#criticalsuperbeast

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Making a Mark: Steven Laurie's Instagram

By Anthony Easton

Photo courtesy of Steven Laurie.

One of my favourite things on Instagram is Steven Laurie’s (Username: _steven_laurie_) use of the mark making tag. Laurie’s tradition is one of found or street photography, and it might be easy to liken him within that space to photographers William Eggleston or Helen Levitt. I am not sure that this would be a wrong opinion— although Laurie photographs very few people.

The mark making hashtag separates him from this tradition. When I say there are very few people in his work, there still remains the influence of people, hints rather than direct portraits. So when he uses the tag #markmaking, it is the ghost of a physical presence, a digital abstraction of a material abstraction of a human intervention. It doesn’t even have to be human— for Laurie, a mark can be made by the excretion of a pigeon as much as it can be made by the tire treads of a car or the orange paint on a utility pole.

Photo courtesy of Steven Laurie.

Part of this is a very old tack. A picture of a mark is a mark itself, just as Magritte’s pipe is both a pipe, and a picture of a pipe. Laurie makes the mark a Duchampian readymade— more complex than the representation of photography, by claiming found marks as drawings. More complex, but not more novel. Having them on Instagram, and having that mark be part of a conversation, suggests that it is liberated from this modernist tradition.

Photo courtesy of Steven Laurie.

When Laurie chronicles mark making, he is doing three things:

This is a mark, because someone or something made it and considered it a mark. This mark does not have to be considered art.

This is a mark, because it can be understood in a tradition of mark making, and as an artist to be part of that space.

This is a mark because I noted this was a mark to a larger community of people who might be interested in mark making. (Laurie has 990 or so followers, and additional people who comment on his photos, and who use the tag #markmaking, without interacting with Laurie.)

The emphasis on these forms is on making— more important than the mark is noting how a mark is constructed, and how a mark is noted.

Making here, can deepen three photographic possibilities:

Making as a curatorial instinct— because I noted that the utility worker, and the tagger and the pigeon are making marks, that I am making an argument about how paint or mud or the like on a surface is constructed. I am arguing about how things are made, by taxonomic category.

This category can be conceptual. Laurie’s generosity plays with the idea of the mark as an aesthetic category— suggesting that it might not be an autonomous gesture, or that it might be a utilitarian one. Bringing us back to the birth of the photograph, where the aesthetic, or the ideological or the prescriptive abutted with the simply documentary.

It marks an extension of Laurie’s own aesthetic. The blankness of his photographic eye, and his noting of the chaos in the midst of the a tightly composed shot, can extend to a larger understanding of an artist's practice, or can be an artist’s practice.

Photo courtesy of Steven Laurie.

This work can function as a sketchbook, or as an ephemeral form, and because it becomes difficult to right click Instagrams, means that the intervention is performative. The making of the mark, and the noting of the mark, entwine in an ongoing mutual problem of erasure. Plus, nestled in the midst of a thicket of other hashtags— some seemingly more serious than others, it might just be a wry joke— which is its own kind of mark.

Anthony Easton is a writer, artist, and theologian. They are interested in class, sex, gender and the west. They have been published in Spin, The Atlantic, Pitchfork, Globe and Mail, and others. They have presented at conferences throughout North America, and in Europe. Their art has been shown in Toronto, New York, Chicago, and is in the collection of the library of the National Gallery of Canada. 

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Jennifer Angus: Lookabout

May 7 - June 11, 2017, Annapolis Region Community Arts Council (ARCAC), Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia


By Emma Lansdowne & Alana Traficante

Jennifer Angus, Lookabout (2017). Installation view at ARTsPLACE Gallery, Annapolis Region Community Arts Council.

I happened upon the multi-venue exhibition Lookabout purely by chance: my sister and I, on a drifting road trip through pre-season Nova Scotia, found our way by default to Annapolis Royal. The promise of teeming rain had deterred us from a plan to drive the Cabot Trail; instead, we wandered the sleepy streets of the tiny clapboard town, seeking out the ghosts of its colonial past. By the time we arrived, artist/researcher Jennifer Angus had been working in residence at ARTsPLACE, the artist-space run by the Annapolis Region Community Arts Council, for a few weeks. She had situated installations in various historic sites in town: dioramas of insect specimens under bell jars; pots of preserves lined up on windowpanes, beetle bodies suspended within. Through this odd assemblage of tiny exoskeletons, spread across unexpected sites (the town theatre, a coffee shop, the unattended historic garden gatehouse), Angus wove a haunting narrative, reimaging the mythos of two sisters, Anne and Victoria Oliver, who disappeared from the town without explanation in 1867.

Jennifer Angus, Lookabout (2017). Installation view at ARTsPLACE Gallery, Annapolis Region Community Arts Council.

Finally, after traversing the external sites, my sister and I witnessed Angus’s expansive, central installation at ARCAC. Already familiar with her practice, I knew to expect the installation of insects pinned directly to the wall in repeating patterns, evocative of wallpaper and textiles. Yet my immediate perception of this decorative, critical mass found it wanting. Angus’s promise to chronicle the Oliver sisters’ strange disappearance was played out in an odd aestheticization of insect bodies that only scratched the surface of the mystery, much less the complex layers of the region’s troubled past that are buried beneath it.

