2014 - Reviews by Debora Alanna

Monday, June 9, 2014

Erik Volet - Scene from the Yiddish Theatre & Other Paintings – review

Erik Volet
Scene from the Yiddish Theatre & Other Paintings
1-15 June 2014
Erik Volet - Exhibit-v Interview

Ministry of Casual Living
819 Fort Street
Victoria BC
Review by Debora Alanna
The theater, bringing impersonal masks to life, is only for those who are virile enough to create new life: either as a conflict of passions subtler than those we already know, or as a complete new character.
~ Alfred Jarry (1873-1907). “Twelve Theatrical Topics “, Topic 4, in Dossiers Caneles du college de pataphysique, no 5. (Paris, 1960: rep in Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, ed. by Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor, 1965).
Erik Volet entitled his current exhibition at the Ministry of Casual Living (MOCL), Scene from the Yiddish Theatre & Other Paintings. Large paintings are images gleaned from historical photographs. Yiddish culture, specifically a Purim speil (play) performed in a home is titled Scene from the Yiddish Theatre. A communal meal illustrates uncertainty about being bound to classification that religion, disease and poverty involves appears inBeggars Banquet. Alfred Jarry upon his velo in Alfortville is Le Cyclist de Monmatre: Portrait of Alfred Jarry and Jarry carrying a boat with another Volet titled, Jarry Carring the Skiff. Included in this exhibition are painting investigations diverging from the Yiddish and Jarry contexts, distinct cultural pondering also from photographs or photographic references - Stolen Journey and Khmer Dancers. An oblique reference to “Portrait of Fernando Pessoa” by Jose de Almanda-Negreiros, 1954 is transformed into Volet’sTeetotaller in the Saloon.
Learned, vivid essays by John Luna and Astrid Wright distinguish Volet’s exhibition catalogue.

Scene from the Yiddish Theatre - Erik Volet - Oil on canvas - 4 x 6’
Borrowing from Jarry’s Topic 4 (above), Volet allows import and disquiet of his personal response to the outwardly impersonal presence within photographic masks. Masking or obfuscation of what may have been personal for the people within the photos seen in books and articles as uncertain subjects that evoke narrative descriptions complementing texts cultivate a performance with Volet’s use and transformation of these images. He involves us in impalpable conflicts between diligence and enthusiasm, desire and idealised devotion. Volet creates new portrayals, portals into and from historical, cultural reverence of a detained, ponderous existence.
Enlarged venerated images impose because realms of significance extend beyond an original photograph or a photo on a printed page, outside the scope of appropriation and reproduction. The work, Scene from the Yiddish Theatre becomes an entrancing introduction from which to view the entire show. The pretext for comic dramatization by children during the Purim festival, Purimshpiln, allows a vehicle to play out the repercussions of chance and or coincidence (Pur means lottery ^[1] – an astrological forecast indicating when Jews were most vulnerable 2500 years ago in Persia) is a means to reveal hidden natures and true characters as described in the Book of Ester. Hiding one’s true nature, our essential character, still plagues the human condition and the guise of acting out intention through dramatic play available to children seems enviable. Volet questions fundamental import, what plays out, in when drawn existing within the tragic-comic human condition.
A weakened adult audience is sullen to the left of the animated players that are greater than the sideliners. Volet paints a monochrome that evokes an intention to cultivate mirth and meaning from whatever is at hand, a Les Arts Incohérents’ saucy satire. To be an audience alone is a grave and improbable, impoverished existence. Ingenuousness is lively and teases out what can be impossible to discover without the lark.

Beggars Banquet - Erik Volet - Oil on canvas – 4 x 5’
And when i search a faceless crowd
a swirling mass of gray and
black and white
they don't look real to me
in fact, they look so strange
~ Chorus from “Salt Of The Earth”. Rolling Stones. Album: Beggars Banquet - 1968
Volet continues to wield and vanquish, to sport and supplant histories with grey scales.Beggars Banquet is saturated with shadows using severe black and testaments of grey, frightening white, a social chiaroscuro shows a meagre table, set for seemingly rustic if not rural, diners, possibly a group of pre - 20^th century moujik. The close diagonal table corner points at us, inviting us to join the motley group. A distant male figure, far right watches our approach. Volet weighs qualities of humanity.
Utilizing a still from Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana, Volet chose the moment where Viridiana, a novice nun attempts charity before her eventual sexual entanglements in the movie. The image is not a banquet of bliss availed by religious order but the abundant dearth of religion. Volet’s use of the Buñuel sardonic wink at charity’s anarchy includes us, his audience in the caper.
The front right featured guest at the Beggars Banquet is a leper being assessed by religious order. His arm held to ascertain the degree of his leprosy, a nun examines his appendage, presumably the man’s ability to eat, degree of degeneration. The diners pause their repast. The nun’s sidelong glare dominates the mood of the work more than a supposed leprosy might. Volet paints the groups’ general stilled acquiesce. What else can they do, being stilled? Religious arraignment presides for this second. Eroticism ensues in Buñuel’s version. Volet sustains our suspense.
Volet’s table is spare. Dishes are empty. People sitting left of the picture plane past the nun’s scrutiny are undersized, their influence on the event diminished. A wide unlit rear fireplace is a grotto of unidentified depths. The work is shrouded in poverty. Volet paints the impoverished mind, where proof is required to trust. Depleted spirits hungry for purpose are preoccupied with the provocation of an outsiders’ probing. The nun’s garb tone equals the others. She too is suppliant, although presumptuous of the import of her role. We question the arbiter’s questioning. Sumptuous black blocks, withholds information, starves us while testing our patience like anyone at the table.
Christian Metz’s 1978 publication, “Essais sur la Signification au Cinéma “.Vol. 2, p. 23 writes that the cinematic screen masks and frames, conceals and structures, limiting the viewer’s understanding of the image(s) to direct attention, construct tension. We cannot know the whole story Volet paints, only what he chooses to show us. Volet feeds us dramatic irony to appease our need for narration, our discomfort and willing separation from the implausibility of poverty. Who would willingly condescend to sit with pariahs or associate with the needy? What is their need to transgress boundaries of propriety?
The banquet is Volet’s offering of intrigue. He invites us to the banquet because we are the disadvantaged, the leper, consuming insignificance, one of the indistinguishable at an empty table. We need explanation to be confident in our separateness from social injustice. In Beggars Banquet we can see the people are out of our time, out of our experience, and can attribute the indefinite or unfamiliar to otherness, black and white thinking. We participate in a banquet of existential apartness when we are strangers to the ambiguous, reject vagueness as unreal, segregate ourselves from others’ chronicles. We take comfort in our separation from the outmoded or obsolete scene we can assert is strange - to most of us - relative to the comforts afforded by Western Civilization, unknowable, a poor table. We are the unrequited guest at Beggars Banquet. Our requisite is Volet’s silent subterfuge.
Publications originating from the Paris Collège de 'Pataphysique are collectively calledViridis Candela ("green candle") ^[2]. Two of Volet’s works have a green candle glow (Beggars Banquet stars Viridiana, provides another green reference), an impossible luminous intensity that might be seen to oppose the quaint as a sepia toned film still might conjoin to an idealized nostalgia, a protanopia monochrome articulating the past in the presence of a cycling Alfred Jarry, rex inutilis (useless king) capitulated in a Le Cyclist de Monmatre: Portrait of Alfred Jarry where Volet captures and surrenders to the king of incredulity. Volet yields to Jarry’s cyclist soul requiring the joy and antics possible on that vehicle that propelled the instigator of a “science of imaginary solutions” ^[3] (pataphysics). Volet’s painted treatment of the solitary cyclist, Jarry shows the image copied from the with shut eyes, turning a historic author into a blind moving time traveller, epitomized by the artist’s explorer machinations as painted egress.

Le Cyclist de Monmatre: Portrait of Alfred Jarry - Erik Volet - Oil on canvas – 4 x 5’

Erik Volet - MOCL Gallery installation. June 2014

Teetotaler in the Saloon - Erik Volet - Oil on Canvas – 3 x 4’
Although this work is definitive without the mushing, pulpy sentimentality of either e.g. a Dorothea Tanning transience, or a Marc Chagall floating figure sensibility , Teetotaler in the Saloon evokes thoughts of both presentations. We find corporeal incongruity to be normalcy. A Pieter Brueghel the elder multiplex of scenes, with a van Gogh / Issac Abrams colour palate, Volet’s opposing ceruleans and oranges strike the eye with the compunction of a bright but conflicting conscience one wishes one could leave in a public place to be stolen but cannot forgetten. The gangly tea drinker is suspended in disbelief with what surrounds him, unbearable legs extending from the round central tabletop. Allusions to this figure is echoed with a floor inclined body and a fellow entering a yellow oval in the back (ideal future sunniness), sauntering to a peeking cast behind the red drape. Temporal extensions are saloon dwellers in front of a red curtain, a staging of saloon/cafe culture. These are social tests for the solo hatted studier of mores in several poses. Teetotaler is every man, everywhere. Teetotaler is anyone’s mind rejoining coloured contradictions.
André Breton spoke about Meret Oppenheim’s ‘use values’ redefined, the rational concerning her work to generate disorientation, impose surreal functions with objects, noted by Josef Helfenstein in “Against the intolerability of fame: Meret Oppenheim and Surrealism” in ‘‘Beyond the Teacup,’’ p. 24, ed. by Jacqueline Burkhardt and Bice Curiger (New York: Independent Curators Incorporated, 1996), p 29. Volet’s teetotaller is fuzzy, tea an obfuscation device, the mental confusion of the tea drinker. He interprets isolation in social settings that might be seen through a quote attributed to Rat Pack member, Dean Martin, “King of Cool” (American actor and singer. 1917-1995) know for his extensive alcohol consumption, “I'd hate to be a teetotaler. Imagine getting up in the morning and knowing that's as good as you're going to feel all day.”
Volet’s teetotaler looks sober, bearing the vesture of distraction and mystification, the result of abstemiousness. The character absents himself from communal interaction, judicious, perhaps accepting what Alfred Jarry wrote in La Revue Blanche, 1897, "It is because the public are a mass—inert, obtuse, and passive—that they need to be shaken up from time to time so that we can tell from their bear-like grunts where they are—and also where they stand. They are pretty harmless, in spite of their numbers, because they are fighting against intelligence." Volet’s main character’s legs describe a person that does not easily withstand anything or cannot assert his will. This teetotaler partakes in his populated ruminations instead, an impalpable place.

Erik Volet - MOCL Gallery installation
We move in the direction of Time and at the same speed, being ourselves part of the Present. If we could remain immobile absolute Space while Time elapses, if we could lock our selves inside a Machine that isolates us from Time (except for the small and normal "speed of duration" that will stay with us because of inertia), all future and past instants could be explored successively, just as the stationary spectator of a panorama has the illusion of a swift voyage through a series of landscapes. (We shall demonstrate later that, as seen from the Machine, the Past lies beyond the Future.)
(...)
Duration is the transformation of a succession into a reversion.
In other words:
THE BECOMING OF A MEMORY.
~ Alfred Jarry. “How to Construct a Time Machine”. Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, edited by Roger Shattuck & Simon Watson Taylor, New York, Grove Press (1965, 1980)
Volet’s exhibition evokes the divergent Alfred Jarry’s 1899 instructions, “How to Construct a Time Machine” (tr. by Roger Shattuck). Volet gathers us in the MOCL time capsule so we may contemplate the future and past, photographic evidence transpires through Volet’s painted evaluations of time and space, a simultaneous opportunity to investigate contradictory lives and confirm what may lay beyond his panoramas.
Through his populated landscapes we understand how Volet penetrates and eludes denouncement of devout palaver by dramatically enlarging reproductions of varied loci. He extends images to enlarge space, preventing insular thinking, frustrate inertia, complacency. Volet’s need to expand historical imagery renders and surmounts cultural ambivalence with his large works, mainly monochrome to simplify allowing commensurability. Volet realizes concurrent elasticity and unyielding phenomena. He paints an intense concentration of impossible human viscosity, thick sticky human consciousness, the banal, the poetic. Volet has succeeded in converting his reevaluations into cogent, illusory resolutions, striking transformations. Obdurate memory becomes Volet’s rejoinder. Kings would would proffer a toast.

---

^[1]http://jafi.org/JewishAgency/English/Jewish+Education/Compelling+Content/Jewish+Time/Festivals+and+Memorial+Days/Purim/PUR+PURIM+The+Source+and+the+Meaning+of+the+Term.htm
^[2] Hugill, Andrew (2012). 'Pataphysics: A useless guide. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-01779-4
^[3] http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1246470.ece

Monday, June 9, 2014

Erik Volet - Scene from the Yiddish Theatre & Other Paintings – review

Erik Volet
Scene from the Yiddish Theatre & Other Paintings
1-15 June 2014
Erik Volet - Exhibit-v Interview

Ministry of Casual Living
819 Fort Street
Victoria BC
Review by Debora Alanna

The theater, bringing impersonal masks to life, is only for those who are virile enough to create new life: either as a conflict of passions subtler than those we already know, or as a complete new character.

~ Alfred Jarry (1873-1907). “Twelve Theatrical Topics “, Topic 4, in Dossiers Caneles du college de pataphysique, no 5. (Paris, 1960: rep in Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, ed. by Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor, 1965).

Erik Volet entitled his current exhibition at the Ministry of Casual Living (MOCL), Scene from the Yiddish Theatre & Other Paintings. Large paintings are images gleaned from historical photographs. Yiddish culture, specifically a Purim speil (play) performed in a home is titled Scene from the Yiddish Theatre. A communal meal illustrates uncertainty about being bound to classification that religion, disease and poverty involves appears inBeggars Banquet. Alfred Jarry upon his velo in Alfortville is Le Cyclist de Monmatre: Portrait of Alfred Jarry and Jarry carrying a boat with another Volet titled, Jarry Carring the Skiff. Included in this exhibition are painting investigations diverging from the Yiddish and Jarry contexts, distinct cultural pondering also from photographs or photographic references - Stolen Journey and Khmer Dancers. An oblique reference to “Portrait of Fernando Pessoa” by Jose de Almanda-Negreiros, 1954 is transformed into Volet’sTeetotaller in the Saloon.

Learned, vivid essays by John Luna and Astrid Wright distinguish Volet’s exhibition catalogue.


