thick & Thin - September update

2008-09-10T13:04:00.004-06:00

Daniel Pagan from the University of Calgary's 'Gauntlet' wrote a short article on 'Painting: Thick & Thin', sampling from his interviews with myself, Dave and Jenn, and Wil Murray. Daniel's article can be read here (note: there is a misquote wherein Wim Delvoye and Peaches are called "Calgary contemporary artists"). Wil Murray has posted his full interview on his blog here.

Jenine Marsh - 'topiarium'

2008-09-02T14:42:00.001-06:00

My essay on Jenine Marsh's installation 'topiarium' can be read here !

Painting: Thick and Thin - questions from the curator

2008-07-10T07:57:00.008-06:00

In addition to the discussion posted in June, Wil Murray has been sending out his own questions of the exhibiting artists in Painting: Thick and Thin. His questions and the responses (ongoing during the month of July) can be read here (question #1 and question #2 have been updated as of this morning).

update - Wil Murray at the IKG

2008-06-23T07:59:00.001-06:00

My short article on Wil Murray can be read here at shotgun-review.ca.

Painting: Thick & Thin - a discussion with the artists

2008-06-22T20:32:00.015-06:00

As part interview, part e-forum/panel discussion, I wanted to get everyone’s feedback (and start a pre-Opening discussion) on some of the ideas Wil Murray posed in his curator’s statement for Painting: Thick & Thin. The resulting collection/text, most suitable left in interview-form, will be available here to read and to comment on. Participants so far: Kyle Beal, Wil Murray, Kim Neudorf, Ryan Sluggett, Dave & Jenn, and Miriam Bankey.

1. Is there an “invented cultural vacancy as a discursive space” in Calgary now, and if you no longer live in Calgary, does this vacancy exist where you live? How does this affect your painting practice and your daily experience?

KB: 'Culture' is a little imprecise? Though I am reasonably sure I know what you are referring to, and will thus give a bit of a long-winded answer. I think that the issue of Calgary’s lack of culture is something perhaps of a myth at this point (but then I haven't lived there in 5+ years so...). One of the reasons that perhaps it persists is that Calgary has not to my knowledge ever had the same level of writing and championing as say a place like Vancouver, or perhaps in a smaller centre like Winnipeg of the last couple years, or Halifax in the 70’s. And so it is simply less visible. Which might suggest that perhaps Calgary has unconsciously been perceiving itself as a middle child in the hierarchy of Canadian cities, and acted that way, which often means attracting less attention to itself, or not understanding how to get that attention, mind you I say that as a middle child. I would also suggest that the low density of the city (read: sprawl) also acts to diffuse any activities that could be seen to leading to any critical mass, or visible and sustained cultural scene.
On the other hand one might ask why this notion of cultural vacancy continues to stick on Calgary given that the Alberta College of Art and Design has operated in some form or another within the city for 80 years?
Here’s what comes up on the home page of www.acad.ab.ca “For more than 80 years, the college has educated some of Canada's most potent designers, artists and cultural producers. As one of only four degree-granting and freestanding institutions of art and design education in Canada, we understand that ours is a unique responsibility. ACAD has charted its course as an institution that makes a difference; an institution that supports and leads the development of culture and innovation in the broadest sense and provokes thought and action in the most optimistic directions. We cultivate debate, explore together and stir culture for ourselves and for our external community.” (Lance Carlson, President + CEO)

WM: I think what I am describing with "invented cultural vacancy as a discursive space" is something like how people will use a simple subject like the weather, common to everyone, to discuss more personal and complex ideas.
Not at all to say the weather, or how "the weather" is constructed is fixed. The most immediate example I can think of is the change in perception of warm days at unusual times from a rare and deserved treat, to a symbol of our greed and impending destruction of the planet. Both of these perceptions hold some pretty intense underlying morality.
What I am poking at with this statement doesn't really escape the discursive space found in "the invented cultural vacancy", as I use it as a bit of a paper tiger to slay in the name of no cultural vacancy existing, and never have existing in the first place.
Of course I think every centre laments some vacancy in their local "culture". Canada suffers it's provincialism loudly, and with perpetual dispatches from folks who spend a week in Berlin or New York and feel they've found some Mecca, when really I think they've just had a lovely vacation. Like all vacationers, they contemplate permanent vacation. I see little difference between "opening a little bar on the beach in Hawaii" and "going to Berlin to be an artist". They both indicate such an misunderstanding of local bylaws.

KN: Thinking about what Wil wrote about paper tigers and weather metaphors, and since I'm thinking of this question more in the spaces of the immediate, I’ve always thought that when there isn’t a very strong city identity that becomes a meaningful part of the day to day, it is yes a natural tendency to shift into a metaphor like the weather or say in the absence of meaningful architectural presence, bodies and personalities become that architecture. I think the spaces that artists particularly exist in for the most part are the working spaces and the spaces of other people, usually the people they end up (out of circumstance or choice) seeing the most everyday (the day job, transit, the studio, the house, or ‘haunts’, if you have the time to be haunted or be a haunt).

RS: I don't know about "invented cultural vacancy", but I've always been able to find great conversations in Calgary. I think you make room for yourself when you go someplace new, I don't feel that vacancy just exists.

D&J: Living in a place with no culture is a myth as fueling as its opposite. It's also somewhat convenient. If we think we come from a cultural vacuum then we're free to dream up our own. It's much more fun that way. Personal history and inner landscapes seem to gain strength in these places. But that's just our take on it. By no means dogma. Maybe it sounds more impressive to say "we live in a cultural void" than it would if we said "We come from a place with a medial amount of culture", like we're separating ourselves from the herd, as renegade outsiders living in beige houses.

MB: The void, Wil's paper-tiger.... Of course art and the artist are necessary contributions to the world we live in, But there is a strange need to validate this contribution by attaching the idea that there is a cultural void that needs to be filled, thus, validating purpose to my "indulgent" act. I think Wil's point is that when we do look inwards (ignoring Calgary's obviousness) we do have a rich cultural community where important relevant work is being made.

2. What are some of the “excesses and voids” that your work specifically responds to or critiques?

KB: My interests these days are basically these two concepts in some form or another. I think that we have more access to others thoughts and ideas and words than ever before. And the sheer volume of contributions into some public/ private realm is simply overwhelming, and there’s no shortage of information to contradict you. So any position one may take to my mind is slippery and tenuous, or maybe just provisional. Which makes (for me at least) the act of positing any idea into the public discourse, difficult. And so to some degree that’s what I am left with - trying to find the right words with which to say nothing. And I am certainly not the only one using lots of words to express very little.

WM: I think the gaping void that exists in the making of my work is around research, or at least my perceptions of some academic process that is expected of me, but none done, or done in some alternate way that satisfies some desire in me to be without choice in the face of the library, or the supermarket shelf. I'm a shitty researcher, and as many artists will tell you, someone who rarely "talks about art".
Now, I talk about art a lot, but I'm told a lot that I don't. Even when I leave a table feeling like a really great conversation about art just happened. Part of me feels like when someone tells you that that really great Vodka you liked so much is used as window cleaner in the country they come from because they ACTUALLY have good Vodka there.
I always wonder if "talking about art" involves tears, or maybe it's that kind of conversation that sends me to the drink table at openings where people list stuff to each other and gauge each others' qualifications and intelligence by the level and intensity of the other's reaction to their list, and in turn, the others' list.
So there's a gigantic void I am always staring into there, but I kind of think it's bunk and mostly made up of my terror of being "intellectually pantsed" by those with Masters degrees.
As for excess....well, just look at my work.

KN: Formally, I’ve been really interested in some of the recent indexical figurative painting out there, for example Rezi Van Lankveld, and this process of working openly with ‘surface’ that links somehow to art history as well as new cinematic access and its flatness, but allowing a sense of painting’s tendency to exaggerate and also to point to a deadness in an image.

RS: I have a tendency towards meditating on my own excesses and voids. I am both excessive and a void, and I should work on that.

D&J: We're focused on the overabundances of the imagination, how those fill the spaces in our reality, and vice versa. Kind of like a waking dream.
Also, what Wil said previously about a void existing in relation to the research and certain academic expectations can also be applied to us. He said it so much more eloquently than we could so we'll refer you to his response. Yes, it is most likely just self imposed terror. But in the event that there should be any "intellectual pantsing", we shall wear two pairs of pants each.

MB: I think that art inevitably becomes a reflection of the condition and times in which the artist lives. The work that I make becomes a perfect example of the current age of excess. A surplus of accessible information at arms length. The work becomes saturated with information, whether it be historical, visual, physical or conceptual and in turn this is how we have learned to view and process information.
Kyle, you are correct, you are certainly not the only one using lots of words to express very little.

3. How have you made “personal and purposeful objects out of painting’s history”? Does this involve long-distance relationships to art history?

KB: I wouldn’t say out of painting exclusively, Painting is in there but also from drawing, sculpture and photography, and more broadly the conceptual approach’s and ways of thinking about things that different artists use or talk about. But for sure there is an important aspect of reflexivity and self-awareness in the objects and gestures that I make. I think the long-distance relationship to objects persists, though the access is somewhat better here in Montreal, images and texts remain principal means of access, which as we all know is not the same. So while my engagement within my studio is often a material on, my engagement with history, recent and older remains largely theoretical. But this may be true for many practitioners outside of major American and European centres.