Returning home, with many questions left unanswered, I sought insight from my friend Emma Lansdowne, whose scholarly research interrogates the colonial legacy of taxonomical aesthetics. What follows is the result of our collaborative dialogue about the work and about the history of taxonomies and naturalist collections, as well as our joint questioning of perceived relationships among land and the people, plants and insects that inhabit it. — AT

~~~

Jennifer Angus is an artist, designer and researcher who, for over ten years, has centred her practice around the collection and repurposing of insect specimens for intricate wall-based and sculptural installations, displayed in exhibitions such as A Terrible Beauty (Textile Museum of Canada, 2006), lauded for its dazzling, immersive patterns that evoke Victorian-era ornament. She has a particular interest in this period, which she describes as “the age of travel, exploration, [and] scientific discovery.” Angus takes inspiration from the practice of naturalist collecting in pursuit of new knowledge, and uses pattern-making as a means of contemporizing the curio aesthetic of nineteenth-century collections.

Jennifer Angus, Lookabout (2017). Installation view at Annapolis Royal Historic Gardens.  

For the exhibition Lookabout, Angus extends her practice by looking through the lens of an unsolved mystery, the unexplained disappearance of two female, budding amateur naturalists. The missing women become her subjects but are present in allusion only, save for one portrait photograph of the sisters mounted on the gallery wall. The show’s small publication and walking guide references an article published two years after the women’s disappearance (titled “The Affecting History Of Two Young Gentlewomen, Who Were Ruined By Their Excessive Attachment To The Amusements Of The Town”), indicating that their disappearance was surrounded in scandal, and that the women were vilified in their absence. Angus reveals that while the sisters were indeed adventurous, they explored the town and riverside with the intent of amassing an impressive collection of local flora and insects. She revisits and re-imagines the Oliver girls’ collection in an immersive wall-patterned installation, and in a small adjacent room that houses objects and furniture reminiscent of amateur taxonomical displays. She presents clues, but very few answers. There are whispers, but there is very little voice.

Angus’s exhibition exudes an infectious intrigue, pulling viewers in through a complex layering of historical mystery, the romance of the unknown, and an aestheticized take on taxonomical science. The artist’s allusion to the contemporaneous account of the girls’ disappearance — an account riddled with presumably unjust implications about their extracurricular activities — prompts viewers to briefly consider the inaccessibility of science to 19th-century women and the potential risks those women ran in defying the societal norms of their day. However, the greater part of Angus’s work — rather than provoking such consideration — seems to use the story of the girls as a convenient narrative framework upon which Angus builds her highly aestheticized insect displays. Rather than further exploring the gendered tensions between the girls’ nature-focused pastimes and their sudden disappearance, Angus draws on their intersecting love of nature and belief in fairies to build a whimsical series of installations modelled on Victorian curiosity cabinets. This whimsicality is a key component of Angus’s work, helping to create an environment of nostalgia for a time when much of the world was still “unexplored,” and when naturalists were to be found at the boundaries between known and unknown.

Jennifer Angus, Lookabout (2017). Installation view at ARTsPLACE Gallery, Annapolis Region Community Arts Council.

There is a danger to such nostalgia, however. The collection and classification of flora and fauna, the display of which led to the foundation of the modern museum, carries the heavy weight of colonial legacy. The process of collecting and naming natural history specimens consolidated a European scientific knowledge system that was both extractive and homogenizing, while specimen displays such as those emulated by Angus were and are carefully curated representational regimes based on scientifically-justified exclusion. Plucked from their natural environments to be pinned onto boards or mounted on blank pages, organic specimens such as insects or plants were forcefully relieved of their environmental, historical, and cultural contexts and, renamed in scientific terms, were given new identities divorced from their own ecology. Based on an assumption of both the availability of “undiscovered” lands and the universalizing correctness of Linnaean taxonomy, natural history collection resulted in an aesthetic, symbolic, and ultimately political erasure of indigenous presence on colonized and to-be-colonized lands.

Although Dr. Laurie Dalton, in her essay about the exhibition, acknowledges a link between such collections and European colonial expansion, commentary by the artist on this fraught connection is largely absent; instead, her installations glorify natural history collection through their highly decorative construction and placement, emulating the reductionist visual structuring of the natural world for which taxonomical science is responsible. As we stand on the verge of a whirlwind summer of national celebration for Canada’s 150 years of confederation, Angus’s failure to unpack the problematic relationship between exploration, science, and colonialism seems especially stark. — EL & AT

Emma Lansdowne is a writer specializing in horticultural history and critical theory. She is currently an MA candidate in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Emma is also a professional gardener who hopes that the deer haven’t eaten all her plants in her home city of Victoria, BC.

Alana Traficante is an art writer and curator based in her home city of Hamilton, Ontario. She is a recent MFA graduate of OCAD University’s Criticism and Curatorial Practice program, where she researched sensory criticism, feminist theory, installation, and moving image artworks. Alana is currently Acting Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.  