Scene from the Yiddish Theatre - Erik Volet - Oil on canvas - 4 x 6’
Borrowing from Jarry’s Topic 4 (above), Volet allows import and disquiet of his personal response to the outwardly impersonal presence within photographic masks. Masking or obfuscation of what may have been personal for the people within the photos seen in books and articles as uncertain subjects that evoke narrative descriptions complementing texts cultivate a performance with Volet’s use and transformation of these images. He involves us in impalpable conflicts between diligence and enthusiasm, desire and idealised devotion. Volet creates new portrayals, portals into and from historical, cultural reverence of a detained, ponderous existence.
Enlarged venerated images impose because realms of significance extend beyond an original photograph or a photo on a printed page, outside the scope of appropriation and reproduction. The work, Scene from the Yiddish Theatre becomes an entrancing introduction from which to view the entire show. The pretext for comic dramatization by children during the Purim festival, Purimshpiln, allows a vehicle to play out the repercussions of chance and or coincidence (Pur means lottery ^[1] – an astrological forecast indicating when Jews were most vulnerable 2500 years ago in Persia) is a means to reveal hidden natures and true characters as described in the Book of Ester. Hiding one’s true nature, our essential character, still plagues the human condition and the guise of acting out intention through dramatic play available to children seems enviable. Volet questions fundamental import, what plays out, in when drawn existing within the tragic-comic human condition.
A weakened adult audience is sullen to the left of the animated players that are greater than the sideliners. Volet paints a monochrome that evokes an intention to cultivate mirth and meaning from whatever is at hand, a Les Arts Incohérents’ saucy satire. To be an audience alone is a grave and improbable, impoverished existence. Ingenuousness is lively and teases out what can be impossible to discover without the lark.

Beggars Banquet - Erik Volet - Oil on canvas – 4 x 5’

And when i search a faceless crowd
a swirling mass of gray and
black and white
they don't look real to me
in fact, they look so strange

~ Chorus from “Salt Of The Earth”. Rolling Stones. Album: Beggars Banquet - 1968

Volet continues to wield and vanquish, to sport and supplant histories with grey scales.Beggars Banquet is saturated with shadows using severe black and testaments of grey, frightening white, a social chiaroscuro shows a meagre table, set for seemingly rustic if not rural, diners, possibly a group of pre - 20^th century moujik. The close diagonal table corner points at us, inviting us to join the motley group. A distant male figure, far right watches our approach. Volet weighs qualities of humanity.

Utilizing a still from Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana, Volet chose the moment where Viridiana, a novice nun attempts charity before her eventual sexual entanglements in the movie. The image is not a banquet of bliss availed by religious order but the abundant dearth of religion. Volet’s use of the Buñuel sardonic wink at charity’s anarchy includes us, his audience in the caper.

The front right featured guest at the Beggars Banquet is a leper being assessed by religious order. His arm held to ascertain the degree of his leprosy, a nun examines his appendage, presumably the man’s ability to eat, degree of degeneration. The diners pause their repast. The nun’s sidelong glare dominates the mood of the work more than a supposed leprosy might. Volet paints the groups’ general stilled acquiesce. What else can they do, being stilled? Religious arraignment presides for this second. Eroticism ensues in Buñuel’s version. Volet sustains our suspense.

Volet’s table is spare. Dishes are empty. People sitting left of the picture plane past the nun’s scrutiny are undersized, their influence on the event diminished. A wide unlit rear fireplace is a grotto of unidentified depths. The work is shrouded in poverty. Volet paints the impoverished mind, where proof is required to trust. Depleted spirits hungry for purpose are preoccupied with the provocation of an outsiders’ probing. The nun’s garb tone equals the others. She too is suppliant, although presumptuous of the import of her role. We question the arbiter’s questioning. Sumptuous black blocks, withholds information, starves us while testing our patience like anyone at the table.

Christian Metz’s 1978 publication, “Essais sur la Signification au Cinéma “.Vol. 2, p. 23 writes that the cinematic screen masks and frames, conceals and structures, limiting the viewer’s understanding of the image(s) to direct attention, construct tension. We cannot know the whole story Volet paints, only what he chooses to show us. Volet feeds us dramatic irony to appease our need for narration, our discomfort and willing separation from the implausibility of poverty. Who would willingly condescend to sit with pariahs or associate with the needy? What is their need to transgress boundaries of propriety?
The banquet is Volet’s offering of intrigue. He invites us to the banquet because we are the disadvantaged, the leper, consuming insignificance, one of the indistinguishable at an empty table. We need explanation to be confident in our separateness from social injustice. In Beggars Banquet we can see the people are out of our time, out of our experience, and can attribute the indefinite or unfamiliar to otherness, black and white thinking. We participate in a banquet of existential apartness when we are strangers to the ambiguous, reject vagueness as unreal, segregate ourselves from others’ chronicles. We take comfort in our separation from the outmoded or obsolete scene we can assert is strange - to most of us - relative to the comforts afforded by Western Civilization, unknowable, a poor table. We are the unrequited guest at Beggars Banquet. Our requisite is Volet’s silent subterfuge.

Publications originating from the Paris Collège de 'Pataphysique are collectively calledViridis Candela ("green candle") ^[2]. Two of Volet’s works have a green candle glow (Beggars Banquet stars Viridiana, provides another green reference), an impossible luminous intensity that might be seen to oppose the quaint as a sepia toned film still might conjoin to an idealized nostalgia, a protanopia monochrome articulating the past in the presence of a cycling Alfred Jarry, rex inutilis (useless king) capitulated in a Le Cyclist de Monmatre: Portrait of Alfred Jarry where Volet captures and surrenders to the king of incredulity. Volet yields to Jarry’s cyclist soul requiring the joy and antics possible on that vehicle that propelled the instigator of a “science of imaginary solutions” ^[3] (pataphysics). Volet’s painted treatment of the solitary cyclist, Jarry shows the image copied from the with shut eyes, turning a historic author into a blind moving time traveller, epitomized by the artist’s explorer machinations as painted egress.


Le Cyclist de Monmatre: Portrait of Alfred Jarry - Erik Volet - Oil on canvas – 4 x 5’

Erik Volet - MOCL Gallery installation. June 2014

Teetotaler in the Saloon - Erik Volet - Oil on Canvas – 3 x 4’

Although this work is definitive without the mushing, pulpy sentimentality of either e.g. a Dorothea Tanning transience, or a Marc Chagall floating figure sensibility , Teetotaler in the Saloon evokes thoughts of both presentations. We find corporeal incongruity to be normalcy. A Pieter Brueghel the elder multiplex of scenes, with a van Gogh / Issac Abrams colour palate, Volet’s opposing ceruleans and oranges strike the eye with the compunction of a bright but conflicting conscience one wishes one could leave in a public place to be stolen but cannot forgetten. The gangly tea drinker is suspended in disbelief with what surrounds him, unbearable legs extending from the round central tabletop. Allusions to this figure is echoed with a floor inclined body and a fellow entering a yellow oval in the back (ideal future sunniness), sauntering to a peeking cast behind the red drape. Temporal extensions are saloon dwellers in front of a red curtain, a staging of saloon/cafe culture. These are social tests for the solo hatted studier of mores in several poses. Teetotaler is every man, everywhere. Teetotaler is anyone’s mind rejoining coloured contradictions.

André Breton spoke about Meret Oppenheim’s ‘use values’ redefined, the rational concerning her work to generate disorientation, impose surreal functions with objects, noted by Josef Helfenstein in “Against the intolerability of fame: Meret Oppenheim and Surrealism” in ‘‘Beyond the Teacup,’’ p. 24, ed. by Jacqueline Burkhardt and Bice Curiger (New York: Independent Curators Incorporated, 1996), p 29. Volet’s teetotaller is fuzzy, tea an obfuscation device, the mental confusion of the tea drinker. He interprets isolation in social settings that might be seen through a quote attributed to Rat Pack member, Dean Martin, “King of Cool” (American actor and singer. 1917-1995) know for his extensive alcohol consumption, “I'd hate to be a teetotaler. Imagine getting up in the morning and knowing that's as good as you're going to feel all day.”

Volet’s teetotaler looks sober, bearing the vesture of distraction and mystification, the result of abstemiousness. The character absents himself from communal interaction, judicious, perhaps accepting what Alfred Jarry wrote in La Revue Blanche, 1897, "It is because the public are a mass—inert, obtuse, and passive—that they need to be shaken up from time to time so that we can tell from their bear-like grunts where they are—and also where they stand. They are pretty harmless, in spite of their numbers, because they are fighting against intelligence." Volet’s main character’s legs describe a person that does not easily withstand anything or cannot assert his will. This teetotaler partakes in his populated ruminations instead, an impalpable place.


Erik Volet - MOCL Gallery installation

We move in the direction of Time and at the same speed, being ourselves part of the Present. If we could remain immobile absolute Space while Time elapses, if we could lock our selves inside a Machine that isolates us from Time (except for the small and normal "speed of duration" that will stay with us because of inertia), all future and past instants could be explored successively, just as the stationary spectator of a panorama has the illusion of a swift voyage through a series of landscapes. (We shall demonstrate later that, as seen from the Machine, the Past lies beyond the Future.)
(...)
Duration is the transformation of a succession into a reversion.
In other words:
THE BECOMING OF A MEMORY.

~ Alfred Jarry. “How to Construct a Time Machine”. Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, edited by Roger Shattuck & Simon Watson Taylor, New York, Grove Press (1965, 1980)

Volet’s exhibition evokes the divergent Alfred Jarry’s 1899 instructions, “How to Construct a Time Machine” (tr. by Roger Shattuck). Volet gathers us in the MOCL time capsule so we may contemplate the future and past, photographic evidence transpires through Volet’s painted evaluations of time and space, a simultaneous opportunity to investigate contradictory lives and confirm what may lay beyond his panoramas.
Through his populated landscapes we understand how Volet penetrates and eludes denouncement of devout palaver by dramatically enlarging reproductions of varied loci. He extends images to enlarge space, preventing insular thinking, frustrate inertia, complacency. Volet’s need to expand historical imagery renders and surmounts cultural ambivalence with his large works, mainly monochrome to simplify allowing commensurability. Volet realizes concurrent elasticity and unyielding phenomena. He paints an intense concentration of impossible human viscosity, thick sticky human consciousness, the banal, the poetic. Volet has succeeded in converting his reevaluations into cogent, illusory resolutions, striking transformations. Obdurate memory becomes Volet’s rejoinder. Kings would would proffer a toast.

---

^[1]http://jafi.org/JewishAgency/English/Jewish+Education/Compelling+Content/Jewish+Time/Festivals+and+Memorial+Days/Purim/PUR+PURIM+The+Source+and+the+Meaning+of+the+Term.htm
^[2] Hugill, Andrew (2012). 'Pataphysics: A useless guide. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-01779-4
^[3] http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1246470.ece

Thursday, May 22, 2014

Ingrid Mary Percy – Phaze Five – review by Debora Alanna

Ingrid Mary Percy
Phaze Five
8 – 22 May 2014
Polychrome Fine Art
977 – A Fort Street
Victoria BC
Review by Debora Alanna

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), French Symbolist poet. repr. In Mallarmé: The Poems, ed. and trans. by Keith Bosley (1977). Variations sur un sujet, ‘Crise de Vers,’ La Revue Blanche (Paris, September 1895).

The multiple (that) must be made, not always by adding sobriety; with the number of dimensions one already has available – always n-1 dimensions… A rhizome as subterranean stem… (And) assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions…

~ Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 7

Phaze Five is Ingrid Mary Percy’s second exhibition at Polychrome Fine Art. The show consists of works on paper and polychromatic wood based sculpture, a hybrid of painted surface and forms, most wall mounted, some free standing. Works in both realms consist of painted planes cut and assembled. Her sculptures often include multi-coloured golf tees. The exhibition title, Phaze Five, was borrowed from the title of a cassette tape by the Steel Pan Mania band. Works are mostly titled Untitled, with song titles from this cassette in parentheses and some with original titles Percy composed. ‘Untitled’ seems to refer to what cannot be named, experiences that are beyond naming. The use of the tape titles in parenthesis is a foray, a means towards the artists’ enterprise, guiding us, fastening us to a possibility within the encounter with her work.

Urban dictionaries describe phaze to mean ‘remove status boosts by way of moves that force a switch’ and ‘insulting someone just for the sake of insulting them and to receive a reaction’. There are a lot of sexual plays involved to obtain the outcomes, potentially in both descriptions of phaze. Five, is ‘high performance’, ‘cool’. The Steel Pan Mania band may have wanted to evoke these urban references. Percy’s association to these references is inadvertent, hit and misses in their connections to her work or the premises seen within the show if they exist at all. Untitled (Right or Wrong) may be contemplated with the sexual implications; however there is nothing crude in Percy’s work. Sexuality is asserted but not with offence implicit in urban street jargon. There are no insults, but this reviewer has been affected, boosted by her assault of colour sense, potency of composition and universal forces that do not ‘switch’ but certainly toggles any complacency to a revving of sensory revelation and approbation of her intuitive disclosure. Reactions, indubitably. So yes, ‘Five’.


Ingrid Mary Percy: Untitled (Right or Wrong)
11.75 x 18”. Arcylic paint & paper. Photo courtesy the artist.

In 1962, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City organized a Symposium on Pop art. Invitees Hilton Kramer, Dore Ashton, Leo Steinberg and Stanley Kunitz panel transcript was published in Arts Magazine, April 1963. Ashton explained how John Cage praised Rauschenberg ‘because he makes no pretense at aesthetic selection.’ The ‘quality of the encounter’ between his choices are not metaphorical but ‘chance encounters in the continuum of random sensation he calls life’. Aston asserted that ‘a voluntary diminution of choices’ enabled artists working in the Pop era the ability to ‘shun metaphor’ that resulted in an ‘impoverished genre’. Chance titling of Percy’s exhibition may seem to give her work a release of responsibility from its original association. In spite of her choice of chance designation, associations are not entirely displaced, albeit the contexts are relational to her practice.