WM: God, condensing the text to 150 words really forced me to mash ideas together.
What I hoped this sentence could do was introduce the word "Object" into the statement, and address the long distance relationship to art history and influence.
Objecthood came up so many times in the studio visits with the artists in this show. An immediate relational jump between painting and sculpture that was so quick back and forth that you couldn't call it self concious at all. While a lot of formal concerns were being dealt with, the specific concerns of image vs. object were not so worrisome.
As for the distanced relationship to art history, inevitably there's auto-biographical flourishes in this statement. I've found that I have, even being closer to the artifacts of art history, an alienated relationship to viewing art's history. I feel like I can suss out better details of a painting for the sake of influence on my own work from photographs of it. I don't really ever feel like a viewer to painting, only a researcher of it. And I do my research from the distanced position of the photo.

KN: My relationship to art history and how that influences my work is based on several-times-removed access (books, digital libraries) which, and I agree with Wil, is a natural way to spend more time with certain art works. I’m interested in how this access contextualizes what and how I view art history. Isn’t being a viewer and researcher interchangeable?

RS: I've placed a lot of importance on continuously seeing as many works in person as I can. But I must try to remember the experience I had. I rely on the art itself. And then the rest (reproductions, etc) can be misleading in their own informative way. Misremembering is also helpful to me when I make art.

D&J: Like most people our relationship to art history is from print materials. For all we know none of things have ever existed and this is all one big scam perpetuated by Jansen.
But really, it creates a mythic overhanging shadow doesn't it?
We're afraid we're really just referring to the textbook definition of "art history" but here it goes:
Seeing these things again and again. In books, magazines... calendars, coffee mugs.... We root through fables and folklore, incorporating our own lives and mythology into it, and through this process these things become more real to us. Art and art history make for endlessly interesting subjects. And now when the speed of information and technology is bringing our usual modes of operation and consuming these things around to another level, history has become pliable. For us anyway, everything has become more liquid. The paintings/drawings/ sculpture/video etc. from the past are all there ready to be pulled apart, examined and consumed. And there is so much of it.

MB: Like Wil pointed out, this objecthood/sculpture reference is a reoccurring comment/connection in relation to all of our work... I guess it's easier to call them objects when the paint wraps around the frame...I probably have to leave town to be able to see some of my favorite works in real-person.

4. What is your response to Wil’s statement: “Without easy access to the physical artifacts of art history or each others’ work, a shared imagination was built between us that sustained very inward practices in a city that looks perpetually outward” ? What are some of your inventive and alternative ways of access to other painters’ work and that of art history?

KB: Unfortunately there is no substitute for experience, what I am left with by and large is bar-room discussion with the people within my personal sphere, because even in my own city the discussion normally takes place away from the objects, and so like text, that is large part of my interaction with art. It becomes a matter of mental visualization rather than direct experience. Luckily the country is not so large and so I have been able to continue to connect with other artists, both from Calgary and elsewhere. I find my visits to Calgary to be some of the most fruitful because long periods of absence coupled with short visits seems to intensify in some ways the relationships I still have in there. The time restraint in conjunction with my enduring friendships allows me to see more and discuss more, which I can then take back to Montreal to reflect and draw energy from.

KN: This relationship of access is also an experience mainly of collecting over using or articulating, where collections and collecting become unique spaces and presence surrounding and influencing work in the studio. Being possessed by art history and the presence of other artists and their work is about great conversations that are never long enough, and finding alternative access by association (both in terms of spaces artists occupy or occupied – exhibitions, studio, writing, documentation, etc.; and in terms of extending their visits in the stretches of time in between). I’ve always been really interested in these relations to things that are accessed in odd or isolated ways – what are the characteristics and meanings we ascribe to them and how do we end up using them, particularly in our personal and physical vernacular and neologisms, and how do they change or grow over time? What are these things that surround us, accompany an internal pacing, and relate to a personal space of working?

RS: I like this. I feel that art practices seem very outward in their very nature (even reclusive practices must be seen by viewers to exist), and cities seem to generally have an inward gaze. Cities are in love with themselves. I have no alternative access to other painters works, only the usual access that any viewer has. Attentiveness and alertness. I tend to naturally ignore the artists known strategies and try to see the object as an isolated individual, to see historical paintings in their 'right now' state. To wonder at how their form can change to formlessness. To discover their strangeness, or more nicely, their uniqueness.

MB: As glossy and sexy as Taschen reproduces it, it is still no substitute for the real thing.

5. How do alternative narratives appear in your work?

KN: I have this jumbled, clunky thought about my work which seems like it could fit here: In my work, I’ve been interested in interrupted or post- states (ex: emotional) within a romanticized vantage point of the languishing and the solitary, but mainly collaborating with the very loaded insta-narratives of ‘body’ and ‘boundaries’.

RS: They appear as the structure of the picture develops. Sometimes in opposition to what seems natural, and sometimes naturally. Collecting and organizing are principles I use in forming my pictures. But there can't be too much closure or the work is trapped, and the word narrative implies to me a kind of trap.

D&J: Alernative to traditional? We build our pictures up through layering and a kind of back and forth rhythm. Even if there was a linear narrative we're not interested in making it too obvious.

MB: I am unsure how to answer this one... At some point where the paint moves from a horizontal plane to it's frame on the vertical picture plane.

a piece by Ergül Cengiz

2008-05-15T21:27:00.002-06:00

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(image source)

This painting acknowledges a bypassing of sentimentality even while steeped in the subject matter of pet-with-human cloying hug. Painted in a style resembling an index of George Stubbs with Brad Phillips, this piece has been eclipsed with tones of black. A close look at the body shape, exposed arm, knuckle, and eye in shadow tells me a little bit about how important the rendering is despite its hidden nature, but without the immediacy of illustration. The bear or large cat holding tight to its 'owner' has the droopy arm of animal stiffness, and also the skillfully rendered sheen of silky fur. Its eyes are blank and white, but in an unfinished iconic way rather than deliberately 'alien', and the eye links the viewer's eyes to the barely perceptible sheen of nose, the outline of the hanging claw of the animal, the owner's knuckle of support upon the animal's back (as if supporting a toddler), and the owner's other arm. The vague background resembles the unfinished smudge of charcoal and ink, nevertheless giving a sense of depth. The painting is a study of positive and negative space, silhouettes, and a sensitivity of craftsmanship and austere iconicity.

Perhaps related to the idea of evoking the intense "here-ness" of the subject as well as the subject-as-painting (see Monika Szewczyk on Steven Shearer), this painting seems devoted to a sincerity of presence, both as glimpsed shapes in the dark and as ghost-like animal within a soft scene of gothic domesticity.

Lauren Mikols and Elaine Cameron-Weir

2008-04-06T20:01:00.004-06:00

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Preview - Hamilton Arts and Letters - issue one !
Edited by Paul Lisson
"Arts & Letters: kinetic, hieroglyphic, sounded, seen, stretched, heard, inked, imagined and realized, will all be found in the sympathetic environment that is Hamilton Arts & Letters."

And a preview of my contribution to issue one:
The Romantic Grotesque in the Work of Lauren Mikols and Elaine Cameron-Weir

updates!

2008-04-04T14:15:00.003-06:00

I've posted recent articles on David Altmejd and Fiona Kinsella, and coming soon, a short essay on artists Lauren Mikols and Elaine Cameron-Weir !

Susan Turcot and Graeme Patterson at the IKG

2008-02-02T14:33:00.000-07:00

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(here is an example of Turcot's work, of which you can sense of the drawing quality; image source)

Susan Turcot: These are sublime drawings, with the quality of lines like ingrown hair and collapsed flesh. Drawings seem to tunnel into the paper and the illusion of the landscape. Draftsmanship is clumsy, unrefined, associating ‘rough’ minerals. Unlike other cross-sectioned landscape-architectural drawings from artists such as Jessica Cannon and Scott Teplin, these drawings are not cute-ified, but left in bare/base pencil, able to dazzle and seduce without the help of acid color and candy hues. Cavernous gorges resemble the shriveled, pockmarked skin of early medical prints and anatomy paintings, also of the glistening, sickbed flesh and powdery pallour via Victoriana in the cinema, except without any of that tea-brown and jammy scarlet tint. The drawings are in a space in between illustration and drafted plans or backdrops. They are large enough to amaze with a sense of space, and dramatic enough to seduce by composed illusion and impossibly intricate plays with light and tone (buried in all that 'hair and flesh'). The subject of these drawings – “The exploitation of natural resources alter[ing] the environment” – is not as interesting as associated textural narratives.