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Living Modern: Hélio Oiticica at the Art Institute of Chicago

Co-organised by the Whitney Museum of Art and the Carnegie Museum of Art. Curated by Lynn Zelevansky, Elisabeth Sussman, Sondra Gilman, James Rondeau, Eloise W. Martin, Donna De Salvo, and Anna Katherine Brodbeck

By Daniel Hutchinson

Hélio Oiticica. Metaesquema, 1958–59. Collection of Diane and Bruce Halle.

A few weeks back I finally got the push I needed to stomach the weak Canadian dollar and head down to Chicago for the first time – the first full-scale US retrospective of Hélio Oiticica, To Organize Delirium at the Art Institute of Chicago. To get to the museum, you first have to pass through a post-modern paradise of landscape design and public art: a curvaceous pedestrian bridge (Frank Gehry), an immense polished steel bean (Anish Kapoor), an ecstatic exploding bandshell (Gehry), and other eclectic features. After all of that sensationalism the formal restraint of architect Renzo Piano’s thoughtfully restrained addition to the Art Institute of Chicago provides a welcome invitation. Inside, a late modernist story plays out across the work of the Brazilian neo-concrete artist that I was there to see, a visionary who arrived at the story of modernism in the 1950s and pushed European abstraction past its dogmatic hermeticism, radically, into the social space of our lived experiences.

Born in 1937 in Rio de Janeiro, Oiticica was a prolific artist who made sophisticated contributions to the abstraction as a painter and later, as an interdisciplinary artist. He innovated radical new categories and forms for art with non-narrative experimental films, installations, penetrable paintings, and “parangoles” – flexible colour structures made to be worn over the body and which were designed to be performed by samba dancers and everyday citizens. Consistent across most of this work is his exploration of abstraction, especially the formal elements of plane, shape and colour. Oiticica’s formalism echoes the look and disciplined rigour of European concrete artists such as Max Bill and Theo van Doesburg, but like other neo-concrete artists such as Lygia Pape and Lygia Clark, Oiticica eschewed industrial finish and formal austerity, emphasizing greater sensuality, participatory engagement, symbolic and even political messages. Where concrete artists looked to cerebral formalism, Oiticica looked to the Brazilian Carnival.

The exhibition introduces Oiticica’s work predictably, by chronology, but quickly moves the viewer through a greater complexity of experiences by overlapping works made throughout the 1960s and 1970s in London, New York, and upon returning to Rio de Janeiro in 1980. Just before the entrance to the feature exhibition, in a small side gallery we find early examples of the artist’s refined and understated gouache on cardboard geometric abstractions from the late 1950s displayed among works by other Brazilian neo-concrete artists. The exhibition opens in earnest with a suite of expanded paintings – suspended spatial reliefs made from wood and painted in closely related colours. Born from the geometric precision of the 2D gouache works, these folding planes and shifting geometries produce a surprising lightness of colour and introduce new elements to the discipline of painting: time, space and chance.

Hélio Oiticica. NC6 Medium Nucleus 3 (NC6 Núcleo médio 3, 1961–63) at Rua Engenheiro Alfredo Duarte, Rio de Janeiro, n.d. César and Claudio Oiticica Collection, Rio de Janeiro.

The central feature of the exhibition is found in the largest gallery with two of the artist’s most important environmental “penetrables.” Eden (1969) and Tropicália (1967) are impressive examples of what would later be called installation art. Both works are sprawling, sand-covered pavilion-type spaces containing small favela-like structures made from painted wood platforms and walls, woven natural fences, primary coloured tarpaulin tent-forms and other tactile fabrics of varying colour and translucency. The results are labyrinthine zones for sensorial interaction, relaxation and refuge. The small pavilions, stone pathways and walls help with navigating the space, but the experience is punctuated by less predictable encounters with arresting sensations: the gritty leaves of too-dry tropical potted plants; the salt-earth smell of accumulated sweat embedded in the natural textiles and wooden walls; the cool sensation of water underfoot in a small square pond followed by the inevitable grit of wet sand caked between toes. Vividly-hued tropical birds squawk brightly from their cage and claustrophobic dank corridors spiral inward to a black-and-white television tuned to a local Chicago broadcast blaring car ads and infomercials. Both works contain space for privacy, relaxation and reflection. It is from here that the exhibition orients the remaining works in the show, around the transitory sensations and creative experiences of each viewer now changed through creative leisure, or what the artist called “creleisure.”

At this point we might imagine that Eden and Tropicália represent the most mature works to date, their radicalism arrived at only by advancing through the evolutionary stages of the gouache drawings and coloured environments, but evolutionary metaphors as curatorial methodology don’t always work. The risk here is that such linear structures can replace engagement with historiography or tokenism (Latin American artistic emancipation from the Euro/American modernist narratives) or, more damagingly, superimpose the myth of the artist genius overtop of the experiences of each unique participant. The curators tread this line carefully and use the larger halls of the museum to great effect, de-emphasizing the artist’s timeline by intermixing works from different media and periods, while using smaller connecting galleries to introduce the visitor to Oiticica’s eloquent writing found in his volumes of notes and textual propositions.

Luiz Fernando Guimarães wearing Oiticica’s P30 Parangolé Cape 23, M’Way Ke, at the West Side Piers, New York, 1972. Private Collection. © César and Claudio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro.