Leo Steinberg in the same 1962 panel said, ‘The artist does not simply make a thing, an artifact, or in the case of Baudelaire, a poem with its own beat and structure of evocation and image. What he creates is a provocation, a particular, unique and perhaps novel relation with reader or viewer.’ Steinberg recalled what Victor Hugo wrote to Baudelaire after reading Les Fleurs du Mal: ‘You create a new shudder.’ Percy’s work is provocation and encourages uncanny relations with viewers of her work. She has indeed created a new shudder because there is an invigorating connectivity, a metaphoric serendipity between the fortuitous titling. Her revelations are a frisson of vivacity.
Percy has revisited her imagery seen on the University of Victoria (UVic) web, reconsidered ideas through shapes in her paper works. Blue Wall, Pink Wall and the processes involved in Yellow Wall, Shaped Tartan from that period are reinvestigated well. Her show at the Deluge Contemporary, Supra in 2005 and her last show at her 2012 Squilloexhibition at Polychrome Fine Art investigated Spirograph images as devices do not appear in this work. Her Squillo exhibition silkscreened overlays included iconographic singers’ portraits, a Pop influence in circular surrounds are absent. The shapes and overlapping is consistent and carried over to Phaze Five’s works on paper. Percy’s interest in circular imagery that she continues to overlay, group and develops within new contexts is married with further shape configurations. She has widened her repertoire, allowing intricacies and complexity to flourish, enabling further symbology and celebration within her visual vocabulary and dialogue. We are confronted by scales of chance colour choices obtained from slicing her student off cast paintings. She imposes her choice selecting strips and colour combinations to deliberately juxtapose. Planar treatments are tested, sometimes asymmetrically for tonal variety. Memorable phasing from one shape to another adjacent or overlaid seem cyclical in the reiteration that is more fugue-like because each shape and positioning is never duplicated. Percy’s specific shape and colour references are relational. She plays, is attuned to ideas within the work. Steps between the works become contrapuntal patterns of behaviour. Circular imagery appears as snowflake cut outs and flower shapes with zigzags and curly cut designs in several current works. Also, stylized female breasts appear in three works.

Untitled (Pax) (the Latin for peace, with a top necklace like string of pearly connected paper on grey paper oviods, a circlet positioned as a necklace with a dovish feathery embellishment, a peace symbol above the large concentric circles below and a cerulean garland beneath the two central ovoids. The larger collaged central entities are circular painted treatments on top of solid, unyielding treatments - black, grey, black, then rosy. The dark under the rose shows breasts heavy with the weight of warring.

Untitled (Duo) is more Pop, more assertive, more let’s bare all declaration and affirmation of exemplified feminine strength.


Ingrid Mary Percy: Untitled (Pax)
18.x 11.75” Acrylic paint & paper. Photo courtesy the artist.

Ingrid Mary Percy: Untitled (Duo)
18.x 11.75” Acrylic paint & paper. Photo courtesy the artist.

Concentric circles and other entopic patterns has been a visual tool since cave paintings. Late in the 19th century, Hilma af Klint employed abstracted geometry including circular investigations, exploring the ideal formations and its premises through interrogatory paintings (although af Klint denied questioning) before Wassily Kandinsky painted Seven Circles. Feminist texts, such as the Woman's Art Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Autumn, 1998 - Winter, 1999) containing the The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art by Lucy Lippard speaks about the female experience in relation to concentric circles. Circles, concentric circles are a pervasive archetype in Phaze Five. Percy’s work dwells in lyric confrontations. She employs deep whimsy and spirited connectivity throughout her world. We see a conscientious nod to feminist forbearers while Percy maintains her own vision, embodying, in the Piet Mondrian sensibility, universality. (let’s transpose Mondrian’s use of noun/pronoun in this excerpt of his writing...)

The cultivated man of today is gradually turning away from natural things and his life is becoming more and more abstract. Natural (external) things become more and more automatic and we observe that our vital attention fastens more and more on internal things. The life of the truly modern man is neither purely materialist nor purely emotional. It manifests itself rather as a more autonomous life of the human mind becoming conscious of itself. Modern man – although a unity of body, mind and soul – exhibits a changed consciousness: every expression of his life has today a different aspect, that is, an aspect more positively abstract. It is the same with art. Art will become the product of another duality in man: the product of a cultivated externality and of an inwardness deepened and more conscious. As a pure representation of the human mind, art will express itself in an aesthetically purified, that is to say, abstract form. The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty; he is conscious of the fact that the emotion of beauty is cosmic, universal. This conscious recognition has for its corollary an abstract plasticism, for man adheres only to what is universal.

~ Natural Reality and Abstract Reality, Piet Mondrian, 1919.

Cutting paper has enjoyed an ancient and enduring tradition. Paper cutting, cutting to form to provide the viewer with a drawing/painting-like experience, has existed since paper and scissors/tools to incise paper existed, allowing the discipline to flourish worldwide for centuries, conveyed into contemporary art practices -20^th and 21^st century collage artists (too many to mention), notwithstanding:

· China since 200 BC;
· Monkiri (antiquated) by the Japanese after the 10th century;
· 13th century medieval Europe paper cutting /collage;
· Mary Delany’s (and undoubtedly others) decoupage in the 18th century;
· 19th century book covers (Carl Spitweg i.e., et al.), utilized collage;
· Paper cutting by Mexicans in the papel picado style;
· German paper cut art -scherenschnitte, areknippen;
· Netherlands, guajian;
· Polish paper cuts – wycinanki;
· Psaligraphy, paper cut silhouette

Percy’s shapes are cut, overlaid and glued to paper or wood, embracing the decoupage tradition.

Ingrid Mary Percy: Untitled (I’ll be with you)
18.x 11.75” Acrylic paint & paper. Photo courtesy the artist.

Untitled (I’ll be with you) is a winter white ground with unexpected florals, ovoids and two coloured snowflakes. All cut outs of painted surfaces form quite separate and distinct from the other. Percy dances summery memories on rime. The absence of coalescence is striking, aside from the inventive, albeit arbitrary painted surfaces that are later delineated similarly. Comparable flower shapes offer solo harmonics. Yet they play together in harmonious colour whimsy. Seasonal referencing is reinforced with the familiar shapes stuck to the picture plane as itinerant memories segregated and distinct, dominating the work. The painted colours are muted and differential. Each a disconnected experience is jumbled, non sequential in the remembering. Striated oviods are bubbles of demarcated time, unevenly filled with unrelated painted sections, recognizable as human experience in the way that memories coexist. In some, the remembering is not quite intact, divided, broken. An innocence of simplified shapes hearkens to the incorruptibility of hope as individual floating joy bubbles, memorable notes. This work shows the unqualified acceptance of another’s connection the way musicians trust another player to perform individuality for the other’s benefit, requiring conviction in mutual goals to obtain concert, unity.

Visual refrains in unique mandala shapes/notes – a different shape for each mantra/note quality conceded. A little reluctance exists in the bemused hodgepodge. The layout of the work shows a need for affirmation that individuals accomplish when playing off each other with a recurring effervesce. Because of the repeat of stripes, improvisational within modest shapes placed in various directions, multidimensional, a flexible rhythmic understructure, the snowflake duad and the complementary instrumentation performed by various parts / thoughts plays leggier (lightly/delicately), beguiles as indefinite pitches. Expectant optimism aspires imperturbably.


Ingrid Mary Percy: Untitled (Mania)
5.62 x 3.62”. Acrylic paint & paper. Photo courtesy the artist

Jazzy in its sophistication, improvisational rhythm and bright zaniness, the above work is seemingly uncomplicated, enchanting in its decorous straightforwardness. However, the work is possessed with tense confrontations. Percy combines the striae found in her sculptures, a heady hard-edged abstraction of reason above left and hovering as the dominating rigour of sound advice. Concentric circles referring to femininity (3^rd work with this specific reference) and personal vision are presented as pale blue orbs dotted with yellow areolas punctuated with obsessively precise black tips. These orbs are outlets and instruments that couples the viewer to the work. She expounds with light and darkness of being within the context of orbital paths we inhabit, paths that might seem to coexist with the help of the misshapen, complicated floral adornment and enhancement. Percy’s arrangement holds worlds together that somewhat entraps in its assertive charm.

Coral points of diversion and perspicacity, sharp multiplex incisions appear warm amid serious twinkles diagonally placed to moderate transversely, inducing insight. These flowers accompany Percy’s cut shapes that are straightforwardly Matisse contours beside and below the picture plane. Percy unapologetically emulates Matisse’s Jazz oeuvre created with scissors. Untitled (Mania) encompasses overgrown desire, passion overcoming individuality, an impediment to see beyond the cacophony of growth. This ground is dark, inferring that she is portraying an unconscious or subconscious state of existence. A corrupted ovoid between leaf and leafy climb connects physically with the doubled/mirrored trapezoid shape above, with a shared colour intervention. These two contrary shapes are two parts of survival, motivation and the diminutive but important niggle and naissance perpetually egging us on in continual interaction, complementary in their difference, although an awkward relationship.

In all Percy’s paper works we see a device for making or breaking or changing connections. Her light hearted exuberance allows patterns to present as archetypes which may be misconstrued as decorative. Eva Hesse stressed the censorious implications of the word decorative in her 1970 interview with Cindy Nemser, published in Artforum, 1970: ‘To me that word, or the way I use it or feel about it, is the only art sin.’ Associating Percy’s work with decorative results is a transgression, although she utilizes the parallel lines that Hesse included in her remarks on the subject. Like Hesse, Percy repeats forms to emphasise, to articulate absurdity with patterns of behaviour. Combinations of qualities, tendencies form a consistent or characteristic arrangement. Percy’s work shows that in her practice, like Hesse, art, work and life are connected. Percy takes risks because her work is perceptual structure, including not only objects (shapes), but the spaces between them making complex compositions of knowledge as elements and their combinations. And like Hesse, Percy’s work explores, articulates ‘the unknown factor of art and the unknown factor of life’.[1] Nothing decorative here. We are witness to motives, the epitome of origins that gives us a means to decipher the strands of life and art.
Each of Percy’s paper works are redolent with unspoken poetic staging of the human experiential exposé all rendered with indiscriminately painted grounds the way life is beyond planning. Vibrant and engaging, we observe reflection through the shapes and fragments she cuts and positions to ease the understanding of existence. Percy’s paper works sing vociferously about what scores and patterns us, lifts us, holds us in place. She allows us to emote within the discreet opera of her blithe ingenuity under the guise of inveterate, enduring motifs embracing the familiar where connectivity deliberates intention.

Victory Over the Sun, a 1913 Russian Futurist Opera with sets and costumes designed by Kasimir Malevich, includes the libretto in ‘Zaum’ language by Aleksei Kruchonykh, which he coined. Zaum is ‘made up of the Russian prefix ‘beyond, behind’ and noun the mind, nous’ and has been translated as ‘transreason’, ‘transration’ or ’beyonsense’ ‘by Paul Schmidt. According to scholar Gerald Janecek, Zaum can be defined as ‘experimental poetic language characterized by indeterminacy in meaning.’ [2] Percy has developed a transreasonal vocabulary of shapes, a kind of Zaum of organic poetics and probable congruous vocabulary.

These lines might refer, point by point, to the self-regulating capacities of a brain, to the emanations of a divine pleroma, to the operating procedures of an information network, or to a secret cipher.

~ K., Roberto Calasso, Jonathan Cape, London, 2005, pg. 252

Protect yourself better
protect yourself wanderer
with the road that is walking too.

~ The Sonnets to Orpheus, Appendix (Fragments), Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Stephen Mitchell, Simon and Schuster, N.Y., 1985, pg. 155

Percy has developed an oeuvre employing painted strips collaged on the face of wood and impaled works with multi-coloured golf tees reminiscent of n'kisi (also known as minkisis[3]) from the Kongo, although Percy’s bodies are variable abstracted shapes. The n’kisi entities hold the powers of ancestors and allow a moral rightness to be asserted. ‘The metal objects commonly pounded into the surface of the power figures represent the minkisis' active roles during ritual or ceremony. Each nail or metal piece represents a vow, a signed treaty and efforts to abolish evil. Ultimately, these figures most commonly represent reflections upon socially unacceptable behaviours and efforts to correct them.’[4] Percy’s work with tees with additional direction from her titles expounds concisely expressed precepts, assertive views without question though always open to interpretation.

Ichiro Irie, Hyoungseok Kimand and others have employed golf tees in their work. What is unique about Percy’s use of the tees is they drive rhythmically, boldly as colour punctuation, analogous of dynamic accents, breath marks, censura, staccato/markato symbols within music scores. Strips and tees are utilized in distinct compositions for each piece. The stripes of mismatched bounding lines are cut and placed in the mostly the same direction on each piece – some work in a vertical direction, some diagonal. Other works include painted cut out shapes that are overlaid with swatches or shapes of paper, sometimes crumpled. Each work has a unique configuration of contour and has predominantly smoothly sanded sides to discreetly reveal the plywood layers. Again, the titles are Untitled, with the music cassette titles employed as parenthesised additions to the work description.

Artists using strips of colour as compositional devices are abundant - Genn Thomas, Cardy Ryman, for example. Many employ panel painting with overlaid shapes including Richard Tuttle, Rauschenberg. Reiner Ruthenbeck’s Moebel (strips of dark red cloth on a steel wire netting box on stilts) and his Ash heap (ashes, wire, 92 iron sticks) seen in the 2014 Venice Biennale is a two part installation with strips and impaling points. The means is not the absolute way as others have employed similar or the same materials, treatments etc, each artist speaking through their own touch, their own thought processes that become evident in their work. Percy’s work is quintessentially unique, expounding patterns of existence derived from our collective experience as accessible presence.


Ingrid Mary Percy: Untitled (Ouch)
3 x 3.5 x .88”. Acrylic paint, wood & golf tees.

Titled as an interjection or a clasp for a brooch or pin, buckle, a setting for jewels - all of these ideas work for Untitled (Ouch). Pain and surprise of sharp corners descending up and down a little jaggedly from a continuous plane, topped with the force of impalement, even if the colourful commitment is slyly appealing is an imposition on normalcy. Change hurts. A little jewel, tees fastened and set caching the buckle shape, we clasp our eyes to this multifaceted gem. Four tees for forthright assertiveness. Smarting pleasure quadrupled.


Ingrid Mary Percy: Untitled (Lying Excuses)
12 x 7 x 1.75”.Acrylic paint, wood & golf tees.
Photo courtesy the artist.