(image source)
(image source)

Graeme Patterson: a Canadian prairie town is the setting for the animation and set pieces, which are also active sculptures with tiny mechanized rooms. The animation, in low-tech lighting, stars a lone deer, a monkey, and several impressively detailed buildings, some which seem to be connected by an elevated train in a sense of dream-like travel similar to the Quay Brothers’ ‘Nocturna Artificiala’. Grass is made of metallic wire, and each space is surrounded by black, associating the stark isolation of the prairie (or Mid-West) landscape at night. The set pieces have been modified into sculpture which, as well as revealing the flat artifice of construction (foam core instead of wood for those weathered buildings), extend the animation to include additional scenes of inner-building life. Beginning with an island-like patch of trees surrounded by the clumsy, old-timey mechanized-puppet movement of several deer, whose vacant eyes switch on in unison with electric headlight glow (the avatars of prairie night), the installation includes a barn, church, and other prairie buildings as well as an open hockey rink modified from a table hockey set. Some of the buildings were more ‘sealed’ than others, allowing only partial glimpses from holes in the roof or the walls into rooms glowing with eerie light, sometimes inhabited by a lone deer or figure, and sometimes showing additional animation playing upon miniature TV sets. These partial glimpses seemed to be much more eerie and seductive than the ghostly projections of David Hoffos's miniature sets, and the reason for this seems to be that Patterson is showing ‘real’ illusions. More obvious Canadian-themed pieces, such as the hockey rink, seem more jokey and do not function the same way as the partially-sealed buildings.

a photograph by Olaf Breuning

2008-01-24T12:06:00.001-07:00

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(image source)

Of a similar flat-out, leveled proximity as Sue De Beer's modern gothic photographs, this late-90's photograph by Olaf Breuning displays the end-result of creaturely effects as snapped by a camera for posterity, so it seems. The performing creature poses atop a work table, its facial expression somewhat mugging with mouth in an agape shape. An intact leg of mundane shoe, red sock, and pant leg rests upon a bare, tatooed leg fake-severed at the knee in jam-dark red gangly flesh. White boxer shorts cover the hips and separate the body into two halves like a bandage or the air between the woman-sawn-in-half trick. The creature's naked torso is a sampler of texture and focus-points for the eye, as a single rash of pink lesions sits under a rainbow-bull's-eye of nipple, topped by some brackish blackish hair covering half the throat, the shoulder and most of the right arm. The left breast seems vaguely altered with clay-colored areola, and the left shoulder given a fleshy fixture hard to make out, leading up to the left hand resting on the pant-boxer hip, its fingers made of four dinner rolls flushed with brown. The creature's face, its eyes sealed over with more vague clay, features a red clown's nose and two cartoony devil's horns, which mirror the perfectly round red-orange globules on either side of the head like ears, their color perfectly matching the wig of the same red-orange hue. Right arm and leg(s) rest upon large bandage-white towels or blankets. The wall behind the posing creature is flat and white.

The difference between this hybridized body and those of the similarly androgynous or de-gendered creatues of Matthew Barney's films is this creature's total fakery combined with the illusion of real amputation and skin/hair texture, and then mixed in with the abject thought of having dinner rolls for fingers. The creature's attitude is casual, and the body still retains its lazy human coquettishness, but each expected sweep of the viewer's eye seems to end up in mutant horror-humor, effectively frustrating a reading of generally fetishized body. The creature's unreadable expression signals a thought that this creature is capable of further mutation and further lack of mutation-boundaries with the same casual ceremony. The whole question of what is expected in creaturely effects - as well as how we expect them to be framed or 'couched' - comes up, whether in film, art, or in body-fantasy culture, particularly when mutations are organic alongside the inorganic.

This is an interesting photograph because it points to artists' long-lasting fascination with identity- and body-boundary themes of "the end of androcentric subjectivity" and the dread of the loss of bodily control in psychosexual and biological narratives. It also brashly asks why one bodily identity might be replaced with another, and whether "mutation" and "fetishisized body" still functions at all. A similar exploration of creaturely fakery and "real-time" documentation can be found in Sharon Lockhart's "Khalil, Shaun, A Woman Under the Influence".

Andro Wekua's “Without Mirror”, 2005

2008-01-20T21:24:00.003-07:00

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(image source)

An androgynous, ageless face is in the center of the painting. Skin is lilac-white and blotchy, like the make-up job on Edward Scissorhands via Avon. There is a thin-lipped mouth coloured in blood-red. Where the nose should be is a twig-like grey shape without any definition apart from its blocked-in greyness. Covering half of the rest of the face and the forehead is a net-like, thin patch of grey, in a grid suggesting slight contour and somewhat random choices. A deep slit of black suggests an eye, visually anchored by a triangular patch of blue around the cheekbone. Grey and black hair delicately frame the forehead and temples in wavy, smoke-like brush strokes. The head is lumpily covered in a purple cloth-like shape, criss-crossed with random-looking lines of darker purple. A shoulder-like black shape creates the sense that this is an over-the-shoulder portrait. Blood-red, grey, and purple lines criss-cross sketchily, somewhat suggesting early 1980’s neon-on-black patterns and disco lighting.

The painting style is similar to Luc Tuymans’ hesitant tonation. The facial collage aspects suggest Surrealist portraits, and combined with the dark and purple tones with red, link to the Gothic and the Romantic portrait.

This painting is interesting because obvious collage-like aspects (literally resembling separate patches and not just random placement of whole images) are allowed to contain the nature of their medium-paint; paint’s soft, smoky, creamy skin associates and adds the crayon-wax and uneven-lines of cosmetics to the setting of 'Surreal portrait'. It also seems as though conventional ideas of the face in general are ignored and instead dictated by the painting’s tendency to use slits, 'hair', and the delineating, territorial nature of lines. Any sense of glamour, youth, and overt sexuality are hidden by covering the face’s ability to seduce; this is done by avoiding 'glamourous' depictions of hair, mouth, nose, and by covering the eyes. More like a Bruce Connor piece about the 'mask' of personality, this painting seems to be about hiding everything. The paint-patches are not objects in a general collage sense; the patches suggest something softer and more suggestive - a patchwork mask knit with paint.

a piece by Gert and Uwe Tobias

2008-01-19T13:29:00.001-07:00

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It is maybe a drawing in pencil first, then ink, and tinted by blues and red-brown. The figure is of "youth" without conventions of youth-culture, either contemporary or historical (of which this piece associates). This is because of the quality of drawing, which is of the naive or nervous hand of the doodler, but with an elegance missing from many recent doodles of late. This elegance seems of the economy of the fashion design sketch, which mutates the body's profile to lend jutting curves and insect limbs to clothing for territorialization. The drawing is able to retain its gentleness despite the assumptions of illustration because of the way it is tinted or "finished" by water-colory blue and brown hues; the "material" boundaries of the coat are stained and reshaped awkwardly by the bleeding color of the darker background; the boundaries of the head and map-like "hair" are of the same anatomy as the facial profile, as head and face are untouched save for small edge stains, truncations, and a vivid-green pooled stain, acting like a halo arund the lower base of the skull. Detailing upon the geometric wing of coat have the filamentations and apparition-like commitment of stringed dots, veining into a stitch-like ornamentation. Imperfections of uncontrolled paint bleeding give leveled/non-hierarchal notations, like language that signals the rest of the drawing. While the coat is vagely Victorian, it doesn't assume any obvious link. The hair-head in dotty-stringed grids is also of a vague costume-association (17th century powdered wig, medieval peasant bonnet, and Victorian braided loops of hair on either side, but with a sharpely-squared crown like a stiff wig, sliced vegetable stalk, or pseudo-Spanish head-dress or comb). The figure is androgynous and child-like in face, with a mere tiny circle for an eye.

This painting is interesting because it side-steps, slips out of, and ignores roles otherwise easily assigned to it, towards a quiet purpose hidden by the index of its unfinished drawing-visage. It is no more committed to its physical identity and body-cultural limitations than anything else with its nervous resemblance could suggest; the humorous hair-head shape seems placed there mechanically, like the wig upon the incredulous, unaware gaze of a doll. This figure dreams beyond its body and beyond the gaze. It is not a cartoony, accessible dreaming, but one that could easily extend to the figure's many lack of boundaries - "eye" might be any dot; "mouth" might be the muff-like collar; the inner-body boundaries might be easily pulled outward in any area of the painting. Whether aware of its drawing-physicality as Georg Baselitz's early drawings are, or artificial doll-bot, its complete irregardlessness of its expected role and behavior creates a kind of endless space for re-territorialization of the body. The erasure or addition of lines or hues would not commit any kind of loaded action, but would continue to communicate based on internal rules which would be just as unrestrained suggestively than overtly visible.

What does this suggest then, this host of bodily cues? The sensibilities of the artists through media process? One of several hastily-completed collaborations in a series of figures from folklore? More lazy distance than territorial concepts of the body?

When the body is rendered in an elegant way but also in a way that is conventionally and literally beyond or opposed to bodily assumptions and roles, this rendering of the body is more open to alternative, parallel, and extended body narratives. This drawing suggests potential, verge, an agent or catalyst for taking off into many more ideas.

Fiona Kinsella at The New Gallery

2007-12-22T18:10:00.004-07:00

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There is a clip from a "documentary" of Sir Henry Wellcome's collection of body and medical curiosities[1] wherein a sequence of several lingering close-ups of a porcelain miniature of Japanese erotica is extended by a concluding shot of a mechanical hand’s rapidly curling fingers, as if in stoically-beckoning reaction. Fiona Kinsella's exhibition ‘the Wilderness' similarly demands both the extension commentary of multiples and multiple looking, as well as the close-up intimacy of miniatures and their gentle indifference to everything outside of their inner worlds. Because we can't quite see what is right in front of our eyes, the pieces have an eerie authority and independence beyond our scrutiny. In this way, the works are incredibly quiet despite the seemingly ravenous life inside of them.

The art of confection sculpture might be exotic to many viewers, possibly associating something in between the wedding cake and the Japanese box. As Kinsella has these hand-iced cakes perform amidst objects of her personal and extensive collection, I would make another link, which seems strongest considering the homogenous, serial nature of these pieces and their ornately-framed display behind glass - the relic and Victorian memento mori.

Kinsella lists the objects within each piece in a combination of objective and subjective inventory, as these lists can include “fondant icing, lock of hair, silver and rhinestones” alongside “melancholy” and “teething”. Despite the literal integration of cake with objects such as insect carapace, teeth, and loops of hair with ivory icing, cake and found object remain very separate, and therefore each embedded performance seems deliberately visceral, provoking physical empathy, and placing the viewer in the titillating role of meta-reacting; that is our understanding, by extension, of having and loosing teeth, even an eye for a glass version, and wanting to preserve this strange evidence of ourselves, our physical facts, shed and made foreign and indifferent to us, even of independent desires and motives. As Pierre Fadida suggests in his essay “The relic and the work of mourning”, this physiological detritus might be said to have been “extracted from a disappeared body... legitimiz[ing] a visibility of the hidden”[2].