For an artist who’s primary goal was to expand the individual’s capacities for creative play and discovery, the challenge for any curator is to get themselves, the institution and the biography of the artist out of the way of the art while producing a cogent exhibition which contributes meaningful scholarship. To the credit of the team of seven curators, To Organize Delirium seems to measure this challenge, putting the emphasis not on Oiticica as an avant-garde outsider belonging to the past, but on his works, which appear charged with creative potential for contemporary audiences.

Anecdotally, To Organize Delirium is maybe the least instagrammable exhibition I‘ve seen in years – not because it isn’t captivating and beautiful, but because the environments were so engrossing that every gallery-goer I saw on that busy Saturday seemed to have forgotten entirely about documenting their experiences. This vitality of experience spills over from Oiticica’s installations and affects the documentary films, non-narrative cinema environments, and more immersive installations in the remaining galleries. The result is a compelling contradiction: the work is undeniably tied to the past – born from the social and political upheavals of the 1960’s – and yet seems completely effectual to audiences a half a century later.

Hélio Oiticica. PN27 Penetrable, Rijanviera, 1979. César and Claudio Oiticica Collection, Rio de Janeiro.

Daniel Hutchinson is an artist living in Hamilton, Ontario. Upcoming exhibitions include the group show Sparrow Night at Museum London and a two-person exhibition at Angell Gallery, Toronto.

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Expanding the Circle: Robert Davidson and the Ancient Language of Haida Art

February 11th to May 28th, 2017, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton, Ontario.

By Anthony Easton

Robert Davidson, Xyaalang (Dancing). Acrylic on canvas, 2013. Photo: Kenji Naga

The new Robert Davidson show at the Art Gallery of Hamilton is called Expanding the Circle: Robert Davidson and the Ancient Language of Haida Art. Careful attention should be paid to that subtitle, as there is more Haida art than there is Davidson work, and by sheer numbers, much of the work is tourist carvings from the McCord collection. If one was expecting something similar to the big retrospective of Davidson’s paintings at the Seattle Art Gallery a few years ago — an exhibition which positioned him as a significant modernist figure whose formalism re-aestheticized a complicated set of Haida/Tlingit narrative traditions — they would be disappointed.

In Expanding the Circle, figuring out what is traditional work, what is work intended for indigenous audiences, what is tourist work, and what is work inspired by these traditions but updated are unresolved questions. The Seattle retrospective made the argument that Davidson updated Haida tradition in an abstracted, European sense. The ongoing problem of what indigeneity means visually is complicated in this space but is less interesting than the show in Seattle, or the recent exhibition of Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’ Haida Manga at the Glenbow in Calgary, or Beat Nation, the Indigenous hip hop show that was shown at both the Power Plant in Toronto and Musée d'art contemporain in Montreal. Each of those made arguments about tradition and history; Expanding the Circle does less of this contextualizing.

Haida work from the 19th century was absorbed by tourists. From that point onward, the intersection between work intended for western audiences and work intended for the Haida could never really be sorted out cleanly: the colours, the anthropomorphized sweetness of the shapes, the fleshy curve of spoon or bentwood box, the overwhelming size of the totem pole. Haida and Tlingit work was sometimes made for white audiences, and sometimes made for use in indigenous circles. Sometimes it was intended as a ritual object, and sometimes it was intended as a tchotchke for settler consumption. The stone carvings of totem poles when intended as tourist pieces were not intended to be read as ritual objects, as opposed to the large poles made from cedar which were taught as a kind of narrative. Often these totem poles were torn down by white settlers. Some of their ritual practices, including potlatches, were forbidden by law. Children were sent to residential schools. Coastal first peoples were encouraged to make tat for tourist trades. Finding a clear route between all of these ways of creation continues to be confusing — about what is art and what is ceremonial, or which work is intended for white audiences and which audiences are intended elsewhere. The ambivalence of all of this is made especially murky when considering contemporary Haida work— work that can be seen as possible abstractions of abstractions.

Davidson’s absorption of a visual style, in the second or third generation after 19th century settler encounters, could be seen as an attempt to make these complicated aesthetic discussions more precise, to list the rules of the games being played, and to formalise a flirtation with western sources.

Davidson is a fourth-generation Haida/Tlingit ritual artist: he carves, paints, and draws. His work is very much about the revision of ritualized potential. Davidson makes clear that the shapes he uses are their own kind of language, such as how the circle of the moon and the oval of an Orca’s eyes could translate across media: in cedar, bronze, acrylic on canvas, or argillite. This is especially true in 2006’s Red, a cedar carving slightly larger than a piece of foolscap, where two eyes are painted on a rectangular board. The board curves and buckles, so both the circle of the eye, and the whorl in the wood have a mutually-reinforcing formal relationship. That Red is installed next to a bronze statue of an Orca tail, which plays with a similar kind of encircling flatness, suggests a curatorial rigour.  

However, the rigour often fails. The show has too many small pieces in too many small rooms. There are works intended for ritual practice such as spoons and baskets, a simple bent wood box and an excellent mask, but also a variety of tourist pieces, including dozens of models of totem poles. The show came from the McCord in Montreal, and unlike the aforementioned retrospective in Seattle, the absence of quality material is clear. The exhibition includes too many tourist pieces, too few masks, and could have featured more of Davidson’s signature prints. Even including the work of Haida artists a generation post-Davidson, such as Sonny Assu’s billboard-sized commission for Supercrawl last year (an ironic graffiti reclaimation of Emily Carr’s westernized Haida forms) might have provided a path into Expanding the Circle, which has too much to see, and not enough to analyse.