‘In an oblique shot, also called a Dutch angle, the camera is tilted laterally on a tripod so it is no longer parallel with the horizon. The oblique shot takes the straight lines of the world and presents them as diagonals. This type of shot is generally used to give an overwhelming sense of the world’s being unbalanced or out of kilter. One of the classic employments of the oblique angle is in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), a mystery set in post-World War 11 Vienna. The tilted shot is largely responsible for the film’s overall sense of a world in which human values and actions are distorted.’ [5]
Untitled (Lying Excuses) is set askew. Although this work and like works in this exhibition are not directly related to photography, Percy utilizes the tilting technique described above, first seen in a 1919 film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, then called the German angle, a devise often employed in German expressionist paintings. This works well in Percy’s piece to accentuate the pertinent content discerned through the title, Untitled (Lying and Excuses), angst that occurs with human foible of deceit. Left inclined black and white pegs, points to obdurate extremes where compromise is impossible. These rivaling opinions are relegated to the tip side, the tees weighing the slant. Swatches of golden sharp flat nuggets pasted on the main lines of inquiry are disruptions of rough cut disoriented squares, imperatives as impediments to the paths of parallel action, long thin deliberations. Dark blue, mostly with tinges of green are interpolate with heavy pink painted strips, a vis-a-vis conversation follow the lengths of sharp, irregularly pointed wood ends, spiky retorts that are sent off the far end of reason.


Ingrid Mary Percy: Untitled (Always Be You)
12 x 12 x 1.75”. Acrylic paint, wood & golf tees.
Photo courtesy the artist.

Untitled (Always Be You) tilts also, but more, as if the extra tilting to Untitled (Lying Excuses) is to be offset, disputed or contradicted, as humans do to argue against, challenge emphatically one controversial characteristic or event that is in opposition to refute and stress an obstinate emotion or thought in an adamant fashion. This work has the tees congregating on the top in two camps, groupings of what is at stake within two points of view. Both clusters attempt to be somewhat upright and seem to adjust for the sake of the whole (work). The lengths of strips are more staggered in length, confidence wavering and reactivating, vibrantly interplaying as requisite needs dazzle when felt, displayed in rapid succession. Untitled (Always Be You) is dynamic affirmation considered in this scenario, which is intense, leans farther towards a change of direction. Contrary to the look anger and disappointment detailed in the previous work, this is the expression of compromise, self assertion, the need for leaning forward to an earnest entreat that upholds integrity. Percy includes rutting in upholding, but segregating contrary stubborn points of view (tees). Championing autonomy (for the plural or singular ‘you’ – either/both) is a serrated and abounding enterprise.


Ingrid Mary Percy: Untitled (Paradise)
10 x 11.5 x 1.75”. Acrylic paint, wood.
Photo courtesy the artist.

Untitled (Paradise) is a self contained island without the impervious tees. This paradise is mottled with infelicity. The swatches blend uncomfortably with the strips and do not strictly follow the formal lines most other works adhere to, some awry. Percy’s composition is an organic island shape, an ideal circumspect corps, a germ of a willful idea where the essential but imperfect paradise originates.


Ingrid Mary Percy: Untitled (Sea, Water & Sand)
10.75 x 6.5 x 1.75”. Acrylic paint, wood & golf tees.
Photo courtesy the artist.

Untitled (Sea, Water & Sand) refers to the details of beach topography. The sunny vertical strip, reflectively compliments and enlivens colour on the other verticals, variable consequences extending off the main formation, longer looks, extra stretches exploring the spell of the place. A large divided swatch of watery blue intensity evokes a concentrated tract of water, tides of divided time. In the title, (sea), a precise type of water, induces the viewer to think broadly and then specifically (water), the specificity of a personal encounter. Imagining going somewhere and then being where you decided to go might be a comparison to Percy’s piece experience. She evokes sand and frolic where the background merges with lives envisioning and experiencing happy repose. Tees gather to the lower right as hours marked, days passing and counted, holding the enchantment constrained to measure, off centre and slightly hidden from the main imagery but noticeable nevertheless. We must handle what is never enough time when you are planning or having fun.


Ingrid Mary Percy: Untitled (In Your Face) - REVERSO

Ingrid Mary Percy: Untitled (In Your Face)
9.25 x 6.25 x 3”. Acrylic paint, wood & golf tees.
Photo courtesy the artist.

Kierkegaard shows that the plane of the infinite, which he calls the plane of faith, must become a pure plane of immanence that continually and immediately imparts, reimpartsand regathers the finite… Perception will no longer reside in the relation between a subject and an object, but rather in the movement serving as the limit of that relation, in the period associated with the subject and object. Perception will confront its own limit; it will be in the midst of things, throughout its own proximity, as the presence of one haecceity in another, the prehension of one by the other or the passage from one to the other: Look only at the movements.

~ Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 311

The nkisi figures brought back to Europe in the nineteenth century in particular caused great interest in stimulating emerging trends in modern art and African themes previously considered primitive or ugly were now viewed as aesthetically interesting. The pieces became influential in art circles and many were acquired by art museums. The intentions of the banganga who created minkisi were practical, that is their characteristics were dictated by the need of the object to do the work it was required to do—hence the nails which caused a sensation were never seen as decorative items but as a requirement of awakening the spirit; or the gestures were part of a substantial metaphor of gestures found in Kongo culture.

~ Wyatt MacGaffey, ‘'Magic, or as we usually say 'Art': A Framework for Comparing African and European Art,’ in Enid Schildkrout and Curtis Keim, eds. The Scramble for Art in Central Africa, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) pp. 217-235.
Percy’s work featured on the poster for the Phaze Five exhibition is Untitled (In Your Face). Protruding reversed tees are jagged, edgy, change course or direction. Tees are driven into the work with unrestrained irregularity around the elliptic edges, except for the bottom of the work, withstanding enough. The front of the work has tees pounded in a central gathering. The painted strips are vertical with a slight incline. Tees on the sides are intractable contravention, wilfully wayward, a frenzied tenacious infringing as fringe. The central nogs are concave top revealed and point, bottoms up connected by an assembly of the forms as a central headstrong configuration, a wholly charismatic termination and departure correspondence.

The title, Untitled (In Your Face) shares the work’s provocative stance. The tee treatment is not un coup d’épingle, (policy of pin pricks) where trifling hostile acts spurs conflict. Percy’s response to whatever is contrary, too close for comfort is the interchange between coursing tees that are substantial in relation to the size of the work and the vertical bands. Distinguishing this piece is the hold by the tees’ lack of symmetry contrary to firm perpendicular painted sliced bars, a combatant force integrated with formidable candour. Like the n’kisi figures’ nails, Percy’s tees instigate a metaphorical awakening to cogency inducing intensive vigilance in the viewer where complacency is impossible. Geometry of parallel lines intensifies clarity in their relentlessness. Percy engages the viewer with her combinations of surfaces, forms and their behaviours in this moving exchange. Percy’s Untitled (In Your Face) confronts us and we pay attention.
Associating Percy’s work to fetish named and claimed by cultures imposing colonialism is flawed. Sexual transference to objects as Freud began to emphasize in the 20s, calling objects fetishes - charms that fascinate or lure as a substitute for human parts is an erroneous comparison to Percy’s work. Any inadvertent comparison the artist had with the original intent of n’kisi is possible with the intent of Percy’s work. There is a similar power to cultural objects used to connect with ancestral prowess that Percy’s work evokes akin to the primal need to connect with life forces. With the many varied strips, the boarders and central placement of contentious attack, the tees are valid arguments, though a central bewilderment at the heart of the piece and ever present mantle of challenging conflict.

Early 20th Century artists appropriated the imagery from African artifacts to address their own need for mystical or braver ideas. Recombinant ideas, not appropriation is present in this exhibition. Phaze Five. shows there is a primal need to address the multiple plateaus of understanding. Percy addresses fundamental aspects of humanity with a hybrid of media, of materials and quotidian forms, of painting and sculpture, found and fashioned work. Her ideas are melody and discord together. Diverse and extensive, Percy’s Phaze Five amalgams rollick.

Recesses exist on the back of Percy’s works. An unintentional reference to the n'kisi entities, although uncannily analogous, these enclaves become a receding part of the work, an indent to suspend or defer or direct the viewer’s connection with the world, redefining the relationship from observer to physical interaction. N'kisi apertures are often frontal, but not always.

Secret and secluded on the back of this work (and others), a small round hollow is available for placing something in the recess. The observer would not know that this secluded indentation is available without the artist demonstrating its existence. However, once it is known, one defers interest in the front of the work. Curiosity and intrigue takes hold, a private adventurous possibility. There is no cover to the small round opening. A pause from the work to reverse its content enables a sculpture in the round, becomes a personal choice (what shall I put here?); a directive and a direction availed by the artist. The artist acts as intermediary between the work and the viewer. We become included in the work as we must decide if we are going to acknowledge the niche or not, even if we own the work and can put something within its space. Knowing is a current of interpolation.

In his address, ‘Experimental Music’ given to the Music Teachers National Association convention in Chicago in 1957, John Cage said, referring to composing parts with multi-tracked tapes and machines and how the listener is ‘not concerned with harmoniousness as generally understood, where the quality of harmony results from a blending of several elements, points where fusion occurs are many (...) This disharmony, to paraphrase Bergson’s statement about disorder, is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed.’ Cage’s presentation culminated in an answer to questions he posed, ‘Where do we go from here?’ He was referring to sound, music and composition. He suggested ‘theatre’. However, his additional response to his own question as a suggestion is applicable to all art practices: ‘...the answer must take the form of paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.’ [6]
Percy’s Phaze Five works live within the realm of the Cagean Silent Prayer (s) where meditation and contemplation are brought forward in her ‘transbeyond’ entreaties, illuminating and expounding on universal experiences providing a lyric visual capitulation. Percy’s oeuvre acknowledges the playful, theatrical as studies in projected dissonance, disharmony of media that resolves to sonorous introspection, the cacophony and subtly of colour, of hard abstraction contrapuntal to curves. Indescribable cut surfaces and curvaceous shapes blended with precise strict compositional stripes and intuitively gathered tees disrupt and emit enthusiastic voluble clusters of evidence that one must puncture the status quo to articulate alliances. Interposing assertions and enigma within juxtaposed and cooperative existences articulates the paradox of living.
Percy’s show is alert and lively. Each of these works thrives playfully beyond desirousness and mindfulness. She drives and holds questions about the quintessential human experience with dramatic, celebratory aplomb, to a tee. Percy’s exhibition, Phaze Five is a steelpan carnival.

---

[1] Eva Hesse in conversation with Cindy Nemser (1970). Artforum 1970. Copyright © Cindy Nemser.
[2] Janecek, Gerald. Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism. San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1996:  ISBN 978-1879691414
[3] Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p. 146 and 297; but see also Vansina's corrective statements in How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa Before 1600 (Charlottesville, VA and London: University of Virginia Press, 2004), pp. 51-52.
[4] ‘The Metropolitan Museum of Art’. Power Figure (Nkisi N'Kondi: Mangaaka).
[5] Mamer, Bruce (2008). ’Oblique Shot (Dutch Angle)’. Film Production Technique: Creating the Accomplished Image. Belmont: Cengage Learning. p. 9.

[6] John Cage, ‘Experimental Music’ from Silence. © 1973 by John Cage, Wesleyan University Press. Thursday, March 6, 2014

Fallen and Found exhibit by Daniel Laskarin reviewed by Debora Alanna

“… it is also true that without flashes of the absolute, which are granted to only a few, humanity would proceed in the dark, indeed it would not exist, because it would not acknowledge itself to itself! And as far as I know the flash as never preceded by explanations or preambles, and only a very small mind… could fail to understand thateternal aspirationabsolute and that the work is the relative, that to create is already to circumscribe; that to comment is to circumscribe the circumscribed, is to subdivide the divided; is to reduce to minimum terms, is to annihilate.”
~‘Boccioni, his artist statement on the ‘flash of the Absolute’: his lecture ‘La Pittura Futurista’, at the Associazione Artistica Internationale, Rome May 1911; as quoted in “Futurism”, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 55
Daniel Laskarin’s current work, fallen and found, is currently installed at the Deluge Contemporary in Victoria. In the Carl Andre sense, Laskarin is a matterist. However, Laskarin enjoys manipulating materials, which Andre might have misunderstood. His sculptures, two that are ground oriented, one upright or erect, an ostensible homage to Donald Judd, with Laskarin’s further development of stacking, several wall mounted assemblages, sculpted poems with a video projecting in a continuous loop above the descending staircase (yes, Duchampian) is an oblique inclination of the never ending need to search for import and the inevitable escalation of searching, reiterating the unrelenting process. fallen and found articulates Laskarin’s investigations regarding ideas about fallen, falling and found, finding.
Laskarin, a meticulous craftsman, delineates with precision. Found objects inspire, are utilized and are transported away from exact definitions or the exacting credence that found objecthood imports.  His virtuosic use of materials coruscates with his brilliancy.He incorporates his own designs with objects that transgress their original use. He espouses colour, especially through material effecting strategies, changed states occurring with acid or gumming. Donald Judd referred to ‘specific objects’ being neither paintings or sculpture, but more credible than either segregated discipline. Laskarin’s work remains sculpture, surpassing Judd’s hold on exclusion, although cleaving to the integrity of the indefinable. Laskarin articulates the palpable absolute with integrity, rigorously eclipsing definitions, while gleaning the nuances of the fallible, the lapsing, defeat, the culpability of the indefatigable - fallen and the search, epiphany of discovery, initiating, establishing and advancing, grounding - found.

fallen - Daniel Laskarin. fallen and found - Deluge 2014. ~photo courtesy Daniel Laskarin

fallen - Daniel Laskarin – detail. fallen and found - Deluge 2014. ~ photo courtesy Daniel Laskarin

fallen is the reversal or the inside out of vented fury. Laskarin externalizes the outcome of unremitting discharge materialized as a traumatized munificence, a substantial rectangular aluminum shell insinuatingly raised slightly off the floor. The elongated lozenge casing surface has been commandeered with a barrage of jagged punctures, impelled pock marks jut out of the berated work, out of the seduction of baked powder coated aluminum. Eruptions mar, trounce outer surface continuity, consternating the subdued gleam of the crust. Vigorously ballistic, the sculpture braces intensity by barrelling the work’s surface with demonstrative wincing, roughly connecting unresolved seams that torque alignment. Conclusive, the work’s ends are enclosed denoting a temporal extent.
Low, Laskarin has inserted a slender, sleek core secreted within the containment. The strategic plane of dark metal unhindered by internalized bombardment asserts an enigmatic terseness.  The impervious, immovable crux of being a continuum survives in spite of salvos, assails that yields as downfall. Disorderly, heavy routing and censure cannot affect vital focus.

failure of flight - Daniel Laskarin. fallen and found –Deluge 2014 ~photo courtesy Daniel Laskarin

failure of flight - Daniel Laskarin - detail.