Of Kinsella’s work, I would extend this to a removal of the body into a context wherein otherwise improbable (or impractical) fantasies of bodily extension can take place. Within one piece, a dark hillock of hair sprouts long Dental instruments, which arch and pierce the air like mechanical limbs. Navel-like holes encase bones, ringed with crystalline pearls, or restrained by an encircling claw of insect legs or birds' nails. Transparent, sepia-lined insect wings bejewel and encircle a navel-like antique brooch upon a swelling of cake. Glazed human teeth in vivid stained color accentuate the head of a fork with teeth-on-metal associations. Other teeth are oversized in groups, and upon one cake, their line-up humorously resembles a tableaux not far from Victorian taxidermy. Brightly colored hat pins, while delicately fan-shaped in some instances, also singly pin and dissect.

There are pieces which make the link from cake to bed, whether funereal, wax anatomical, or romantic story of near-death and languishing. Which leads me back to the aforementioned Sir Henry Wellcome curio sequencing; these cakes, like the white gloved handlers of ages-old artifacts, gingerly lay bare, encase, or provide the inner-vitrine pedestals of these objects without contamination or stain save for the occasional lingering bruise of metal upon icing.

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[1] The Phantom Museum. Phantom Museums: The Short Films of the Quay Brothers. DVD. Prod. Keith Griffiths; dist. Zeitgeist Films, 2003.
[2] Fedida, Pierre. The relic and the work of mourning, Journal of Visual Culture, v. 2 no. 1 (April 2003) p. 64.

This article has been published at shotgun-review.ca.

Coming soon - an article on Wil Murray's exhibition 'The Brawl of the Beast'....!

smell, scent, olfaction, and purfume

2007-10-05T20:21:00.000-06:00

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(image source: www.ffwdweekly.com)

From catachresis and phenomenology in film theory, to the Stink God in "Spirited Away", to Laura Marks' essay "The Quays’ Institute Benjamenta: an olfactory view", to the recently regenerated "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" from the book by Patrick Sueskind, and finally to Jim Drobnick's compendium "The Smell Culture Reader", smell, scent, olfaction, and purfume can be found having infiltrated much of the arts, particularly when researched right about now. I wrote about Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan's performance piece 'Scentbar' last week, and of course didn't have room to talk about all of this new (or revised and re-costumed) information about smell culture. Here are samples of more of my findings:

"In narratives of horror, love, and religious ecstasy, smell wafts up as the most subliminal, the least controllable, the most evocative, the least knowable, and possibly the most gendered of our senses. None communicates so immediately and directly to the sites of memory in the brain, bypassing conscious cognition to summon core emotional states associated with the minute chemical combinations that first stimulated the neuron for that specific scent."

"Constance Classen wryly notes that in academic analyses "sight is so endlessly analyzed, and the other senses so consistently ignored, that the five senses would seem to consist of the colonial/patriarchal gaze, the scientific gaze, the erotic gaze, the capitalist gaze and the subversive glance.""

Smells are indexes: "One potential derives from the fact that smells originate in matter, that they are intrinsic to the nature of substances. As insubstantial as odours are, they nevertheless heighten the sensuousness and actuality of materials. Because of their formlessness, Gell considers odours to be "incomplete," that is, without clear definitions. One means by which odours are cognitively completed is to associate them with their source, that from which they emanate."

"Like the sense of smell, common sense was understood during the Victorian period as the source of responses that are immediate, instinctive, and automatic...quick and sensitive without being in the least morbid…These often unremarked negotiations of daily life engage, in short, not only all the impressions offered by the objects, including the bodies, that a particular culture creates and with which particular individuals present themselves, but also all the varying significances that attach to physical impressions."

David Altmejd at the IKG

2007-09-15T20:13:00.003-06:00

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I was first introduced to David Altmejd’s work in the context of which he is most often left stranded by writers – the werewolf (or often ‘taxidermy’) and a decidedly morbid version of the spectacle of display. Not exactly contrary to bare captions and neologisms of late, Jerry Saltz wrote of Altmejd’s “werewolf parts” as associating “an immense fallen symbol”, linking it to current disasters and contemporary dread[1]. Altmejd’s exhibition currently at the Illingworth-Kerr gallery is quite comprehensive, with a piece representing a different phase in Altmejd’s career, lacing in and out of time periods in a non-linear installation. I visited David Altmejd’s exhibition in the quiet afternoon of the day following the Opening night.

The 2006 piece ‘The Hunter’ lay in full bloom like an abandoned maidenhead of a shipwreck a few feet inside the gallery space. Essentially a figurative sculpted piece, ‘Hunter’ is a cabinet of curiosities, anachronistic sci-fi technology, and interactive playground. Of the shape of the head of a bearded and moustached man (lain on his side), the sculpture invites entry (owing more to the eye than the immediate body) inside delicately jagged caves and chambers at every angle. In interviews, Altmejd has often spoken about his interest in the energy of growth in between notions of death and decay[2]; ‘Hunter’ reads as the remains of a body in a much more ornate role than merely decapitated abject-object, housing both fantasy and personal collection of what Altjmed has called “the potential energy of signs”[2]. The innumerable textures of the piece threaten to steal every scene, so to speak, with surfaces and intimate handling associating dried and matted hair from self-tailored wigs, sugary glazes, Technicolor-red and ‘Tron’-fractal light, Victorian hair jewelry, dirty purple glitter and burnt honey, Rhino-protrusions of glass cubes with edges made soft by glowing light, 1960’s Japanese film sets, pastel plastic castle toys for children, and salmon-pink flesh which picks up the satiny pale-blue of the plinth. A small, modest cabinet sits aside glass shelves inside one of the larger chambers, wherein Altmejd has placed fetish objects both contemporary and traditional; both have the quiet role of artifacts, and the heady, restrained scowl of relics.

The next room of the gallery space was made exquisitely intimate in complete darkness, wherein the reading was made that much more seductive. “The Lovers”, from 2004, is a piece consisting of a large slender plinth holding the elongated, partially fused bones of an unknown creature (or creatures) of wolfish skull, its feet covered and encased by a mint-colored box. Through glass, skeletal feet and toes are visible and made kaleidoscopic by mirrors. Proliferated crystals riddle the skeleton with bejeweled lather, while smaller crystals cover the immediate boney surface in glazy pools and popped soapy bubbles. The creature’s one visible eye of long lashes is closed in sleep, while its wizened remains and dark fur signal its past, associating another version of lovers from Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’ (1979), a skeleton whose long red hair signaled the shock of its sleeping, embraced partner.

In the piece ‘Loup Garou 2’ from 2000, a taller mint-colored plinth holds various small sculptures encased in a grid of plexi-glass shelving. Here, salmon-colored flesh and black, gnarled hair cover nameless remains alongside a foot and hand, and the garish jewelry of fake flowers. The campy monster index is more visible within the bulging joints of the hand, and the sharp, curling nails of the fingers and toes. Altmejd has spoken about the werewolf as “sexy…suggestive of transformation…seductive and complex”[3], while writer Brian Sholis suggests that Altmejd’s “use of the werewolf…is a morbid, Victorian-era take on the heinous..absent of any explicit violence, preferring the dread of the unknown…to a forensic analysis of cruelty”[4]. A partially hidden window on the side of the plinth reveals a snaking chamber, inside which we are allowed to see a partial wolf’s head, toothy and crystalline, visible with the aid of multiple gridded mirrors; a sighting explicitly haunted by our wanting more access to what we are seeing. An electric-red stripe of light cuts through the reflection, and cuts through our reading, making a link back to ‘The Hunter’ and the cinematic logic of reading through multiple looking. These two pieces, which are the strongest of the exhibition, highlight what Déry calls Altmejd’s fascination with “what is lost and…what is appearing”[5], as well as what can be intensely seen, possessed, and what “accosts persistent rhythms in the present”[6].

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[1] Saltz, Jerry. The Village Voice, Arts. “Modern Gothic”, February 4-10, p. C85
[2] Déry, Louise. David Altmejd, Galerie de l’UQAM, 2006, p. 45.
[3] Dubé, Peter. Monstrous Energy, ESPACE 79, Spring 6-12, p. 7.
[4] Sholis, Brian, Flash Art, “David Altmejd: Hideous Progeny”, March-April, p.100-102.
[5] Déry, Louise. David Altmejd, Galerie de l’UQAM, 2006, p. 59.
[6] Déry, Louise. David Altmejd, Galerie de l’UQAM, 2006, p. 17.
http://www.shotgun-review.ca/2007/09/david_altmejd.html

This article has been published at shotgun-review.ca.

Suzen Green at ArtCity 2007

2007-09-10T09:28:00.001-06:00

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ArtCity 2007’s theme, Rupture, is described on their website in a viscerally associative list of definitions, including “fulmination of membrane”, and “moment between blocked passage and settlement of violent emotion”. Linking Rupture with some of Calgary’s recent growth, the question is asked: “If there is a momentum building to a point of rupture…Who are its actors…What constitutes the flood that would rupture…the membrane, the silently straining status quo?”

Local artist Suzen Green’s response to this year’s theme is to explore what she describes as “Yarnover Calgary”, and “the irony of misplaced dedications” upon public symbols which have lost some of their collective meaning. With the immobile help of a series of Calgary public sculpture in the downtown area, Green will imbue various statue body parts with hand-knit “hats, balaclavas, boots, mittens, and scarves” over the course of ArtCity’s September 7-16 run. In a recent interview, Green stated, “when you think of typical graffiti, and then you think of Knit Guerilla tagging, people don’t know how to react to it.” This provokes questions about how a city deals with vandalism, as well as the line between collective and private use of public art. Green described some of her experiences of downtown space: “I walk downtown and it seems so cold. The city tries to spruce it up a bit but no one notices.” Speaking of one of the groups of public sculpture on her route, Green said, “they have such great necks, and they’d look so good with socks on.”