Anthony Easton is a writer, artist, and theologian. They are interested in class, sex, gender and the west. They have been published in Spin, The Atlantic, Pitchfork, Globe and Mail, and others. They have presented at conferences throughout North America, and in Europe. Their art has been shown in Toronto, New York, Chicago, and is in the collection of the library of the National Gallery of Canada. They will start a PhD at the University of Aberdeen in 2017.

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True Blue: “A Sublime Vernacular: The Landscape Paintings of Levine Flexhaug”

January 28th to March 12th, 2017, Rodman Hall Art Centre, St. Catharines, Ontario. Curated by Nancy Tousley and Peter White.

By John Haney

Levine Flexhaug, Mountain Lake with Deer. Image courtesy of Rodman Hall Art Centre.

The term outsider art has always rubbed me the wrong way. It refers to art made by people who do not have training in art-making or in art history. An “outsider” artist does not exist within the established boundaries of the art world. Depending on one’s perspective, the term is either pejorative or liberating. While I don’t entirely disagree with its usage, the term casts a wide net, acting as a sort of containment device for undesirables — artists whom American writer and illustrator Sarah Boxer lumps together as “visionary, schizophrenic, primitive, psychotic, obsessive, compulsive, untutored, vernacular, self-taught, naive, brut, rough, raw,” as if all non-outsider artists were normal. However, by my rudimentary arithmetic, the corollary of outsider is insider, implying a rarified world made both by and for those who occupy the centre and may freely designate labels. The phrase, for me, elicits a Groucho Marx-like distaste: the sort of distaste that one might harbour for any club that might have one as a member.

And then there is the eccentric example of the artist Levine Flexhaug (who could be described by the majority of Boxer’s designations), the subject of an exhibition now on display at Rodman Hall in St. Catharines. Flexhaug was a self-taught painter (though he showed “an aptitude for art” in grade school) born near the dubiously-named town of Climax, Saskatchewan, during the final year of the First World War. An “itinerant painter,” he travelled around the Canadian west during the Dust Bowl era of the Great Depression in a massive station wagon, schlepping his painting gear. Flexhaug painted — over, and over, and over again — seemingly endless variations on one theme, indeed image: an idealized vision of a Canadian Rocky Mountain scene. This was a world populated solely by animals, save the occasional canoeist. A quaint log cabin graces many of the paintings but there is no Goldilocks, rather a family of bears who seem more like the cabin’s residents than its marauders.

Full disclosure: on January 11th, I was called into Rodman Hall to spend the next two and a half weeks working as a gallery technician, labouring with a team to install an exhibition consisting of no less than 465 of Flexhaug’s paintings. We immersed ourselves in days spent unpacking the hundreds of paintings from their crates for the usual condition-reporting: making note of the condition of the works both to ensure that they have travelled safely, and to establish a baseline status should any damage occur during the run of the exhibition. But this was condition reporting like no other: the paintings were framed all higgledy-piggledy, from the minimal to the absurd, contemporary to kitsch. Many paintings had holes bored straight through them, stigmata where nails secured them above fireplaces, dining room tables, perhaps even legion dartboards. The murals that came from taverns and pubs were mystified with nicotine sfumato. Peter White, co-curator of the exhibition, remarked that the big ones even smelled of burnt tobacco. One frame was stained with blood.

Another crate: 50 more paintings. Another crate: 80 more paintings! On and on it went. I developed a five-stage response to Levine Flexhaug’s works. The first day I sneered at them; their hokeyness made my skin crawl. The second day I liked them, but I was suspicious. The third day I loved them, though I dared not say it out loud. The fourth day I declared (out loud) that I loved them, but in truth I was numb. The fifth day, objectivity began returning to me slowly, though when I closed my eyes, seared on my retina were (are) his innumerable repeating motifs: mountains, trees, lake, stags, moose, bears, birds, cabin, canoe, moon (always full, never fractioned). Then these animals began to show up everywhere: one moose on a QEW Ontario Tourism sign; another moose (its plastic head) covering the trailer hitch-ball on an old Lincoln Continental lumbering along Burlington Street; a silhouetted bear on a beer can. I’d been Flexhauged!  Suddenly the totems of his de-peopled world became grafted on to my surroundings — the Golden Horseshoe, this most desecrated of Canadian landscapes.

Flexhaug’s work was a salve not so much for a desecrated landscape, but for desecrated souls. He whipped these paintings off, selling them at modest prices primarily to Prairie folk who were depressed by the Depression, and perhaps also by their own landscape’s relative topographic inadequacies. Flexhaug’s paintings are examples of undeniably democratic art, the kind you see piled against a wall at the Sally Ann. Indeed, many works still have thrift store price tags on their sides or backs: $2.99, $10.00, one auction-buster weighing in at $50. His was a simple, if heroic world; his Rückenfigur was not a brooding German existentialist, but a deer. Or a moose. In the depths of the mid-century Prairies, these little blocks of saturated colour must have been escape portals that ran at odds with the brown and the white and the horizontal. One is tempted to snatch one off the wall (would it be missed?) and sneak it into the AGO’s concurrent blockbuster show Mystical Landscapes. Would it be conspicuous, or would it hide in plain sight?