I now note that ordinarily I am concerned with, focus my attention upon, things or ‘objects,' the words on the page. But I now note that these are always situated within what begins to appear to me as a widening field which ordinarily is a background from which the ‘object' or thing stands out. I now find by a purposeful act of attention that I may turn to the field as field, and in the case of vision I soon also discern that the field has a kind of boundary or limit, a horizon. This horizon always tends to ‘escape' me when I try to get at it; it ‘withdraws' always on the extreme fringe of the visual field. It retains a certain essentially enigmatic character. ~ Don Idhe (1976) [1]
Poised on a wall, an elongated structure of velvety proficiency shelves a lumpity, leaning bronze casting of a miniature rocket with the debris of the mould making, purportedly an unacceptable result. failed rocket, recalcitrant in its positioning, explicating the out of sight, out of mind arrangement, articulates a stubborn resistance to expose refractory results of the cast while upholding the chunky amalgamate as a prized relic of 60s prosperity bolstered so we may venerate its survival. Laskarin sets the laden shelf just above average eye level. He backs the presentation shelf with an extension of the aluminum plaque to apportion commemoration. The object and mass is charming and endearing in its roughness, the uneven texture, the bumpiness and incline. The metal melds together with the rocket while complementing the rocket form, stretches the irregularity. Its shelf support is exquisite. The construction, the flawless cutting, the petite screws with their precise placement and execution, the effect is as enigmatic as divine perfection.
Laskarin’s failed rocket is an analysis and interpretation of failure with an absence of deduction, a refusal to be hypothetical. There is no ‘what if’ in his assumptions or reckoning. He adduces the idea of failure, the fact of the molten artifact is evidence of his analysis. He stretches our visual horizon and we must strain to evaluate the material shape and configuration on display. We do assess his rocket and matter, whether it is indeed failure because failure is enticing, the admission of failure intriguing because it is a human proclivity. We wonder if the little rocket will fall over. Laskarin presents the consequence of failure, the cost of conquest. Rockets are for triumphs in space. failed rocket is a crooked bird, with anomalous residue on a perch. The consequence of failure is diminishment. The cost is detriment.
Intent to make a whole, faithful rocket, however small, presupposes there is a problem, if the attempt at creation of the intended object fails somehow. The issue and quality of the failure contributes to defining the goal by way of the failings of the piece, its blighted look, disturbance in the expectation of a mission or behavior as an enduring symbol because of its instability. Problems are great catalysts for revelation, motivation, ideas. Each aspect of failing can generate all kinds of possible new developments. Yet Laskarin chose to place the failure as deliberate conclusion, a testament to failing. The end result, although incidental or accidental, is an inspired result. There is nothing wrong with failure. Failure is the object, objectified. failed rocket elevates us, transporting us to a heightened awareness of failure’s tenure as a enduring fact. With a boost, the homely, unpretentious casting asserts perspective. The gruff reconsidered, it becomes a heartening upshot, an experience to be sanctioned since failure can be a soaring enterprise.

for a broken tree - Daniel Laskarin. fallen and found –Deluge 2014 ~photo courtesy Daniel Laskarin

As scientist Sheldon H. Geller explains, “scientific research cannot prove anything…it disproves error.” By contrast, the perceptive artist learns how to repeat and magnify his errors in order to create his own distinctive style for sharing new truth.
~ ABC of Prophecy: Understanding the Environment, Barrington Nevitt, 1985, pg. 77
Preserved on a shinny blood red square, a trio of precisely executed inspection gadgets hold a leafless broken branch preserved in ecru gummy material giving the surface an uncomfortable coating, preserving the sticks with a viscosity resistant to drying forces. Twigs stretch beyond the sanguine shape, daring to challenge the influence of the flat, mottled surface. Clear of the inspection, twigging our interest as a declaration of life beyond science fascinates in this appealing challenge of discomfiting scrutiny.  We are drawn to the defiance of restraint. The inspection tools hold in lively alignment and seem to animate the struggle to hold the branch in place. for a broken tree indicates that Laskarin is offering his work as an intention towards, an offering for a broken tree.  He has us think about the correlation or relationship to brokenness as opposed to wholeness. Imperfection, split apart, incompleteness is examinable, with a tussle. Striving for autonomy under the duress of inspection allows defiance and independence from impassive scrutiny.
Being broken isn’t that bad and is only a small piece of the whole tree, does not destroy the tree. Laskarin’s work explicates the fight from oppressive enquiry, and ascertains severing the branch might be a way to point to a divergence that is on an adjacent, imagined reference point. This work is a hopeful reframing of the self-preserving veneer to hide and necessity of acknowledging the usefulness of imperfection. This may not be an olive branch, but the work wrestles with the undertaking of examination, titling the work as a peace offering for the endeavour of breaking and critically studying the tree part. Laskarin shares with candor his awkwardness experienced through his exploratory process. He displays his cheerful confidence that examination is vital (bold red ground), and even sanguinary (exactitude of the holding arms), while acknowledging the source of his discoveries with deference (title), allowing the escape of the branch to pass beyond the safe, articulate space of the square. A tree might be broken, but in it is not ruin.

for an uncertain support - Daniel Laskarin. fallen and found –Deluge 2014 ~photo courtesy Daniel Laskarin

Our thinking tends to circle around established conventions whose basis is forgotten or obscure. Nietzsche proposed that the attainment of knowledge requires a ‘solid, granite foundation of ignorance’ for its unfolding: ‘the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will: the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue! Not as its opposite, but – as its refinement!’
~ 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, Daniel Pinchbeck, 2006, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, New York, pg. 3
Poured epoxy resin evokes translucent smoothed ragged glass, is forward of a flat, silky but slightly impatient muriatic acid treated aluminum foundation. The deleterious, caustic agitation peeks through the resin pour of the lucid, undulating scrim. The grounds support a centrally secured forlorn, difficult and sincere “r” cast entity with its bottom speared with dense grey epoxy, heart shaped.  The splodging is high relief, realizing the value of and releasing invigorating spontaneity. A square, diminutive shield is screwed in the lower right corner a little unevenly just off the construct asserts intellectual obligation, balances the work with a dripping line of epoxy on its top, a gestural stripe.
Laskarin confounds assumptions about what support is, what uncertainty is and how they interplay in for an uncertain support. The combined aluminum/resin ground layering with the top torn surface incomplete depends on the metal divulging a willful substantiation below. The metal allows the resin to articulate whimsy, the wavy edging of the folio stubbornly unruffled. We cannot define the focal point in this work. It is the inscrutable stronghold of not knowing. Without the mysterious, strange, unspecified protuberance at the centre of Laskarin’s sculpture, an excrescence, anything that grounds - exacting aptness, discerning clarity is lacklustre, monotonous, imposes but in an insubstantial fashion - giving but a nod to the empirical, the logical as the wonky patch fixed in the lower right. It doesn’t fit well, overhangs but must be present, just because it is a consideration in grounding.  The mass, seemingly sticking out from the ground ends up grounding all the rest, enhances all other considerations, cultivates heartfelt elementals. Laskarin gives credence to, and tenders uncertainty as the quirky, endearing initiate of reflection, a willful codicil.

for the passing of years - Daniel Laskarin. fallen and found –Deluge 2014 ~ photo courtesy Daniel Laskarin

for the passing of years - Daniel Laskarin. fallen and found –Deluge 2014

In all the cities of the world, it is the same. The universal and modern man is the man in a rush (i.e. a rhinoceros), a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who cannot understand that a thing might perhaps be without usefulness; nor does he understand that, at bottom, it is the useful that may be a useless and backbreaking burden. If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art. And a country where art is not understood is a country of slaves and robots.
~Notes et Contre Notes, Eugene Ionesco, pg. 129
A 20 year old bunch of carrots, a cluster of very dry vegetables dominates for the passing of years. Offside, a suspended family heirloom, a 1930s wooden top is suspended with strapping that might harness aircraft wiring, a staunch binding, an unwillingness to ever let go of the momento. The top plumbs like a stopped time piece pendulum. The posey of veg roots dance, relief at their liberation from 2 years in an abandoned crisper, and their subsequent 18 year stint on the studio shelf awaiting Laskarin’s inspiration for their use.  His application, the pairing of unassuming and discordant items, illustrates how he can take advantage of the transitory to explain the futility of discomfort at time passing because, although long left and nearly forgotten, a bunch of dried carrots and a toy can be a focus within a new, haptic space, immersing us in the reciprocity that what might have been may touch us differently than what might be or is within this playful abandon. Laskarin touches us with serendipity. Behind the main structure plate is a slide, moving the scenario forward and backward, allowing time to reconfigure.
Laskarin celebrates objectivity, detachment that is interdependent with subjectivity, a predisposition of the artists’ love of “objecthood”. We can assess objects he displays with acuity and insight, he objectifies time passing through phenomenon of desiccation, disuse, wearing, the judicious stop of a top. We bring a subjective consideration to this palpable contrast. Material realities juxtaposed bring us affectionately to embrace his poetic celebration of time passing.
for the passing of years explores complacency about the ordinary, the ordinariness of time. Laskarin utilizes the unassuming as a source of time’s presentment.   The work demonstrates how passing of time can activate the serendipity of conjuncture.  He employs unpretentious bunch and bob to wield memory’s subservience in the insubstantial continuum called time. The items together are revivified, and play within ineffectual memory, temporizing our presumptions about disuse and uselessness. Redefining memory’s inferences and oddities come together to root derivation, plumbing the qualities of effects, references to humanity. Laskarin puts a spin on the ambiguous, fleeting nature of time and plays with the inexactitude of cursory assumptions.

for Chartres - Daniel Laskarin. fallen and found –Deluge 2014 ~photo courtesy Daniel Laskarin

Beauty, like loving, sometimes seems a kind of crisis. It brings us to the crossroads and thresholds of the perpetual choosing. Immediacy thus impels us.
The recognition of beauty is part of the soul’s flow.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 215
Gold leaf on heat formed plastic, aluminum sheeting with an acid stain, screws observing the whole. for Chartres is so much more than a sum of its parts. The gold form is ecstatic, the stain weeps. The screws eye you. In conversation with the author, Laskarin recounted how he and his family heard Mozart’s Requiem in rehearsal in the Chartres Cathedral, and with his daughter scaled the North spire. Bernini’s folds come alive in this work. It’s Deleuze’s fold: ‘from the fold of our material selves, our bodies - to the folding of time, or simply memory’. ([1])
The gold billows wondrousness. Raised from the platter, the awe becomes factual, the truth about the experience of beauty. The adjacent stain is the crisis of knowing, the instability of dwelling on the sublime. Laskarin willingly surrenders to the swell of excruciating perfection, eminence that is impossible to sustain but ever cultivates and coats future considerations. The work is a requiem for aspirations held dear and their treachery, an elegy for waking to loveliness, manifest and culpable, allowing intensity to be residue for continuation.

for the briefness of flight - Daniel Laskarin. fallen and found –Deluge 2014 ~ photo courtesy Daniel Laskarin

The stereotype of the bohemians as jolly fornicators, roisterers and barflies is superficial because it completely ignores the significance of Excess. If Bohemia was a journey as well as a destination, it was a journey in the dark to a land of danger as well as pleasure. It promised a path along the edge of a precipice, and it was impossible to know in advance whether that path led to revelation or madness, triumph or oblivion. The point of Excess was ultimately not self-gratification, but self-discovery, or sometimes self-destruction, as Baudelaire expressed it, ‘a taste for the infinite.’ The deadly sin of Bohemia was not Lust or Gluttony, but Hubris – the pride of Daedalus, who courted death by daring to fly.
~ Bohemians, The Glamorous Outcasts, Elizabeth Wilson, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2000, pg. 195
In his book, Abstraction and Utopia Now and Then Reader LLC, Nov 15, 2011, Chapter 111, Hilton Kramer quotes Tatlin:  “A revolution strengthens the impulse of invention.” With respect for Vladimir Tatlin’s, Corner Relief (1915), for the briefness of flight examines a revolutionary precept far from the Russian Revolution’s need to revolutionize social disparity and affect a new world sensibility. Laskarin’s insurgency is his internal analysis, infiltrating and advancing his complex sensibilities about change. He excises the introspection for our reflection. Laskarin’s helicopter pilot career brevity, his response to that career and his resulting views regarding his career change is likely central to the work’s traits, its arrangement, positioning, and delivery.
Centrally secured with more scientific examination apparatus, Laskarin designates a found and empty hummingbird nest to the forefront of his work, high so one can barely see into it, reminding us of the hummingbird’s relation to helicopters and that seeing into other’s privileged sanctuaries is a defiance of privacy, although Laskarin allows this although we must strain to achieve the altitude necessary. The empty nest has lost its original purpose, is desolate, grows lichen. The lower nest is spackled with harsh yellow plastic material used to insulate tool handles is the application of the excess of reinforcement, rewarding and punishing. The violence to the nest confuses the idea of preciousness and reinforces the integrity of the papery husk with vehement insistence.
Behind the fore, Laskarin layers clarity with the opaque, translucence with cloudiness. A curved horizon of clear plexi window, harkening a helicopter cabin window exposes what is a conglomerate of allusions to helicopter engineering, aircraft substance. Backgrounds intersects horizontality and verticality. The far ground is tampered with, crimped, bent, bearing the evidence of incident. The middle ground, softened with acid is spare, defending the damage behind it as the caustic action is mitigated with time.  Vertical, sandwiched metal crosses with the widened plexi horizontal. Interceding, Laskarin mediates the safe place (nest) and dangerous space (ground) with the transformative plexi view that is handsomely secured by smartly contrived steel clips. The emblematic nest provokes, reflecting on the curvature every which way, together with those poking holding arms. The ground verticality incites and disquiets accountability’s hold on rationality.
for the briefness of flight is about the invisibility of a personal journey. The work is about remembering the daring to soar with what one initiates, discovers. It is about critically examining, assessing that which fosters and develops what one desires, the heights one is capable of and abandoning the secure refuge of nurture, demarking it as a dangerous place to land, a vulnerable return. Laskarin screws together reflection and retrospection. His work is concise as the abiding feat of flying is brief, but the tangents of assessment, the inspection arms are departure points to fly to new realms of finding, of sighting, of intention. He frames intrepid exploits with its dangerous fragility.