Green spoke of her interest in personal urban experience as compared to collective experience, as well as “how your environment influences who you are, and how living in a city contributes to a lot of anxiety”. In her practice, Green has used hand-weights, furniture, and a series of exercise equipment as subjects for knitting covers. Using unwanted or forgotten objects, she extended the decorative nature of the knitted cover towards an exploration of “how odd the shapes are, becoming that much more comical when knitted around, all these appendages.” Knitting, as well as having an active nature of immediacy, can be “a lot like drawing where you look at a shape and break it down.” This associates Bruno Schulz’s stories in The Street of Crocodiles, and his writing of the “the eternal mystery in a new and amusing shape” (73), and of apartment furnishing “susceptible to distant, dangerous dreams” (67). Green’s study of urban anxiety has also led to research into “a cultural look at pigeons and urban living”, “knitting in contexts of change”, and topics like agoraphobia and “war knitting songs”. Of a recent resurgence of knitting and DIY enthusiasts, Green commented, “it might be seen as a backlash on technology, yet communications are online, which can be an organizational and cross-referencing heaven for knitters.”

Public sculpture can lend a readymade stage for deadpan humor mixed with an anti-hero appearance. Staunchly fixed amidst the day-to-day, the statues’ stoic presence can be crowded daily, their own personal space ridiculed, shared, celebrated, and ignored. Adorned and clothed, will they reflect our mixed feelings about their role in our space, or are they steadfast individuals, stubbornly and mysteriously ceremonial, yet entirely indifferent to our curiosity? Re-activated by sudden knit growth, these public symbols may invite new communicative possibilities beyond their own bodily boundaries and forgotten status.

The Drawing Party

2007-09-10T09:23:00.000-06:00

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Collaborative drawings may not always be of the nature to allow access into the collaborative drawing process itself. Often what we see in a context of display are carefully selected samples from a larger project, which, unless invited into the collaborative space, can seem of mysterious rules and of secret ritual. Artist Daniel Barrow describes some of the many roles of collaborative drawing in a curator’s statement from terminus1525.ca’s online exhibition The Game Show: “detritus…indecipherable scribbles…drawing games and games of confession.” Following a set of game rules, The Game Show allowed various artists to participate and post part of their drawing process through e-mail. Barrow reminded the viewer, “many of the drawings were designed specifically to make friends laugh…the artists of The Game Show reveal what Surrealist Nicolas Calas characterized as ‘unconscious realities in the personality of the group’.” This echoes Truck Gallery’s description of The Drawing Party, a workshop currently run through Truck’s CAMPER project series; the generative input of the participants involved both conditions and opens up a lexicon of drawing.
The Drawing Party originated with a group of local artists and musicians, including Jenine Marsh, Thea Yabut, and The Consonant C’s Jennifer Crighton and Laura Leif. The group started meeting regularly at one another’s apartments or other casual settings to play and invent drawing games. Some of the games are played based on spontaneous invention, while others have rules and might be played circle-style wherein various drawings are handed around to each person in the group for input until each drawing returns to its original owner. A game based on Telephone combines both drawing and writing as each player draws or describes the drawing which is passed around during the game. The history of each collective drawing is hidden to subsequent players, leaving them to translate only the last part of the message or drawing, creating a continuous mutation of the original player’s composition. This creates an immediate and endless space for the often hilarious results of miscommunication and subjectivity; based on each player’s interpretation, a bejeweled hand can turn into an “unhappy” shelf for plants, while a sleeping figure in a tent compromises his sleepy identity by his “corpse-like” appearance. The territorial nature of interpretation and language is also potentially in play.
A recent visit to a Drawing Party hosted by Thea Yabut allowed some insight into the group’s thoughts and ideas for this ongoing project. They described the games as “a survival technique”, “trust games”, and “communicating silently, learning about people”. Thea Yabut stressed that the drawing games are meant to have no real sense of ownership and could continue beyond the Drawing Parties and create “a life of their own”. Jenine Marsh spoke of the Drawing Parties as “not necessarily a feel-good kid’s game only. The games may not be seen as subversive or critical because of that pigeonhole.” Jennifer Crighton added, “the Drawing Parties are more intimate and playful, but we’re just as engaged with critical issues.” The group spoke of how the location for each Drawing Party will continue to inform the result of each series of drawing games, both in terms of community involvement and visitor interpretation of the project’s identity. Crighton explained, “Our apartments have usually been the frame for the parties, and the workshops will create a different frame. A publication of resulting drawings could be a completely different frame again.” The group expressed a shared mandate of interactive, community-based drawing games that are open to forming new relationships and which can be held outside of individual practices.
The Drawing Party workshops will be held August 25th at The Creative Kids Museum, Telus World of Science; and September 8th at Olympic Park during the ArtCity Festival.

Lisa Benschop at Truck Gallery

2007-08-01T21:19:00.000-06:00

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A nearby video by artist Stéphane Gilot adds a Tangerine Dream-like crescendo to a recent installation by local artist Lisa Benschop, whose dewy green-gold and wood vitrine-assemblages line Truck Gallery’s entrance space in the group show ‘Salvaging Utopia’. Objects, textures, miniatures, and throne-like object-homages bring to mind the stoic eccentricity of the stories of romantic remains found in oddity exhibits such as California’s The Museum of Jurassic Technology. At first, Benschop’s collection-based assemblages seem to come directly from a period in history when folk-craft, domestic, mass-produced styles of a particularly popular garden-green and Swedish-tan line of objects in the 1970s accessorized and activated the home. In a recent artist talk, Benschop spoke of the shifts in home decorating during periods such as post-WWII and subsequent decades which responded to home-culture’s need for multi-purpose spaces within increasingly modest domestic space. Fascinated by the cultural roles of these objects, Benschop has been exploring their potential for both an updated era-ideal and as the material for creating environments for a kind of alternative object-identity.

Speaking of her installation process, Benschop explained, “I respond to what presents itself to me.” Without a lot of planning beforehand, she builds her object-environments on the spot, responding intuitively to the nature of her collected material, the context in which the objects were found, and their exhibition space. There is a tactile presence to these arrangements; objects are alive through their use in the past, through being collected and arranged by Benschop, and through their ongoing display. A larger assemblage in the exhibition houses what Benschop admits is a kind of “reliquary…a place to honor all these objects.” Describing her earlier installations, Lisa explained, “the work felt really young then, and now it’s become a fantasy environment with no function at all.” Tiny gold-tinted snails’ shells seem to grow like the beginning symptoms of a nervous alterna-matter from the unnatural mass-produced material of plastic and wood. Antennae-like material sprouts quietly from another object, suggesting communicative potential. An oversized tiara crowns the ‘reliquary’, operating as a suggested baroque reading of the exhibition while also unsettling the viewer’s instant visual references towards a more literalized, ‘fertile’ environment of display.

‘Salvaging Utopia’ is on view until August 4th.

(article published in the August issue of BeatRoute).

Hazel Meyer at Truck Gallery

2007-05-05T22:13:00.001-06:00

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Truck Gallery’s main space will become the stage, laboratory, and workshop for Montreal-based artist Hazel Meyer, whose recent project is titled ‘Hound’s Tooth, Forsooth!’. In a recent interview, Hazel explained one of the original ideas behind the project: “the image that kind of started it all - a swatch of a hound's tooth weave juxtaposed with the Giovanni Italian. Putting this image together is what really got me thinking about how it is possible to see textile structures as metaphors for how society forms in patterns reflective of the structures we wear.” She described turning the Truck Gallery space into a “fabricLAB” wherein “a brilliantly pattern work space…turned into an oversized hound’s tooth…will also resemble something of a textile stadium, with bleachers, two zebra mascots, and in lieu of a playing field, a loom.” One of Meyer’s past projects, ‘Unnecessary Roughness’ at VAV Gallery, similarly focused on a physical, though more visceral icon alongside the sports narrative – the human digestive system and its hyperbolic humor. The performance and exhibition involved an “Ulcerettes cheerleading squad and a 110 yard knitted intestinal tract”. Hazel has often used the spectacle of the sports context to stage her interests in the body-based and crowd rituals of aesthetic-calisthenics, or, as she describes, the “exciting and potent visual, emotional and theoretical [which] come from these quasi-random connections”.

To Hazel, textiles and performance can be the triggers and exploratory spaces for a shared experience and discussion of how the physical and the social relate and create “seemingly disparate communities, issues and environments”. Immediate visitor participation in a performative context can become “active, determined…sincere” in contrast to a more private gallery experience. Hazel’s hybrid use of textiles, costume, and relics of sports culture reflects the relationships between group behavior and physical appearance; clothing, for example, can become the metaphorical or exaggerated equivalent of a physical and emotional experience. Sports equipment and clothing within ‘sports culture’ is usually communicated in terms of what is “stronger, lighter, faster, safer, and smarter”, as described on the website of Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s 2005 exhibition ‘Extreme Textiles: Designing for High Performance’. Hazel Meyer’s interest in the aesthetic and psychological quality of sports culture reflects that of writer Lois Lunin, whose review of the exhibition describes a desire to “touch, hold, even smell—textiles…Feelings took over from vision.”

Hazel’s interest in group identity through both body language and clothing, and the multi-sensory experience of the sports event is also reflected in the way she combines crowd behavior with her description of the hound’s tooth pattern: “to hold a placard that locates you in the sea of an image, to be the eye, ear or mole of a face…structurally dependant / a mouthful of canines…the tooth finds an audience”. ‘Hound’s Tooth, Forsooth!’ is a continued exploration of Hazel’s interest in “abandoning obstacles to communication” within a space of lived experience.