Levine Flexhaug, Mountain Lake with Deer and Three Birds. Image courtesy of Rodman Hall Art Centre. 

Flexhaug has been dead for over forty years, and yet his seemingly endless typology of chimerical Canadian mountain landscapes has done its work on me. There is a quotation which I cannot find, that I learned of from my wife, who was paraphrasing her mother, who was paraphrasing possibly a New Yorker article from sometime within the last two decades: that if a man draws a line, it’s probably not that interesting. If he’s drawing the same line fifty years later, you’d better take notice. Flexhaug found a formula and cleaved to it, making paintings that abstain from the weight of history; they are flat fantasies that begin to make demands of you. They are like those people who are quiet and smiley, and thus make people like me blather confessionally in order to fill an awkward, if amicable silence. Flexhaug’s paintings changed little over the decades, save the date he inscribed on them; one has to look at these dates and wonder if the images provide any evidence of historical attestation: do those painted in 1939 show a preoccupation with the first shots fired in a new war? Do the peach-and-chartreuse skies of a 1945 painting express the existential burden of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Flexhaug was a commercial artist. He was an entrepreneur. Was he a scrappy hustler or a quiet, reflective soul? Did he find solace in painting these innumerable boards, or was it tedious work? Was he sincere, or did he wield his brush with a smirk? Faced by walls crowded with paintings, one contemplates these binaries. The pictorial subject becomes immaterial; the paintings deliquesce into a watery staccato barely contained by the key of “True Blue” paint applied to two of Rodman’s smaller walls. The curator’s function in this exhibition becomes less to order a selection of work than to take on the role of an installation artist, painting the walls with paintings. The works’ demands are not so much art-critical as they are anthropological.

After being trapped in the same room with Levine Flexhaug for nearly three weeks, I began to take the same refuge in his never-cloudy vistas as their first delighted owners might have. These are paintings whose jobs were, in essence, to bring relief, to give people a sense of escape or reassurance during trying or just plain regular times. Is a painting’s role — or art’s role — to be a window or a mirror? Does one’s gaze penetrate these simple, silly vistas into an imagined space, or does the eye stop on the surface of the paint? When I describe this work to friends, their common question is: were these paintings based on an actual view? I don’t know, and I don’t particularly care. As it turned out, the duration of time it took to hang this show was coincident with the dark, foggy, un-seasonably warm, drab doldrums of January. Evening commutes back to Hamilton brought the ever-worsening news of the Trump inauguration and new world order. Oh, how I longed to be back in that warmly-lit gallery with its hundreds upon hundreds of perfect, untroubled landscapes. Better yet, I could disappear from the city entirely and find the open door of one of those red cabins and, like many others who feel the same way these days, take up a new life as an outsider.

John Haney is an artist who lives in Hamilton.

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Shipkeeping: Laine Groeneweg’s Sea Level

October 29 – November 23, 2016, Members’ Gallery, Centre[3] for Print and Media Arts, Hamilton, Ontario.

By Amanda Jernigan

Laine Groeneweg, Sea Levels, installation shot. Various mezzotint and drypoint prints,  2016. Photo by Laine Groeneweg.

Walking on a littered verge, you stumble upon them: battered, wave-abandoned sea wrack, these things are nonetheless recognizable to you, just — landlubber that you are — as objects of use. A life ring. A buoy. An anchor. A wheel.

Perhaps you have been on a boat, once. Perhaps you recognize these things as icons of seafaring, from the walls of tattoo parlours or the arms of those who frequent them. Or from your own arms. Or from books. Perhaps from books you read once in your childhood, children being natural mariners until it is bred out of them through time spent on land or in life or in school.

This is the world of Laine Groeneweg’s Sea Level, the exhibition that set up shipkeeping in the Members’ Gallery of Centre[3] through the month of November last year, beckoning viewers in from the street with its warm light and its familiar/unfamiliar imagery.

Along the south wall of the gallery, a series of portholes: circular mezzotints in gorgeously constructed round wooden frames. An octopus with a dinner-fork trident gets a death-grip on a horse (Poseidon); a sawfish faces off with a hammerhead shark (Saw & Hammer); a giant squid gores a tattooed beluga (The Squid & the Whale); a blue whale hides in a giant clam (Hide & Seek), a jellyfish in a Jif jar (Peanut Butter & Jellyfish). We are in a world that is one part Jules Verne (Several ships had recently met at sea “an enormous thing,” a long slender object which was sometimes phosphorescent and which was infinitely larger and faster than a whale…) and one part Christmas cracker (What do sea monsters eat for lunch? Fish and ships). The mixture of literal and figurative bathos was initially disorienting, for me — but it was glossed by the images on the facing wall: rectangular mezzotints, rectilinearly framed, some incorporating colour. We are back on land, here, looking out through the windows of dailiness, though at nautical scenes. These images restore a landlubber to her comfort zone, putting the undersea fantasias of the opposite wall into a context of play and childhood fascination. A narwhal impales the stacking plastic donuts of a toddler’s toy (Sea Unicorn and Rainbow); a pufferfish inflates a balloon (or vice versa?) (Rebreather); a boy pirate attacks (in)visible enemies from his pirate-ship bathtub (Give No Quarter); another child, in an old fashioned bathing costume and cap, prepares to dive into the open, illuminated pages of a book (The Dive). One conversation that is taking place in this body of work, then, is between adult and child.