found fallen and found –Deluge 2014 ~ photo courtesy Daniel Laskarin

found - view 2

found - view 3

“Now man that alto man last night had IT–he held it once he found–I’ve never seen a guy who could hold so long.” I wanted to know what “IT” meant. “Ah well” laughed Neal “now you’re asking me im-pon-de-rables – -ahem! Here’s a guy and everybody’s there, right? Up to him to put down what’s on everybody’s mind. He starts the first chorus, he lines up his ideas, people yeah, yeah, but get it, and then he rises to his fate and has to blow equal to it. All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he GETS IT–everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries. Time stops. He’s filling empty space with the substance of our lives. He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it’s not the tune that counts but IT—” Neal could go no further; he was sweating telling about it.
~ On the Road: the Original Scroll, Jack Kerouac, 2007, Viking. Pg. 304
Lurking low, down, Laskarin’s two part work, found is sculpture that began as an idea found within something else that was left for a time in his studio. Time is utilized to determine what was once one thing is, with reconsideration, sustained evaluation, revamping, and then, presto-chango... Voila! Eureka! There it is. It is found.
found is a duality, the symmetry of validation and invalidation, the interchange between yes and no, what it is, and what it is not, here and there – on and off ad infinitum. The work is Gaudier-Brzeska’s mountainous sculptural energy, with the definition of masses by planes (sculptural ability). (‘Blast’, 1914) found can be pondered with Rosalind Kraus’ discussions of base/no base work, absorbing the base/ marker – logic/ontological absence – not-landscape/not-architecture. (Sculpture in the Expanded Field 1979, essay reprinted in Artists, Critic, Context by Paul F. Fabozzi p. 283-289)
One part of the cut and bent aluminum panels recurrence is on a flat rectangle, ostensibly a plinth, the other has been placed directly on the floor. Each echoing with one edge touching the surface underneath and the opposite part held up by posts - identical mirror images of each other back to back. The work on the floor seems larger. But it is the same. The low plinth isolates the work on it from the rest of the world. The work on the floor looks like it is in the world, living an existential existence. The part on the plinth feels ceremonially presented, paraphysical, a parody of itself.  foundcontains multiple contradictions.
Each looks like an abstracted bird folding its wings, birds’ beaks (origami), birds grounded – one on one off the jetty, and/or mantles of mortality. The parts look like architecture without the possibility of accommodation or shelter. Introverted, one needing the other and back to back each part of the work holds the other’s place. The on the plinth off the plinth stance gives definition, raises questions of why, and what does the here and there mean. We must look down, and stay looking down to sustain the view – across from other parts of the room isn’t enough. We encounter the process of finding concluding with the found. One comes to think of the lifting, cantilevered edges as a double peer and we must circumvent one peek to view the other. The work is demanding, compelling us to examine and re-examine. found requires we appreciate the complexity of metal folding from the sheered aluminum, the striking sexiness of surfaces. We are bound to meet the challenge of seeing each piece as exactly identical and we must test this questioning by walking around and around the work, seeing the raising, the formations, the shadows that enhance and perplex in their complication. We must rectify any presumptions about the pair being merely tipped metal objects, one on a metal rectangle.
The process of finding the fundamental nature of existence, advancement of comparisons within ourselves, echoing, the anticipation of unadorned disclosure, time arrested to allow the finding are all considerations within found. Barnett Newman named the presuppositions and foundations, and its extent and validity regarding ideas, aesthetic acts (art) that encompasses ideas as an epistemological paradox. He said the pure idea is ‘Not space cutting nor space building, not construction nor fauvist deconstruction; not the pure line, straight and narrow, not the tortured line, distorted and humiliating; not the accurate eye, all fingers, nor the wild eye of dream, winking; but the idea-complex that makes contact with mystery – of life, of men, of nature, of the hard, black chaos that is death, or the grayer, softer chaos that is tragedy. For it is only the pure idea that has meaning. Everything else has everything else.’ [2] Laskarin reveals shrouding and its deflection, double death incising with his multifaceted, lively mystery shadows with the chaos of either or, with the soft grey of tragedy, cut sharp and hard.  Laskarin finds it, and it is multipart, a compound, mirrors. It is in the nature of finding, it is found. He tags us, children in the game of hide and seek, looking for some (one) entity in the search for meaning - tag, you are it, too.

stack - Daniel Laskarin. fallen and found –Deluge 2014

stack – detail – Daniel Laskarin. fallen and found –Deluge 2014

Water jet cut layers, capably welded, sander ground, muriatic acid etched, stack stacks memory captures. Catching snaps of derelict places, abandonment, emptiness, incidental glances into anonymous existence, a hefty podium for chance detection and a revelation of urbanity, stack shelves a few photos for the public to finger, browse. We do reluctantly touch, with trepidation. stack is both self-important and significant, detaining us, holding us with this commitment to see what’s being stored without any direct or apparent indication that we might become or indeed be revealed as a photographic capture held for posterity, too. We might see ourselves, be seen, be held. More disconcerting, we might not be acknowledged, or more severely, removed from the stack.
Laskarin establishes a provision to view peripatetic discourse through the layering and informal retrieval of documented finding. His cachet, documents of found glimpses is an incessant endeavour. The repository establishes the weight of holding on to the storage of ubiquitous finding, setting up a provision for continuing existence, what is extant, although the views (photos) of the finding, what is found are interchangeable. The tranquil grey work presses with abstemious insistence to convene photographic responses. stack is grave, a subdued tribute to finding, once found arbitrarily shelved. Rendered with exactitude, stack shows the serious responsibility of holding onto the found.
This work is access to the weighing of fallen and found, an epitaph commemorating time’s residue. The upright time piece chinks equably, firmly registering gauging what can be found, keeping us from falling.

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[1] http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors3/casconetext.html
[2] The Picture, Barnett Newman, New York, Betty Parsons Gallery exhibition catalogue, 1947. Reprinted in Theories of Modern Art, Herschell B. Chipp, University of California Press, 1968, pg. 550

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[1] http://www.simonosullivan.net/articles/deleuze-dictionary.pdf
Daniel Laskarin
fallen and found
January 31 to March 8, 2014
Deluge Contemporary Art
636 Yates Street
Victoria, BC, Canada V8W 1L3
Review by Debora Alanna

Friday, February 21, 2014

“ Stricking Oil “ exhibit by Michael Lewis reviewed by Debora Alanna

Sea Czar City
Vegas, In The Desert Of My Mind
Michael Lewis - Homage
Michael Lewis – Striking Oil review by Philip Willey
Michael Lewis – Times Colonist by Robert Amos
“My images are not products of the spiritual realm, they are comics with no continuity, anti-animated post salon nostalgic slapstick. It was the discovery of George Grosz and William Gropper that taught me that rage can look like a political cartoon on, delight can dress itself up like Batman – that you don’t need a diamond drill bit to strike oil, sometimes a paintbrush and pencil will do just fine.”
~ from Michael Lewis’ artist statement .
Walking around Dales Gallery where Michael Lewis’ Striking Oil hangs (until February 26th), I imagined hearing Henry Mancini’s orchestra playing Stardust merging into a melliferous medley, then, gunning with sharp and sassy sax and bossa rhythms. Perhaps, Orsen Wells’ guttural tones rasping Mike Hammer’s voice overlaid with scratchy radio waves. I heard the rat-ta-tatting of weapons and cat-call whistle blowing pronouncing danger and decadence through affable memories, as detective fiction will engender mystery and mayhem. Utilizing his strong connection to the 50s movie, TV and pulp fiction genres, Michael Lewis’ work is sharp-witted and vociferous, oil works of striking saliency.
Conspicuously pure colour vaults and jostles the viewer. Hard edged characterization snatches, grips where grappling of imposing political stances are decried, and underdogs as comic book immortals reign. Coy and suave characters are juxtaposed, painted to reverberate cartoon sensibilities with current concerns that still twist us.
There is much more here than what aficionado honours present. Experienced colours and shapes Lewis’ grasp and engagement of Victoria’s disadvantaged for decades where he worked to ameliorate their strife. In Lewis’ work there is no ploy for brazen hero worship. Through his treatment of what influences him he explicates social mores currently frightful today, which is more distressing than invented plots, whodunit narratives. Lewis’ exploratory shading, askew delineations, architectural cartooning, parquet grounds and ceilings and walls et al, illustrates his incisive tenderness through comicalness, and catchy visualization.
He darkly outlines urbanity’s folly. He drills at our dismissals, and self-conscious clumsiness with firm unadulterated colour and misproportioned extremes, demanding outlines addressing our disproportioned views of the world’s woes, our imbalance as a result of political choices and commerce’s greed – war, warring spirits, the aftermath of battles, pecuniary strife. Painted wisecracking amplifications of heartfelt pronouncements as visual puns keep us from tearful, presumptuous conclusions. Scruffy wastrels, goofy animals are symbolically and often satirically recalcitrant, headstrong and stubbornly resistant to off-handed speculation and in defiance of societal condemnation. Lewis’ madcap treatment of affectionate recollections, his jovial figures and evocative scenarios play with our complacency and pop us on the head.
His paintings are mostly a juggling of angular compositions with varied lens shot or storyboard views, perhaps digesting Ben Shahn compositional ranges  - wide angles or close up stills, overlays saturated with bold, quirky objectivity. Lewis’ shrewd and mindful work allows a cheerfulness to help us through the compelling and significant aftermath of his formative and collective post World War 11 experiences, societal bargaining of the War damage and consternation, and inescapable, painful observations of people imposing as William Gropper figuration, experiencing poverty in Victoria BC.
During the twenties of century through to 1933 when the Nazis came to power, an 1924 exhibition held at the Kunsthalle in Mannheim curated by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, the Director showed artists that rejected personal romanticism of the expressionists, and wanted to characterize public attitudes. They further defined themselves and their work utilizing the title of the show, the New Objectivity (in German, Neue Sachlichkeit). Although these artists generally were concerned with a characterizing of events, there were two distinct ways artists worked within the New Objectivity movement. Classisists, or the right wing artists aimed to ‘search more for the object of timeless ability to embody the external laws of existence in the artistic sphere’.  George Grosz and Otto Dix were two of the the verists, or left wing artists who allowed ‘tear the objective form of the world of contemporary facts and represent current experience in its tempo and fevered temperature.’ [1] [‘Sachlichkeit should be understood by its root, Sach, meaning "thing", "fact", "subject", or "object." Sachlich could be best understood as "factual", "matter-of-fact", "impartial", "practical", or "precise"; Sachlichkeit is the noun 'form of the adjective/adverb and usually implies "matter-of-factness.’] [2]
Lewis’s work incarnate, lively characterizations shows his chronicling constancy faithful to the matter-of-factness inundating social constructs, anthropomorphizing the animal in us, humanizing the superstar features at the heart of relational entanglements. Lewis records the jagged and the out of kilter in humanity’s interactions, foibles with precision and a blaring palate, because humankind is so palpably wonky and colourful.
Referring to his personal concerns, Lewis collects, recollects and bares his memories, divulging stilled sequences of a life lived through the exhilaration of fact as fiction presented through his mind’s eye. More, he is a painter of folks, ordinary people seen through his extraordinary vision. He redeems their inadequacy with his brave and assertive brush. Confabulation becomes actualized as historically
important interpretations. Lewis chronicles lives lived through the vehicles of social realism, comic rendering and quick witted panache of mediated media. His works are precise and expository, blatant astuteness made with a chuckle so we too can enjoy societies foibles, its waywardness while thinking of the overall import Lewis brings us to, to ponder in our naiveté .
Lewis’ works deliver unexpected causality, reframing and reinterpreting, demonstrating how we can grasp, live with the bewildering, confounding any assumptions. Fraught with the sensationally humourous and charming sequences intensified scenarios, double meanings, visual syllepsis or paraprosdokian approaches and schemes illustrated, Lewis ensures we focus on his perspectives, uncompromising blatancy with jest cosseting the dark side charitably.

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An interview with Michael Lewis by Debora Alanna held 2 February 2014 at Dales Gallery during his “Striking Oil” exhibition, with quotes by the artist that accompanied his paintings and subsequent thoughts about Lewis’ work by Debora Alanna.
M = Michael Lewis
D = Debora Alanna

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Kiss Me Deadly - 36 x 24" by Michael Lewis
“I got my first breath of cool from television detective shows. I wanted a girlfriend like Honey West, a woman with her own ocelot. I wanted to hang out at Pepe’s with T.H.E. Cat. I wanted to play pool with Peter Gunn and piano with Johnny Staccato. I wanted to listen all day to Mr. Lucky jazz. I wanted it to follow me down the street like a sound track. What a crazy kid’s wish. I had no idea it was yet to come.”
~ Michael Lewis.
D             Journeys through Michael’s world.
M             One of my fetishes is 50s detective novels.  Movies. Television shows.
Kiss me deadly is done off a poster from a movie called ‘Kiss Me Deadly’, a Mike Hammerfilm An anti-Mike Hammer film.
D             Anti?
M             The director took the character, who in the 50s was very popular and made him into a fascist idiot. In the film he was treated as a fascist character. At that time, Mickey Spillane was the bestselling novelist in the world The director felt there were such levels of fascism in it that he took his book and twisted it to his own design and made this classic film
Honey West was, in the 50s was a television female detective. And this (central figure) is my version of Shell Scott, who was a lampoon of Mike Hammer. There is a fish tank in a description of Mike Hammer’s apartment. The cat album is Mr Lucky,. Henry Manccini. The other album (in the painting) is a version of Richard Diamond. This TV detective shows became my introduction to jazz. Peter Gunn. TV detective jazz was my first exposure to jazz.
D             What’s happening here? You have a central core. You have abstraction. The mask.
M             I wanted to do a version of that 50s hip decor that often had African masks.
D             And the orange couch.