Exhibition dates: May 18 - June 23, Truck Gallery main space

article published in the May issue of BeatRoute magazine.

Evan Broens at Truck - An Interview

2007-03-01T20:01:00.000-07:00

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In an exhibition titled "Dwelling Along" at Truck Gallery’s main space, Evan Broens will be showing new work alongside artist Hye-Seung Jung from February 23 - March 31. Broens’ work has recently been described as “deceptively simple” with a “monumental presence” (Canadian Art magazine Fall 2006), while local artist and writer Sarah Adams has picked up on the “poignant, refined, and considerate” quality of Broens’ work in her description of his 2006 show “Kicking Stones” at Art Central. While my first impressions of Broens’ work associated more ceremonial, pop culture references such as the time machine or the river Styx (more Monty Python than heavy metal), I later noticed repeated motifs of the ‘supports’ of those entrances and exits into space, which became about the formal presence of those spaces, and sometimes their character or personality in the exhibition. In the following interview, I spoke to Evan about both his new and previous work:

KN: Of your earlier work, a few themes come to mind, particularly related to the materials you use and their behavior in the exhibition space. Starting with "I'll take the latter" 2005 and ending with “Mountain” 2006. Described as “deceptively simple” and “sincere” because of the “raw” finish of the materials you use – unstained wood, for example – I can see how viewers would feel more of a relation to the sense of “raw” nature of the everyday in your work, or even of the body.

EB: The material I use isn’t really that raw – the wood has a lot of finish. I’ve used Tung oil and India ink, and the wood completely absorbed the ink so that it doesn’t exist at the surface. Often there is this notion of sculpture being “finished”, being pretty. I tend to want to demolish the “prettiness”. I’ve been using wood because it’s so malleable. You can treat it, you can work with it; once you work with wood you have this relationship with it – you can’t fake it. I find metal too aggressive. Wood is this “super-traditional” material; its ridiculous but I love it.

KN: There is also a language of almost historical display in the peep holes and mythic presence – I’m thinking of your piece "The planes within" – the idea of a once-functional object that may have been occupied by someone just moments before. Do you see your materials as having this role?

EB: I’m really influenced by antiques and they’re referenced a lot in my work. They have such an atmosphere, this “look at me but don’t touch”. But my work is more tangible and not so removed. In the piece “Mountain” – when there’s a rope tied around something, that means you can move the sculpture, but no one at the Art Central show moved it or touched it.

KN: In your 2006 show “Kicking Stones”, as well as a show called “Presence Affirmed”, both in the Art Central exhibition space - an extremely commercial space complete with an odd glassed-in floor – while the space may have repelled others’ exhibitions, you were able to make the visitor completely forget about what was outside the exhibition space, yet almost adapt to it at the same time.

EB: I found the space could be mystical, quiet, having a spiritual setting in the middle of this commercial building. Showing in that space made me realize how sculpture can take up so much space – some of the pieces seemed like mountains. If you give the work enough space it pulls you in, in a weird way. It’s how I want to show my work now.

KN: What is the process like when creating one of your sculptures; where do you usually construct them?

EB: They’re made in my studio, in my apartment, and sometimes I have pieces cut at wood suppliers. The piece ‘Fencing Planes’ has four peepholes in wood knots, and inside you can see paper airplanes inside the space. Holding up the airplanes are grass stalks made of doweling. It was fun setting this up – I had to drop the airplanes through an opening in the top onto the grass because I couldn’t reach.
I do a lot of bike riding through places like Bragg creek, and there are a lot of fragmented fences, grass is everywhere; these spaces are great for the imagination – there’s more room for the imagination, for playing.

KN: In your sculpture and drawings, do you pay a lot of attention to emphasizing the presence of the materials in order to find a balance with the narratives?

EB: The drawings are key - they can explore other ideas, another kind of atmosphere. I’ll be doing a talk at Truck on the topic of when to take drawings and make them into sculpture; at what point do you take the drawing and move it off the page?
The drawing "Untitled (benthouse)" - I remember this old house I saw in PEI which just sparked my imagination – it made me think of the image of a house decaying in time-lapse, and maybe a family living there and how they experienced that decay.
This idea of “presence” – “I was here and now I’m not”. I like the sense that someone has left a trace. Even at home, I can sense it when people have left rooms. There is so much about people in what they leave behind, and in what they don’t show. Sculpture does that too – an object can state that the artist has been there. At ACAD in my 2nd Year, I had this piece up in hallway, and there was this sense that at the same time it was me in that hallway.

KN: I’ve heard the description “little dramas” in art which can describe the spaces of certain phenomena, where the art, whether given a patina or because of the nature of the material, has ‘resulted’ in damage or a metamorphosis of some kind.

EB: Doorways can have these secrets, which become something else to investigate in the work. At the same time that drawings and sculpture activate space, a fissure or crack in the work can bring you in, and there’s more engagement with the object. Everyone likes to snoop…

(link to exhibition website)

2007-01-30T21:56:00.000-07:00

(Andrew Gable’s ‘Figure in Landscape’, image courtesy of Triangle Gallery)

Mid-January unveiled several opportunities to view art with back-to-back Openings - Triangle Gallery’s “Hit or Miss: An Exhibition of Contemporary Drawing”, Stride Gallery’s “Laura”, and Truck Gallery’s “ditdahditdit”. It was also, coincidentally, the right time and place for hearing other people’s voice-overs; from an arm-sweeping declaration of the texture of Tanya Rusnak’s new constellations of symbols, to an excited play-by-play commentary of a looped scene from “Laura”, to a languishing group of visitors leaning over a large framed series of Kyle Beal’s drawings as if they were a bar table, and adding private speeches to the work’s textual outcries.

I joined the crowd at Triangle’s Opening for “Hit or Miss”, curated by artists Chris Cran and John Will (aka “The Lazy Curators”). From an accompanying curatorial essay, the duo curators state “both educators as well as artists…we simultaneously observed a curious phenomenon in the work of drawing and painting students…what can only be described as ‘the doodle’.” Amongst both new and familiar work by artists such as John Bride, Tanya Rusnak, Ryan Sluggett, Mark Dicey, and Brandan Doty, ‘Hit or Miss’ also features a beautifully-fussy landscape from Sarah Holtom, the sense of quilted muteness in a Lisa Murray conté drawing, and Jenny Lin’s pageant-postured figures whose physiognomy resembles the parsnip-limbs of Marcel Dzama’s animal-costumed crew. Triangle Gallery’s Director, Jacek Malec, writes of drawing as “the most personal form of expression…drawings [betray] the specific features of the artist’s individuality and sensibility.” Andrew Gable’s ‘Figure in Landscape’ reveals a kind of intimate detail usually appearing as shorthand signs when combined with his painted scenes and figures, but which, through drawing, generate an erupting overflow of baroque and botanical viscera. A nymph with the kind of healthy ‘youth’ reminiscent of the rotund young woman in Robert Crumb’s “Oggie And The Beanstalk” nestles almost in pure outline within this churning and lovingly-detailed vegetation.

At Stride Gallery, accompanied by an essay from curator Diana Sherlock, Eric Metcalf’s “Laura” is a collaborated installation of set design, soundtrack, and fictional backstage glimpse of the filming of the original 1944 feature film of the same title. Once inside the gallery’s front door, the exhibition’s partially enclosed film set surrounds the viewer with each collaborator’s ‘alteration’ to the style of the original set, including an optical illusion of late-night street (or moon) light illuminating invisible window blinds. In the second part of the exhibition, the wood smell of exposed set construction accompanies Metcalf’s research, notes, drawings and an original book jacket for the novel “Laura” (upon which the film is based), all which create an atmosphere that diverts away from “Laura” and mimics a more subjective reading. While there is a distinctive feeling of stepping inside the stylistic tricks of “Laura”, there is also a feeling of “Laura” – like overly-curlicued footnotes - assembling its audience. Metcalf, whose enthusiastic commentary I mentioned earlier, appeared at the Opening like a bespectacled Chas Addams (though without bedroom slippers or Knight’s armored helmet and pipe).

“Language is often put into the service [of] the image, with word and irony engaged to disrupt, and complicate what could otherwise be taken literally”, reads an artist bio of Kyle Beal, whose drawings and photographs make up a large part of Truck’s “ditdahditdit” alongside Angela Silver and Chris Gillespie. Silver’s ‘Etym’, a large shredded-paper construction, has something of conceptual artist Ann Hamilton’s textile pieces in its assemblage and monumental sense of weight and words. Kyle Beal’s delicate textual declarations of ‘artist speak’, and photographs of a seemingly bombed club interior (‘Burnt-out Comedy Club') and a wooden-slat ray of light (or lamp) occluding a lone figure’s head (‘Lightheaded’) are of service to the signs of form and color, in fact the sign of text itself – the block-letters act as stand-in props for Beal’s textual phrasing. Chris Gillespie’s video ‘The Wonderful World of Ants’ formally digresses from curator Anthea Black’s reading of “a pseudo-scientific experiment where the artist’s collection…follows closely behind the ants” by its projected enlargement of the sudden traipsing of several ants’ live movement; just as microscopic views of cells and viruses seem to exist within a transparent jelly of detail, Gillespie’s ants suggest a similar amoeba-fixative caused by simple video distortion.