I do not know Groeneweg well, but I have encountered him around town, and I knew he was a parent before I knew he was an artist. The biographical critic — or perhaps the parent — in me sees in these images an artist working through the kind of reimmersion in the foreign yet familiar element of childhood that one gets when one’s own children are aswim in it.

Another, overlapping conversation is evident, however. The interpretive material about this show tells us that Groeneweg is someone “who has seldom experienced [the sea] first hand”; his images are inspired as much by “dreams [and] folklore” as by “the landscape of the ocean” (wonderfully paradoxical phrase, that). So there is a conversation here between seafarer (the one who might make and/or use the anchor, buoy, life ring and wheel presented in the drypoint engravings of Nautical Studies, on the gallery’s west wall) and landlubber (the one who made these drypoints, in which the objects appear reverently isolated, as icons). This is in part a conversation between expert and layperson, and it is particularly eloquent for me in the context of Groeneweg’s work.

Laine Groeneweg, Saw & Hammer, platemaking process. Mezzotint copperplate, 2016. Photo by Laine Groeneweg.

Groeneweg is a layperson in the world of seafaring; in the world of printmaking, however, he is a master, his stunningly well-made mezzotints and drypoints proposing their own conversation between expert (him) and layperson (many if not most viewers of this exhibition). A viewer entering the gallery, like the beachcomber I described in my first paragraph, encounters — on a dark verge of black velvet in a lit display case — objects of use. These may, just, be familiar to her as tools of a printmaker’s trade — rockers and burnishers and copper plates, an engraver’s pad, a loupe — but they may also be as exotic as the tools of the seafaring trade presented in Nautical Studies.

My one, small regret about the exhibition: a notebook computer installed in the gallery, with process videos and other interpretive material, demystified these printmaker’s objects in a way that, for me, didn’t serve the exhibition — even though I was interested, non-initiate that I am, to learn how Groeneweg’s mysterious mezzotints came to be. It must be a constant wrestle for an artist who works in a once-common process that has become exotic (I think of the film-photographers that I know, here, too): how much do you need to educate your viewer about your medium, in order for her to understand the work? How much is the medium’s exoticism — its unfamiliarity and/or historical association — an integral part of the work, and something that deserves to be protected?

On my first tour through the gallery, the notebook computer was out of service (happily, as it turns out), and I encountered the exhibition without its intervention: it was this first, unmediated experience that shaped my most powerful impression of the show.

The analogy between ship’s master and master printer — the master printer being himself a non-initiate in the kingdom of the sea — sets up a dramatic tension between form and content in this work. For me, this raised the level of the exhibition, which continues to haunt me, leaving me chasing chains of connection and encountering zones of estrangement amongst artist and audience, landlubber and seafarer, and (as I said above) adult and child — this last a particularly poignant dichotomy for this viewer, who so often feels at sea as a parent of young children in this fascinating, menacing, marvellous world.

Amanda Jernigan is a grownup writer landlubber who is in love with childhood and printmaking and the sea. She lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

[criticalsuperbeast-blog]

Nancy Anne McPhee Fragment 47

Nancy Anne McPhee -- Fragment 47

Redhead Gallery, Toronto  -- November 1 to 25, 2017

by Karen Thiessen

During a November weekend, I popped by Nancy Anne McPhee’s exhibition Fragment 47 at Redhead Gallery in Toronto. I spent some time with the work and then went on my way to Type Books, where I bought musician Patti Smith’s newest book Devotion. Before bed, I read half of it. That night Smith’s words and McPhee’s photographs merged into one continuous dream. When I awoke, I knew that I had to write about McPhee’s work. Later, while I was writing this essay, I learned that this phenomenon was an afterglow (1) effect, when an artwork stays with you even if it didn’t have that much impact during your first encounter. Although this has happened to me before, these delayed attractions take me by surprise when they arrive without warning.

Still under the influence of my Smith/McPhee dream, I returned to the gallery. Fragment 47 and Mineralogy were dynamic contrasts in light, mood, and scale. Fragment 47, a 12 by 8 foot installation of the silhouette of an oak tree buffeted by wind, dominated one long wall in a darkened space. The oak was created with anaglypta, an embossed paintable wallpaper, in acanthus leaf and bark patterns. Both wall and tree were painted the same rich dark blue gloss and illuminated with a 4 foot fluorescent light positioned at the base of the tree.

The title of this installation, Fragment 47, comes from part of a poem by Sappho, a female Greek lyric poet, most of whose work is lost. It reads: “Eros shook my mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees.” (2) In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit writes about “the blue of distance” that relates to landscapes (horizons and far away mountain ridges) and time: “The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel.”(3) McPhee used deep blue and stark light to convey the loss of poetry, the distant mountain whose wind shook the oak, and the distant past when Sappho wrote of love. Eerie fluorescent light accentuated the heavy texture of the wallpaper and bounced off the gloss paint in this dark space thus creating an unsettling psychological tension of menace and melancholy.