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Lewis has adopted some of the objective styling and rational commentary, outlining actuality seen in the New Objectivists verists. However, Lewis brings lightening palaver of high spirits into his work.  He combines sharp, humourous adoption of mid century comics together with a witty demonstration of the inscrutability of TV menace and jeopardy, exercising persuasively slick film generalities and the spectacular and unfussy verity of pulp literature, staggeringly. Lewis allows the intensely impassioned but simplified ideas to supersede human impairment, demarcating an emotional maturing through an expressionist treatment of his affecting influences. Kiss me Deadly expounds the mid century genre with distinguishing form, style and subject matter. The shape of the TV, the period lamp(s), the flat top haircut, the turntable spinning an ambiance of heavy mid century colours. Green shadows and fixated women decorate. The large fish tank occupies nearly half of the centre of the picture plane – a think-tank of discordant gaping fishes bubbling their air, reflecting the TV bubble shape, and the mouth of the ‘Kiss me Deadly’ poster. Lewis paints a foreshadowing or embrace of irreconcilable smacking, critical remarking, a gibe about the lethal and implacable world of mortal’s glancing blows.

Sands - 36 x 24" by Michael Lewis
“I grew up in Las Vegas. I met both Red Skelton and Vincent Price when I was a teenager. I tried to sell them a painting. It wasn’t one of mine. It was by an artist, like them now, long since gone.”
~ Michael Lewis
D             The Sands, as in the Sands hotel?
M             Yes. Because I was raised in Las Vegas.
My mother was an antique dealer. She had this painting. We had two appraisals. One was that it was authentic. The other was, that it wasn’t. It was a copy.
D             Either or.
M             Ya. It was by an artist named Gottfried Mind. He had some form of autism, some form of socially unacceptable behaviour. He came from a British aristocratic family. They gave him pencils and paints. He turned out to be a quite proficient painter of animals. My mother had a painting on porcelain that was supposedly by him called “The Cat and the Kittens”. And if it was by him, if we could actually authenticate it, it would have been very valuable. We didn’t have any money at the time...
She had made contact with both Red Skelton and Vincent Price, who were both art collectors. But then she became too ill to attend these meetings so, her star struck, very inept son went to meet both of them to try and sell this painting.
D             You?
M             Ya.
Skelton was playing at the Sands at the time. He was also having his first art show. He started painting clowns. They had a bungalow in the back for him I had an appointment, a day to go meet him. When I went out he was more or less like this... He was in the swimming pool, in a sou'wester hat, painting on a little floaty thing. That is how he kept his weight down. He was in the water in this coat and hat sweating like crazy. Just sweating massively.
Vincent Price I met at a book fair. He was a gourmet cook, and he was flogging his cookbook at that point and doing cooking demonstrations. That’s why I painted him with a meat cleaver.
We had two different appraisals, and they said unless we could get an appraisal that it was verifiably authentic they weren’t really interested in buying. 
D             Whatever happened to your mother’s Mind painting?
M             It went to my uncle, and then I believe my uncle said it went to the San Diego museum.
D             I love the car, with fins one cannot easily maneuver around. I love how the golf flag is like a musical note.
Would you explain your asymmetric exploits in your paintings?
M             There is a lot of influence from German Expressionism. I mostly have 3 influences – the American Social Realists of the 30s, the German Expressionists of the 20s-30s, and the Sunday Funnies.

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Sands presides over a real fabricated memory, managing the lighthearted and anomalous lives and funny people that two entertainers animate. Meetings between Red Skelton and Vincent Price are combined into a single work. Yellowy sky, rails and roofs askew, the desert sands bite into the grassy golf plain as the stars star in bizarre antics. Lewis’ work challenges the eccentric madness that celebrity creates. The work demonstrates the grains of lunacy, the idiocy of being full of polish with the artificial boundary between the ordinary public and stars. He implies that crossing the line between them and us, or the sandy frontier between sanity and sensational behaviour is troubling as his cockeyed landscape and crooked portrayal of these performers’ realities. Ignoring or hiding from obvious signs of danger, salacious folly buries its head in the sand.

Politicians and Pirates - 52 x 31” by Michael Lewis
“Battle in Seattle and then some.”
~ Michael Lewis
M             This came out of the Seattle confrontation and riots in 1999, where there were protests around the World Trade Conference that became known as the ‘Battle of Seattle’.
D             Your Gap store looks like no Gap I have ever seen.
M             That’s part of the whole corporate deliberation.
D             It’s using ‘gap’ as the other meaning of the word.
M             I’ve always loved that. I don’t understand. Do they do this on purpose? If you look at the Gap, manikins don’t have any heads. Like there’s no brain. There is a hat and a shirt, and nothing in-between. I don’t understand that as an advertising device. You have no brain if you come in here and buy these clothes. That’s what it is saying to me. I have always wondered who came up with this and why.
D             You have a cross of light in the apartment windows. You have the world dissected vertically. The Seattle light is all grey.
The police shop at the Gap?
M             Ya, they are all faceless. They do look faceless. That’s part of the intimidation.
D             Who is the pirate?
M             Robber barons. Corporate entities.
D             If only they looked as dapper.
You painted a lovely green door, an escape route? Then you have three windows, each with a different window treatment. And they are askew. They are almost the face of the building. You know how windows become eyes of faces? Then there is a lit window on the far right, an empty window.
M             They are all pretty well empty.

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Delving into the gap between inconsolable breach and unnerving alliance between politics, police states, pirating, Politicians and Pirates gapes and ransacks these realities, presenting the official to the pirate with a firm handshake bathed in the light of a staged play. Undisclosed police rail, ready to attack. The Gap store, featuring a featureless manikin is explicit as a phoneme where a business model of humanity is slight and slighting. The red orange moon in à la El Greco sky, irascible, Lewis brings worldly mayhem to balance on a tippy roof of the public eye(s), with a dark stairway to lighting up divinity’s horror is not candy-coated, although he uses candy colours. Lewis does not minimize the unpleasantness, the difficult actions that occurred in the 1999 Seattle riot, but offers us a confectionery insurgence to think about what is unthinkable.

If We'd Help Each Other - 24 x 30" by Michael Lewis
“The men who were my father figures when I was a kid, were men who had ridden the rails during the depression and tanks during the war. If Dagwood had been a real man, he would have been them He would have come home. He would have tried to act normal. He would have married Blondie. He would have known she was smarter. He would have always felt awkward around her. He would have taken a job he could never get to on time. He would have erupted into violent fights with the postman for no reason at all. He would have had kids he would never understand. He would have tried to hid in naps on the couch. He would have been awake every night. He would have sat in the kitchen making impossible sandwiches. I would have seen him on Sundays and laughed.”
~ Michael Lewis
D             If we’d help each other with the work around our houses it would make it look a lot easier?
Look a lot easier. If we help each other.
Would you tell me about this?
M             This is a series of Dagwood paintings that I did. I was really fascinated by men that came out of the Second World War. They had gone through the Depression, gone through the War. Growing up with the Sunday Funnies, Dagwood is the prototypical duffus, male goof. If you look at the paper, he might have been a real person that had gone through the Depression and the War. It started with him as a young man in his 20s, as a young college student. Though, I began to look at the comic strip that often had these – he would erupt into violent fights with the postman over nothing, often images of violence that seemed to erupt from nowhere. He would be sleeping. He was always trying to take a nap, sleep in the afternoon, get away from things.
He had several dogs. He had Daisy, and all the other pups. He had the wife and family, the whole suburban thing. And yet he is up at night making sandwiches. He obviously can’t sleep. I started seeing him as this funny figure. But if he had been real – I started seeing this whole trauma of his life. I did a series of about 5 paintings each, covering a different aspect. This was the first one.
D             Would he have ever had a portrait of this woman in a bathing suit like that?
M             This is Blondie, his wife. What I did is that I tried to take the image from the Second World War, the famous pinup of Betty Grable. I did the Betty Grable and put Blondie’s face on it.
This (officer) is like MacArthur, but I used Dithers, Dagwood’s boss for the face. Herb Willy, Dagwood’s friend, and he... I used an image from Life magazine of two soldiers, and I put their faces on the soldiers. The panels, words, I lifted from a Dagwood comic. If we help each other... was this friendship, and what the friendship had gone through.
D             You’ve painted the post War ‘ticky tacky’ houses.
M             That was what was suburban.

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Dagwood Bumstead and Herb Woodley, main male vehicles for Chic Young’s ‘Blondie’ comic strip have a conversation, where Dagwood explains how helping each other makes chores look easier, in a speech bubble atop If We’d Help Each Other. The two men walk in ordinary suits, but the shadowy soldiers they were hunker into battle. Dagwood’s boss, Julius Caesar Dithers wading in insubstantiality postures in a false memory as General Douglas MacArthur, looking over the war year the men experienced, traipsing towards their current reality. Blondie (née Boopadoop) as a buxom pin-up girl, maybe hearkening to her flapper girl past has a crooked shadow. Haunting and eerily grey in her existence as Dagwood’s help mate, Lewis paints her looking at us, challenging us to accept that she is not just a housewife. Lewis’s parades the strife of a post war subsistence, where there is frail differentiation between what was and what is in a veteran’s life.

Late for the Train – 24 x 36” by Michael Lewis

“Part of a series of apologies to the men I grew up around when I was a kid. Men who tried to lead normal lives after coming home from the war.”
~ Michael Lewis
M             This is treating the Depression. It’s called Late for the Train because Dagwood is always running for the train, always late. I thought, during the Depression, he would have been running for box cars.
D             That’s a symbol on the door. What is it?
M             That’s (Al) Cap and (George/Ham) Fisher. I wanted a couple of other cartoon characters that looked like they were hobos, so I used Humphrey from Joe Pallooka.
D             On top of the box car?
M             Ya. That was done by Fisher. One was Lil’ Abner that was done by Al Cap. There is a story between those two because Al Cap had started as Fisher’s ghost artist, and then had created these hillbilly characters which he did a version of for Lil’ Abner, and Fisher said he stole his stuff. They had this huge fight that went on for years. There are some references here.

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Another rumination about the post-war life, Late for the Train again features Dagwood and Herb on their commute to work. In the comic strip - Dagwood was invariably late for his train. The consistency of tardiness for work forced on him when his parents disowned him for marrying Blondie shows how being employed in J.C. Dithers Construction Company is uncomfortable, a destination unworthy of his punctuality. In the background, a cargo trail roof figures Depression era comic characters by Al Cap and Ham Fisher. An idyllic countryside rolls through the car door. Heavy dark clouds overcast, contrasts with the quick sandy space between the cartoon lives, the endurance of strife of each set a challenging ride in either each direction, past and present is latent with a kind of catching of a train of thought, where clarity is practically approximate, a rough and transitional scuttle and can never be quite fathomed.

3 A.M. - 30 x 30" by Michael Lewis
“There is a creature that comes into old men’s rooms when they sleep. It sits on their chests until they wake. Then it is gone.”
~ Michael Lewis
D             Is that you at 3am?
M             I think it’s a lot of people at 3 am.
D             It is a very urban scene behind there. Urban and yet not, because of the fence. So, suburban?
M             I tend to use iconography from Expressionism, The way the city is described.
D             The skeleton image on the blanket?
M             It could be a foot on his chest. It’s that thing that wakes you up at 3 in the morning. Heavy.
D             Pressing on your chest.
M             Ya. It is a lot about age. And anxiety. I wanted something for that pressure on the chest. That became this sort of figure.
D             What about the horse?
M             That’s a Greek figurine. I have always had it in my room, and have always liked it. It was a little tourist piece that someone sent me. I wanted something there that was unusual. It is also nightmare (night mare).
D             The double entendre with that. That’s what is says right there, ‘night webs’.
M             Night webs.

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Languishing within time’s imposition, miserable howling of a dog skeleton is stark at a wavering fence. Early morning, untimely sharp features are too close to closure, to the wake of finality. The import of disheartening sleeplessness is at variance with a naked woman in a semi-shaded window, a view to what was or what seems unattainable through aging. The alarm is alarming, a red hexagon, poised to ring at any moment, the hex, enchanting dream of sex. Shelved books uphold a Trojan Horse sculpture looking a little spent for subterfuge. An elongated skeletal footprint or fingering of the immensity of heartache presses within exceeding the covers. Bricking the left wall, Lewis paints the interior/exterior leanings of architecture under the eschewing influences of the hex of the moon. The brick wall chinks seems explicit and substantial, less a puzzle than the serrated city. Lewis acknowledges what undeniable and stolid in his existence in spite of the capricious presage of evocative imminence haunting the sleepless male, although the bricked pattern escapes in the split wall covering below the nude. Again, memorable yearnings as impetus prevail – 3 A. M. encapsulates an interval of awakening.

The Box - 24 x 24" by Michael Lewis
“What I have of my mother. I have a hand painted Chinese pigskin box. I have a mortar and pestle. I have a photo of the young her in the 1920s.”
~ Michael Lewis
M             These are three objects I had from my mother.
D             Is that her on the left?
M             Yes. I had a photograph of her in the 20s, when she was in her 20s. She was born in the 1900s.
D             What an amazing time to be born. She always lived in the USA?
M             She spent some time in Australia. In my blog about growing up in Vegas (Vegas, In The Desert Of My Mind)... I was looking at old photographs. One I used was this great old photograph of when she was on the liner heading to Australia. They came up to Victoria, first. She took a picture of the Parliament buildings in 1931, maybe. That was really fun to see. It hasn’t changed that much, except for a car that you see parked in front that’s not from now.
D             What about the floral pattern on the background?
M             It is my memory of the house I grew up in.
D             The box is Oriental.
M             I had these three objects from her and some photgraphs – the box, the mortar and pestle and the photograph. She was very interested in Asia. That was her personal box where she kept her personal papers, that sort of thing. Meant a lot to her. It is a lovely box. I still have it.
D             The mortar and pestle. How did she use it?
M             It was for making medicine. We didn’t have any money so she used it for making home remedies.

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Maternal vestiges are honoured amid the strength of ever blooming, transitive roses in Lewis’ The Box.  The clout and urging, the weighty mortar and pestle compels as a stalwart routine. As a discerning confidence in enigma, a Lewis paints a sun lit box belonging to his mother. The private box is exclusive to Lewis, now. This article of poise is painting made throughout affectionate connectivity, and positions as a closed, with delightfully painted Oriental scenes on pigskin. Revealingly intrepid in flourishing feather finery on a sill as a jaunty portraiture, Lewis painted his mother as she appears in a photographic memento. A formidable tribute to his mother, Lewis intimates nobility within the capacity of the picture’s containment.