Exhibition dates:
“Hit or Miss: An Exhibition of Contemporary Drawing”, Triangle Gallery, Jan 5-Feb 10
“Laura”, Stride Gallery, Jan 12-Feb 17
“ditdahditdit”, Truck Gallery, Jan 12-Feb 10

(article published in BeatRoute, February, 2007)

Chantal Rousseau's 'Historiettes'

2006-12-03T13:32:00.000-07:00

Cut-out animation (and that which has a similar physiognomy) can be extremely sensitive to a movement inherent in its medium (ex: Yuri Norstein), but can also include the stiffness of Flash, even Atari-inspired animation, in which segments (a leaf on a tree, an arm, eyes) move while much of the remaining object seems paralyzed. Hair is helmet-stiff or behaves like frozen tentacles. Chantal Rousseau has treated her animated subjects like cut-outs; only two of the animations have any fluidity (the maddened mid-flight of a bird attacking a lizard seems also 'shot' in the middle of a hurricane), although in the self-contained machine of the animation 'cycle' or loop.

What does the stiffness and cycle-movement do to the sense of the drawings and to the subject matter in Rousseau's animations? While containing a bit of collage slapstick, Rousseau's animation does not exist only to undermine the dignity of ready-made signs, but to also include the mundane stiffness of the everyday body. The animal-subjects in the animations seem more comfortable and natural in their animated roles, while the human subjects associate the futility of the same ceremony; we need or want a reason for each act and motion. The fact that there is no explanation or continuation for each piece speaks more of the everyday than any Flash formula or collage animation; in one piece, a young woman is elegantly displayed in a pose restrained by a drawing style reminiscent of childrens' book illustration, adding a modesty and (human-scale) immediacy to each sexually-suggestive act. The vulnerability of these animations links to Slavoj Zizek's reading of Lacan's "sublime quality of an object": "the paradox of an object...able to subsist only in shadow, in an intermediary half-born state...to reveal the substance, the object itself dissolves; all that remains is the dross of the common object."(83); the image which fails to live up to its identity outside of the 'fantasy space' of the ideal. In Rousseau's animations, the element of time (the subtle change of posture, the appearance of a bird, the shivering of leaves) evokes the anti-climactic nature of every-day public space, which fails to acknowledge these glimpsed ceremonies and instead has the audacity to interrupt the seduction of these acts.

Unlike the deadpan performance of a lot of raw animation, Rousseau's work has an austere sense of movement which is able to retain the elegance of the iconic, the pose, and the confrontation of drawings.
'Historiettes' is currently showing at The New Gallery.
(link to exhibition, and more images of the work)

Magdalena Kunz and Daniel Glaser

2006-11-29T19:50:00.001-07:00

Digital photos of exhibitions found in an internet search are probably taken very quickly, the camera’s nature also adding distortion/texture and shadow to the work. This is a still from a video or film by Magdalena Kunz and Daniel Glaser, but which appears in this stolen still as both a crappily recorded VCR taped music video (thanks to the high heels and flying hair) and a murky planet maybe under the sea. A modern mermaid/siren accompanied by a trapped visitor from Earth, both in jeans and balanced both by bare bosoms. From my first association, I remember a scene from the pretty terrible film ‘Supergirl’ where Supergirl finds herself trapped upon a planet/dimension of screaming arctic winds, foamy black oil, grey ice terrain, and Peter O’Toole who was very, very depressed (sort of in the Doldrums), and who falls off some kind of cliff into certain death; Supergirl does not get depressed but instead escapes, with blond hair flying and 1980s eye makeup and satiny curves keeping check. I wonder what this video is about. It looks so fun, both to film (I’m guessing), and to watch in a gallery. It is maybe a cross between Eve Sussman’s work and Fellini’s Satyricon of aimless collections of gestures exaggerated as if finding an isolated world of extra-terrestrials. And seriously, what better place to explore your bodily freedom?
(a link to some images of the filming of this video/film)

a David Shrigley drawing

2006-11-27T21:19:00.000-07:00

David Shrigley’s drawings are also instant stories, the length of notes, short letters that seem unsent. Journal entries. I don’t remember where I found this image. Maybe its from one of his books, which can be looked through online (as well as purchased sometimes). Why do people like his drawings and stories? Are they charming? Are they considered a bit dark but after a time very digestible like an overdone graphic novel? Are they honest, containing an honesty that places the embarrasing in a light that reminds us that we’re all human? This drawing might be part of a longer story about a serial killer, or it is more likely found on its own in a collection of sudden ‘middle parts’. A tiny arm/hand, small feet, wooden skin with sudden hair. Deep shadows within the body, and the shadows of the dark wood(s) of this dark past. Not overdoing it with wide bodily gestures and stylized, overacting illustration. And the story just as mundane and concisely stated as any ‘true-crime’ back story in the language of evidence and heavily documented but sparse details. This figure is like the remains of a search for visual evidence of a mythic figure never really ever photographed, never etched, and so with his back to us, but what we get to see in full plain view is the over-exposed in sighting language and the textural sign of the serial killer bio.

(more David Shrigley drawings)

Terence Koh

2006-11-26T21:16:00.000-07:00

In this image by Terence Koh, which is from a performance which I don’t know anything about except perhaps the work is influenced by Chinese opera (based on the artist’s bio), the conditions of the still – a close-up, an exaggerated costume of surfaces and androgynous identity, a hidden ritual involving the costume as well as the tin foil object, the state at which this figure or idea has become this way – creates a natural environment for uninhibited staring. A still is more accepting of this kind of staring than an actual performance, obviously. My distant gaze acts like touch, free to ‘see’ how each surface retracts or imprints the running over from my fingers. The fringe wig bangs, the floury powder. But not the mucusy area of the nose and mouth where stray hair has gotten stuck. That is the area in which ‘things happen’ which I truly would like to see, to see this state continue into its own logic, decompose; the area of ‘action’ is that which isn’t touched but which instead touches.

Ocean Forstner in the Stride +15 Space

2006-11-22T19:16:00.000-07:00

A display of curious objects in quiet, frozen procession wait patiently for the viewer in a new installation by Ocean Forstner in the Stride Gallery +15 space. A homemade house of cards, stitched pictograms, and miniature twin ‘suits’ with the 1970’s Elvis formality of vintage costume are just some examples on view. The objects’ preciousness in size, suggestive space-relation to each other, and formal combination of the mundane, the functional and the decorative hints at a feeling that a kind of evidence is being revealed intimately and obscurely, providing a glimpse into a ritual one is only partly let in on. Where these objects came from, what they were and what they have become is part of Forstner’s ongoing project – the collaborative research between Forstner and a chosen group of artists within the local arts community. “I’m not sure what you were expecting to see”, Forstner commented during a studio visit. She explained that she had asked individual artists to provide her with an object (or objects) which were somehow meaningful to them, wherein Forstner would begin a process of research on both the artist and their work, continuing the idea of research as an activity of transformation. Forstner spoke about her interest in using art as a medium to get to know and collaborate with some of the artists she is excited about within Calgary’s arts community: “what you can learn from what others create can give you a new appreciation for what they do and who they are”.
The nature of the transformation of the objects and their link back to the artists was hinted at when Forstner explained that the resulting objects “are like small advertisements for the artist”. As a second part of the exhibition, Forstner has provided Stride Gallery with small binders which contain some of her notes and research collected throughout the project (visitors to Stride Gallery who view the binders will be invited to view the +15 exhibition, and vice versa). For the artists involved in the collaboration, their interpretation of the request to provide Forstner with an object was left completely open, which allowed for unplanned and unexpected glimpses into the artist and his or her everyday working process: “the way people collect for you, what they give you, and even how they give it to you, can reflect who they are”. Forstner’s process as exploration of a person through given and found material, and then as communication of this exploration has been interpreted by artist Michael Coolidge as he explains how “[Forstner] departs from traditional notions of authorship (author as sole creator) in order to act as the programmer and conciliator of a system of generating work based on the choices of other artists”. The idea of artifact as a language to describe someone speaks of a relationship with how we access the past through not only its remains, but through the mediating effects of time and its projected roles and functions upon these remains. Forstner’s final process of curating her findings seems to have been a solitary activity out of range of view of the other artists involved, but this heightens the role of the objects provided, as these objects become collaborators (and authors) as well. The memory objects can hold of their past as well as their absent owners, and their ability to imitate their owners (or pretend to) seems at first an insinuated part of their role in this installation. However, like narrators who exaggerate, the objects’ varying ‘narration’ is given a somewhat free reign, their separate ‘preoccupations’ playfully extended; an origami animal can suggest both a squirrel and its skeleton, while a miniature couch can seem to swallow its shape by the jewel-like texture of its own rose-petal material. This is key to what Forstner calls “a gentler way to know someone and celebrate them” through the materialization of moments “that we encounter maybe for just a brief time.”
How do these projected homages/biographies have a dialogue with what the artists are known for (through the space of accessible documentation), as well as the traditional artist bio? There is a question of whether the open interpretation of how and what to give Forstner may be open to varying ‘projections’ of the artists themselves. The viewer may wonder - are these fictions? “Sometimes people give me things reflected in their own work, whether or not they realize it”, Forstner commented, and which, she added, “will tell me how the materials should be used. It’s very intuitive”. Though we may find Forstner’s objects familiar, their function lies at the edge of direct reading, and they shift in and out of categorization and implicated link to the artists ‘in question’. Rather than operating as present-day curios with epic (even if obscure) tales attached, they borrow their language from the private artist’s studio wherein the activity in which they have been arranged has been recent, in fact additive and ongoing, suggesting the hidden and unseen life within that which surrounds the improvised and low-tech performance of everyday objects. Through this partially hidden view and suggestion of displaying some hidden fact, the installation then draws the viewer into an interiority of Forstner’s process, hedging away from the suggestion of biographical disclosure of the artist-subjects. What the archive tells us about these artists does not function as easy-to-digest insider knowledge (there are no clear boundaries around what we are ‘studying’ for clues) but instead, the archive acts as a description of the very forms of information Forstner received, and just as Forstner’s displaying of what she has found also questions the factuality of it, what we know (or think we know) as well as how we process this ‘knowing’ from reading the archive is under equal investigation.