In an adjacent section of the L-shaped gallery was Mineralogy: five images of gleaming minerals photographed against doppelgänger textile backdrops. The 18 by 24 inch images, mounted on aluminum and thus unencumbered by glass and frames, appeared to float on three well-lit white walls. Each artwork was given ample space to breathe, and this had the effect of a palate cleanser between food courses. McPhee photographed selenite, pink halite, sandstone, pyrite, and bismuth against textiles that mirrored the colour, texture, and sheen of each lustrous mineral. With the exception of two minerals, most were photographed against fabrics that were flat. The textiles suggestively draped around the pyrite and bismuth brought to mind sultry nude models photographed on artfully arranged satin sheets. Like Patti Smith’s memoirs, the overall atmosphere was serene, warm, inviting, and dreamy. As Smith wrote in Devotion: “In my sleep genius combines, regenerates,” that night in my dreams of her Devotion and Nancy Anne McPhee’s Mineralogy, my subconscious mind linked the two. (4) To read Patti Smith, whether M Train or Devotion, is to enter into a poetic and reverent world of rituals, dreams, and mundane objects made sacred through her venerable care.

The minerals on which McPhee focussed her lens, are small, beautiful, yet common, substances found unnoticed or invisible in most homes. Selenite, a form of gypsum, is in drywall; bismuth is used in pharmaceuticals and cosmetics; halite, or sodium chloride, is the gourmet salt of the moment. McPhee takes these ubiquitous minerals and amplifies their humble status by juxtaposing them against glittering backgrounds.

Patti Smith, a dream, and the afterglow effect led me to write about Nancy Anne McPhee’s exhibition. The sprawling, sombre, monochromatic Fragment 47 installation offered contrast to McPhee’s intimate, ethereal, colourful Mineralogy. My dream after my first viewing of McPhee’s exhibit was lustrous and shimmering, like the selenite and pink halite against their sparkly backgrounds. Patti Smith repeated one word to me throughout the night, but upon awakening it was gone, just like much of Sappho’s poetry.

Karen Thiessen is a textile and mixed-media artist. She maintains a virtual presence at www.karenthiessen.com and on Instagram via @dayindayoutstudio.

Notes: 

1.Thanks to Catherine Leroux for this term found in: Porter, Rosalind. ‘Canadian writers are bold!’ The Globe and Mail. Saturday November 4, 2017, p. R18.

2.Nancy Anne McPhee artist statement.

3.  Solnit, Rebecca. ‘The Blue of Distance.’ A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Toronto: Penguin Books, 2005, p. 39.

4. Patti Smith. Devotion. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017, p. 13.

Photo credit:  Bismuth, Photograph, 2017, Courtesy of Nancy Anne McPhee.

[criticalsuperbeast-blog]

The Hand of Craft

The Cotton Factory, November 2 to December 3, 2017

By Melissa Bennett

The Hamilton-based artist collective Shake-n-Make prioritizes collaboration as a mode of working, usually among its two members, Liss Platt and Claudia Manley. With The Hand of Craft, the exhibition recently installed at The Cotton Factory, they extend the reach of this modus operandi by working with over 80 sewers to create a 15.5 by 6 foot quilt top, made of many small fabric hexagons stitched together by hand using the English paper piecing technique.  

They organized workshops over two years in Hamilton and Sackville, New Brunswick, including one at Sackville’s annual community event, A Handmade Assembly. In all workshops, they engaged sewers with all levels of experience, bringing people together around the materials in an encouraging way. They favour slowly-made works in order to build appreciation around labour, which is an overarching subject of the work; the term itself is depicted in a bold font. The quilt top is ambitiously large, and took hundreds of hours of work by many hands. The bringing together of people, various skill levels, and various perspectives on the craft itself, are all strengths of the piece.

Shake-n-Make regularly exhibit their works in a fine art context—they’ve been doing so for decades. Past works use a kitschy aesthetic to investigate the ways in which vernacular and contemporary quasi-folk art operates in mass media and within a gallery context—but The Hand of Craft is not kitsch. It is reminiscent of a British regal, and perhaps patriotic, banner in its scale and the use of the colour purple; its construction method also harkens to a golden age of hand sewing in Britain, when decorative sewing became more popular after the Industrial Revolution. By many accounts, paper piecing was a craft that began as an economical and practical way of creating large blankets using available fabric scraps. The craft reached its heydey in the 19th century when, in the western world, women of means and class privilege found more leisure time, advancing textiles in a more artful manner. This pastime could be a solo one, but often included a social element, as does The Hand of Craft in its community-based approach. In its installation at The Cotton Factory, the quilt top is surrounded by large graphic illustrations of hand sewing techniques, which provides an added visual and design element that situates it further as a gallery piece full of historic and contemporary references.

In bringing the art world together with everyday sewers (some of whom are also artists), Shake-n-Make build on the ongoing dialogue they cultivate between fine art, which is often publicly displayed, and craft, which is often part of a private realm. As Shake-n-Make point out, sewing is traditionally women’s work, the effort of which is usually hidden from public view. They raise this idea in part as dialogue around the value of domestic work, which is traditionally gendered.

In a recent video interview, the artist Greg Staats spoke eloquently about collaboration, saying that: “sharing comes from a place of compassion, and it sets up a dialogue for reciprocity.” Indeed this is one of the greatest outcomes of The Hand of Craft: a forum for people to get together in a productive way, and one that includes slow and meditative actions, shared labour, and the achievement of a collective goal.

…

The exhibition is located on the third floor of The Cotton Factory at 270 Sherman Avenue North, in Hamilton, Ontario. It is free and open to the public: November 2 to December 3, 2017. Remaining exhibition hours are: Friday, December 1st:  9am - 5pm and Saturday December 2: 12-5 pm. Full details here: http://www.akimbo.ca/akimbos/?id=112865

Melissa Bennett is the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.

Photo credits: Liss Platt