(link to Ocean's exhibition)

‘Canadiana Martyrdom’ by Diana Thorneycroft at Skew Gallery

2006-11-22T19:15:00.001-07:00

Skew Gallery is showing Diana Thorneycroft’s ‘Canadiana Martyrdom’ series until October 14th, 2006, which Skew’s press-release describes as “conventional narratives of martyrdom” involving “plastic figurines of animals associated with the north [which] join up with Canadian icons…in the reenactment of grim spectacles, which are at once dark and humorous”. Diana’s most recent bodies of work, that of the ‘Martyrs Murder’ series of photographs, and drawings of familiar pop-culture references in black-humored scenarios, have moved into overtly National territory with the ‘Canadiana Martyrdom’ series. Combining the language of the meticulously constructed and fake scenarios of the diorama with references to archival and art-historical depictions of public (and communal) displays of martyrdom, Thorneycroft presents us with playful enactments of natural scenes of chaos and disaster, all within the kitsch-glow of theatrical snowscapes, battlegrounds, and landscapes regionally familiar. Thorneycroft has previously described a piece (The Martyrdom of St. Nicholas) in ‘Martyrs Murder’ as having "no historical narrative that goes along with this image, the reading of it is much less fixed and I hope, a bit more humourous". In an interview with the artist, I asked if she had received such reactions from viewers to the Canadiana Martyrdom series, as well as whether or not viewers have reacted to and/or identified with the Canadian icon references. “I am just beginning to show this work…and the response so far has been very positive,” she stated. “Despite the fact that some people may not be aware of the historical martyrdoms the work refers to, everyone recognizes the Canadiana content”.
The photographs evoke references from both childhood and growing up in Canada, a lot of them personal and not necessarily Canadian or regional. GI-Joe dolls (two in GI-Joe and one in Canadian uniform), instant (even dutiful) suppliers of staunch, dignified expressions and profiles really do connect to the icon of the Mountie in The Martyrdom of Captain Canuck. The platform-height of the sawing ‘executioner’ is at the same stark height of the executioners depicted in the kind of historical illustrations one can find recounting similar spectacles. Yet the two figures on either side provide the filmic-symmetry of a contemporary action flick. It’s a showdown. The language of the diorama is the structure which crowds it all together, while a lack of complete slickness keeps reminding the viewer that these are the dolls, figurines, and sets of amateur construction. “The low tech look comes from my acceptance of “clunkiness”,” the artist commented; “I sew like a child and my carpentry skills aren’t much better, so the sets are in fact quite awkward.” The photographs started to remind me of ‘survival’ narratives or the types of films where violent ordeals show the ‘indifference of nature’. Martyrdom of the Great One is like the pull-back shot from a scene in ‘The Birds’, showing a threat made larger by its accumulation. Martyrdom at the Rink has the mist and group dynamic of a Guy Maddin film, but in color it is The Red-Nosed Reindeer clay-animation from childhood – a strange barren landscape if ever there was one (evoking an awful feeling that no one else existed, like a post-apocalyptic land). The point of view in The Martyrdom of St. Anne is like a behind-the-scenes set of a film, where Bob & Doug Mackenzie are the directors or part of a film crew (or they are in the ringside seats of Waldorf & Statler) shooting footage of Anne in a familiar pose. The Stoning of St. Peter the Fat Fan and its bankside location evokes hockey players washed ashore, maybe shipwrecked, wherein a new and urgent ‘game’ becomes reality. Martyrdom at the Ski Hill seems to have the color-symbolism of Nicolas Roeg’s ‘Don’t Look Now’, where sudden visibility always means dread. I asked the artist if it was her intention to use formal, visual language from film or other media in order to allow the viewer multiple access into a reading of the work. She responded, “Several years ago I had the privilege of spending a day at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where I saw a room full of paintings by Pieter Brueghel. If there is any conscious mimicry going on, it is my attempt to make my compositions as fluid as his. Brueghel’s work also allowed me to understand the size that I wanted the Martyrdom series to be. Not so big that they are intimidating, but large enough to hold all that complex detail.”
While dioramas and the language of the tableaux can seem exaggeratedly idealized and isolated (like miniature ‘backlots’), to the contemporary artist they can act as sites of access to the idea of another time or place. Referencing her photographs from the 1990’s, Thorneycroft has spoken before in other interviews about the “privileged feeling of having access” to an “unconscious wish to know” within an image or scene, as well as of “child's play” and the rituals and role-playing children perform which can propose and allow for rituals of enactment and manifestation. Are these ideas taken further within the ‘Martyrs Murder’ and ‘Canadiana Martyrdom’ series? “With the Martyrdom series,” the artist explained, “I am commenting on the way violence has always been used as a form of entertainment. The movie Brave Heart is such a good example of this because it shows how violence was used to entertain the masses back then, and how much we still love it now. Part of me wants to be critical of the ubiquitous use of murder and torture in the entertainment industry, but I’m painfully aware that with both my photographic work, and recent drawings, I’m just as guilty as the rest.”

(link to Diana's exhibition)

Sarah Holtom Portraits

2006-11-22T19:07:00.000-07:00

Sarah Holtom’s current project – the painting of 100 local Calgary artists - has involved several weeks of portrait sittings by artist-to-artist invitation, or, as stated in a press release, through some of the “more personal and social inter-connections that weave throughout Calgary’s strong and vibrant community”. These portraits are completed in sittings of approximately 3 hours in the sitters’ workplace, home, studio, or chosen ‘local’ locale. For a week in August, Truck Gallery’s Camper Project invited Holtom to be an artist in residence to work on some of these portraits in public view on the corner of Stephen Ave & 1st Street. Visitors could get a peek not only at Camper’s kitschy 1975 upholstery but watch a portrait sitting, while Holtom was happy to answer any questions and include the curious in on her technique. One young visitor, Holtom described, became fascinated by the immediacy of both the artist’s painting process and the openness of her artist role. “People assume everything is done with projectors, or that the artist working is a big mystery. Its positive for people to see a random girl doing what she’s dreamed up.”

Descriptions of Holtom’s work have compared her painting style to Flemish or Dutch portraiture, where soft and feathered paint edges resemble that of conte, pencil and watercolor. One might link her to artists making contemporary use of an historical painting vocabulary in a way that works for them, such as Sarah McEneaney and Mari Eastman, rather than prim painters Karen Kilimnik or Elizabeth Peyton, who prefer, in Holtom’s words, “pseudo-styles, single-wash areas and ruby-like lips.” Holtom’s portraits evoke mini-narratives within rich details; the wing-back look of a chair in the background can resemble the exposed threadbare ribs of old velvet, blond stubble can resemble miniscule fish bones or the teeth of a comb, and the weight of a jacket’s folds can resemble the anatomic twist of cloth via Alexander McQueen. Holtom cites Vuillard and Alice Neel as early influences, having fallen in love with Neel’s aesthetic: “she was this lady who moved to Harlem and painted all these people from life exactly how they looked. She wasn’t shy with colours; her technique was simple, but spot-on.” In a review of Neel’s male portraits, writer Peter Schjeldahl finds that something particular happens to the sitters’ extremities: “hands are almost always distended and brittle-looking…feet are…hardly functional”. He adds, “Neel didn’t have a refined sense of boundaries…but she respected her subjects more profoundly than most of them probably knew.” Holtom’s subjects often seem slightly startled into their characters, or watchful with one eye particularly fixed. Holtom explains that formal vanity issues like symmetry and “the noble chin” aren’t things she’s concerned with; oddities “become part of the conversation between me and the other person. When you pose for a photograph, you might try to remember your ‘good side’, but sittings allow for those things to break down.”

Holtom’s portraits also have another element which draws them away from other popular portrait styles. In some of the more Franz Gertsch photo-realist portraits of Kristin Beaver, Janet Werner, and Nicolas Grenier, outright seductiveness of the paint and representation - made immediate by using anonymous subjects - turns into commercial slickness. I asked Holtom if she had ever painted from images, and she stated that the experience was “creepy, like painting someone in a wax museum; it became an awful exercise.” Holtom stresses that for her, the experience and process of drawing is an important part of her engagement with the subject as well as the portrait’s outcome; “the feeling that your eyes are cruising over the surface of something; this hand-eye coordination and sensitivity for different lines.” Colors are chosen “like choosing pencil crayons”, in which a color is identified within a surface or object, mixed and applied in all visible instances, then the next color is chosen and so on, starting with facial features and working towards the background. The drawing and scrutiny involved in painting portraits is, for Holtom, a natural part of the time spent and shared with the sitter; “this is when I lose track of time and stop thinking of it as ‘portrait’.”

Holtom spoke about how important it is to engage the public through the sharing of the artist’s process, as well as evoking more of an interest in viewing and thinking about art. “Sometimes there is an attitude that ‘art’ can seem too weird, expensive or detached, and people may tend to be interested in something flashier and easier to relate to. Paintings have the ability to slow you down and make you stop.” Holtom’s resulting 100 portraits will be included in a catalogue, accompanied by a short bio of each of the chosen artists. The portraits will be exhibited at both the Art City Opening on Friday September 8th, and Tuesday September 12-15th, 2006, at the Living Art Center, 2404 Earlton Road SW. (Sarah's website)

(originally published in BeatRoute magazine)