Dick Tracy - 24 x 24" by Michael Lewis
“Before big screen TV. Before 3D movies. Before music videos. Before comic books. There was the LA Times Sunday Funnies. It came in a section bigger than any could kid could hold. A perfect blanket to lay on and fall into.”
~ Michael Lewis
M             The Sunday Funnies were my first and probably most major influence because that was the source of my colouring books. My mother would.. she had a pretty good eye. She would draw panels out of the Sunday Funnies and those would be my colouring books. She would draw and I would colour them in. I loved the Sunday Funny people. I couldn’t have comic books. For one, they were expensive. And it was during the 50s when it was when comic books were evil. It made children into juvenile delinquents. But I could read the Sunday Funnies. Funnies were just fine.
D             Why were newspaper comics more legitimate?
M             Because it was part of the newspaper, which was an adult medium
D             Already sanctioned.
M             Ya. Comics, what started that whole scare was Dr Werkman in his book, Seduction of the Innocent he wrote about the evil of comics referred to the horror comics made for people that had come out of the War. Those kinds of comics is what they carried into war with them. It was easy. The horrific quality of the stories was designed for adults, not particularly kids. But of course, kids could have access to them. That’s what horrified adults. Soon, that stain went over everything. Donald Duck was just as bad as decapitating people. You can find these as films on Youtube. Propaganda films. There’s one that’s really funny. Three little boys are reading a comic. Suddenly, one boy pulls out a pocket knife and starts jabbing it into a tree.
Churches had big book burnings. They said, kids bring all your comics and we will burn them in a big bonfire or they will turn you into a juvenile delinquent. So my mother said, no no. But I still had the Sunday Funnies.
D             You have a binder of them in the painting?
M             No that’s from the Big Little Books[3]. It is an image that shows up in my work, like the crooked tailed cat, the bent ash can, designs that seem to be recurring.

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Dick Tracy plays with Chester Gould’s ‘Plainclothes Tracy’, and later, ‘Dick Tracy’ iconography, allowing toy sized artifacts of the detective’s story with impossible gadgetry (2-way watch radio), weapons laying about the decoratively patterned floor to quell evil doers that are escaping in a picture frame. A collection of ‘Big Book’ stories lies in wait for further reading, and ideas to thwart the rogues. Flattop Jones, villain with machine gun looks for trouble. A Jr. button behind him, Tracy Junior is as always disposed for and enthusiastic for the intrigue. The bold coloured drawing of a real sized pistol is placed to be at the ready. A child’s recollection of urban crime drama utilizing Tracy’s wits and science to foil the bad guys are Lewis’ comforting ploys to substantiate that all will be well in the end, even exciting in the conclusive thrall.

Mother and Child - 24 x 35" by Michael Lewis
“A better title might be Holy Land”
~ Michael Lewis
M It should probably be called Holy Land. The Mother and Child defines the work too much towards the Christian version. My idea was that symbolic of the Holy Land was Christians, Jews, Muslims – any denomination. It is what we call this place where all this horror happens – Holy Land. The land is not treated at all holy.

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Mother and Child shows a feeding of humanity, nurturing of essential and fundamental needs in the wake of impending hostilities. The reclining male blends into the flooring, camouflaged and coiled into a fetal position. He is representative of how the complexity of war reduces mankind to unabashed neediness.


Gimme Shelter - 32 x 26" by Michael Lewis
“After thirty two years working with the homeless, some images just get stuck.”
~ Michael Lewis
M             Years of working at Street Link.
D             Police with the symbol for ‘Do Not Enter’ on their uniforms. You have a Hudson’s Bay blanket, very symbolic.  This aperture is not straight.
M             No. At Street Link, and probably it is there till this day, a fish eye lens was used to look out onto the street. You can get more of an image of what is outside with that kind of lens. It also made the entrance very claustrophobic.
D             Weighty.

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Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones:
“Oh, a storm is threat'ning
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away”
Lewis’ Gimme Shelter is an aspect of his working life as a homeless shelter worker. The view is bowed, as the illicit bows humanity. Policing dominates and belittles scarred individuals. The Hudson’s Bay blanket enfolds as suffering’s wrap, the cost of commerce’s embrace. Headlights stream onto the forsaken road where shelter is problematic and prohibitive because it will not solve the problem of damaged souls loitering, lurking and lingering on the proverbial razor’s edge.

Femme Fatale - 32 x 26" by Michael Lewis
“Too much Tex Avery as a kid.”
~ Michael Lewis
D             Here we have Femme Fatale. This is a little more jaunty.
M             My comment was, too much Tex Avery. Growing up with 50s cartoons, particularly the sexual content of Tex Avery cartoons.
D             That’s quite a car. 
M             That’s my shark car.
D             Do they really exist?
M             No. It is a take-off on the shark fins, that existed. I decided to paint a shark as a car.
D             You have signage that says Femme Fatal. And you have a trapezoid, yellow, dominant and central.
M             The window(s)? Artists’ mistakes.
D             There are no such things as mistakes.
M             Sure there are. There are all kinds of mistakes. I often don’t know what I am painting till I am finished. I have an idea. Then, oh ya, that’s what I am painting – when it is finished. I wonder, where did that come from? What does that mean? It is the internal dialogue.

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Audacious and reliably slick, Femme Fatale (from the French, meaning fatal woman) is an archetype in myths and legends, a stock character throughout literature and eventually in clichéd popular illustrated comics. “Although typically villainous, if not morally ambiguous, and always associated with a sense of mystification and unease” [1] femmes fatales can be antiheros and redeem the story for the greater good. They are almost always mysterious and seductive, their temptress personas is one of their ways to hide their intentions. Lewis paints an exaggerated red clad female in wide stride with an equally elaborate pooch. A shark fin turquoise, larger-than-life lines of the finned vehicle is parked with a flat topped made leering at its side, in expectation of seduction. Signs separating the “Femme”, diagonal and positioned upward up, and “Fatale”, a pointed sign directing us down hold the viewer between what is enticing and what is dangerous. The painting is staged as in a movie set, the spry cut out city all melded into one resolute backdrop. In the middle of the picture plane, a trapezoidal window, blaring as is the unknown in any story line, demarks the wonder and possible desire of female wiles, craving. Yearning for what is unattainable can be an chancy interface. The out of kilter, smudged golden window, matching the other window’s light but larger and predominant, and fella’s golden hair, his brain wave of the dazzle of imagined consummation is Lewis’ assertion that ideals conceived with impossible female characters might not have an idealized golden result, and may indeed be fatal, although they may be fun to fantasise about in the light bright cartoon world.

Sun of a Beach - 24 x 36" by Michael Lewis
“The mermaid came out of a dream The richman came out of the sky.”
~ Michael Lewis
D             A parquet beach.
M             I had the mermaid image. It came out of a dream I started with that. There was the beach ball. Round images...
D             Who is the fellow up in the sky?
M             Attached to money? A big blow-hard. Hot air.

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Ferris wheel and merry-go-round distant as memorable childhood experiences, a beach fire roaring – ‘where is everybody?’ a youngster might ask, a pile of money holding an inflated moneyed man, a star fish shape and a sandcastle all curve along the beach’s right edge inSun of a Beach, remnants of playful abandon, once upon a time. In the centre of the painting, a nearly naked woman stands beside the gold pile, underneath the floating business man. In the forefront, a gender unspecified gilled mer creature with fake breasts, with enlarged hands holds its tail, a fish out of water, stranded, fiery hair shot into the air. The sky drapes like drapes, the sun ogles the scene. We have to ask if the balloon man, inflated with his own power chose the cost of the nearly clad woman with the white bow and then metamorphosis took place and he transformed into mer creature, the son of the beach? Only Lewis knows for sure. This work personifies fervour of and dismay at overpowering persuasion scorching like a summer sear, with comeuppance hoisted, having a ball.

Sweethaven - 36 x 24" by Michael Lewis
“Final harbour. The ferry boatman will gladly accept payment on Tuesday for a hamburger today.”
~ Michael Lewis
M             With a lot of my paintings, people say they are bright and happy. I say, well, here’s where it comes from They say, oh. This is my meditation on death. 
D             I got that. Because Popeye is not looking at you. You have a cross centrally. The sweet beyond Cliffs of Dover, or somewhere. And you had to have Wimpy as the pilot.
M             He’s my boatman on the river of Styx. It is what I am hoping for. That the transition is nice and cosy. A haven.
D             You have your fellow compatriots with you. Who is the woman on the rock?
M             That’s the sea witch. She is usually the villain in the old Popeye comic strip.
D             She looks like Olive Oyl’s mother.
M             (Elzie Crisler) Segar played with those archetypes. She’s like the Siren, only in Classical mythology, she is a beautiful woman singing, draws you in. This is the ugly woman who’s flute playing will drive you onto the rocks.
D             I guess that’s why Popeye is not really listening. What’s that creature on top of the boat?
M             The Jeep. Eugene the Jeep. That’s where we get the name of the military vehicle. They named it after him. Segar brought two words into the English language. Jeep and goon. Alice the goon was one of the sea hags. Hench person. Until she got tamed by Popeye, and then she became Sweet Pea’s babysitter. Both those terms were invented by hiM The reason the word was invented is because that is the sound it would make. It would go, ‘Jeep Jeep’. It could prognosticate the future.
D             He is whispering to somebody, but who knows who’s listening.

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Sweet Haven, the boat chugs and splits the water avoiding the deep blue depths’ perilous rock where a sea hag and her lanky pillar touting the dire dirge she blows, a sleazy breeze.   Elzie Crisler Segar’s characters occupy the boat. Jeep jeeps, Wimpy at the helm, Olive Oyl forward looking, Popeye’s turned away toward the cuddle of homes on the bank.of Sweethaven, maybe a sailor with more preoccupations tha destination, perhaps thinking about the inroads yet to navigate. Sunset colours, the day subsiding, the end of the journey is approaching. Lewis paints how the end of life can be a passage with allies, with friends, with caring people about you to accompany you while you traverse the unknown waters. No matter how quirky or anomalous or funny, ones’ relationships carry one through to Sweethaven. Lewis’ work shows his journey to be a salute to affection, a cosy familiarity. The indefinite finality is distant and glowing, green pastoral edging the dusk, the expanse met through a quaint, alluring multifarious village - a sweet haven, the ultimate refuge.

Fuck Off - 18 x 24" by Michael Lewis
“One day downtown, two ships passed in the light.”
~ Michael Lewis

Father and Son - 18 x 24" by Michael Lewis
“Granny has on her basketball shoes. Sonny is in a suit. Mom bought a dress she thinks makes her look nineteen. She saw it modeled by a twelve year old. Dad looks like a paperboy with tattoos. His progeny wears the camouflage of a soldier, knee deep in blood and mud.”
~ Michael Lewis
M             Both these images (Fuck Off, Father and Son) I saw in Victoria on the same day.
D             This guy’s pants on backwards. His whole body is backwards. It is very revealing. He is turning himself around for his son who is dressed as a preppy. It is a reversed image of what we think children and adults dress and behave. 
M             I saw this father what I consider kids’ clothes and his son dressed in adults’ clothes. I have seen that image a few times.
D             What does that mean about our society?
M             It is interesting. Both images were interesting for me because they are about how much the society has changed since I was a kid. When I was a kid there were very defined rolls. The adult would look like an adult. The child would look like a child. Now, you can switch them.
In Fuck Off – when I saw the woman, her butt was not quiet that revealed as seen in the painting. Growing up, a young woman would not be walking around with her pants slit open, and would not have those kinds of words on her shirt.
D             You have painted the lollipop’s colours to reflect the woman’s red and orange shoes, and his glasses reflect the lollipop. A spin.
M             To me, it is about freedom. She can dress however she wants.
There used to be Norman Rockwell kind of paintings with a good looking woman walking down the street and the guy or guys whistling. She never looked that intimidated. That was a male perspective. The women often were, of course.  Now that whole thing has changed. Now, he’s intimidated. Am I supposed to look? Am I not supposed to look? She says, I will do whatever I want. That’s a huge change in the society. That’s a huge freedom that women have that they didn’t have. They were forced into a certain role.
D             Also, the work is explicit. His lollipop licking looks like a masturbatory act. People kept that secret. That wasn’t talked about. Or, not in public.
M             Again, he is not the aggressive predatory male that he would have been because she is no longer a submissive woman.
D             There is no access at all. You have her shoes bent in a high heel look on one, and flat and accommodating on the other.
M             That’s just supposed to be bent. You keep seeing things.
D             There is a lot to see.

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In Lewis’ Fuck Off, matching shoe colours, two strangers diagonally cut by a grey lot, their lots transect, ever so briefly. A youngish woman with a sprightly orange doo, the balding middle aged male and prominent brows share the same hair colour too. She turns to him, her orange glasses swirl in their frames. He glances back at her, his rippling candy twirls on his tongue. Her shirt bears the name of the painting. She wears the shirt as a sign, as an imperative, an angry dismissal for those that may take advantage of her. She will not be a victim. Yet she wears provocative jeans with a tear exposing her buttocks. He holds his lollipop as his sexual member, sucking on the confection with unease and diffidence while sneaking a peak at the woman passing. She gestures, challenging. He walks hand down, without a doubt that she asserts and he ascertains his distance, and he will never fuck off in his imaginings. He is the victim of her assertion. She is the victim of his insular behaviour. Their orange shoes barely meet on common ground.
The background city is lightly, densely painted, and we can expect that it is full of these trepidations staged for our viewing. Lewis documents cryptic innuendos within our society.
Father and Son shows a work is about the incongruity of perception, both in the context of familial interaction and societal prejudice. The figures stand in a light blue wash, a window barely visible, an elevated escape from preconceptions seems unlikely. The figures stand on a blue triangle close to the wall. They are pressed into, confined by the angling for each other’s understanding, both confused about the other. Equilateral, the triangulation positions the young and mature in a close proximity, equal in importance, and similarly odd. The kid, hair spiked looks astonished and appears single minded because of his glasses. He is dressed as an adult might in a white shirt and tie, formal slacks. His dad is clothed in street savvy garb of a younger generation, and is facing the wall, although his head swivels to confront his progeny, with a perturbed countenance.
Lewis paints a generational conundrum. Understanding is absent when bias prevails. Adopting what one thinks is appropriate makes wrong assumptions, and prohibits communication. Superficiality, assumptions corners both people in Lewis’ work. Clothes do not make the man, or the child. Lewis explicates that it is okay to redress audacious behaviour.

Robin Hood of the West - 25 x 32" by Michael Lewis
“My mother worked in a Western theme park. She took me with her when I was too young for school. I would sit at the knees of Doby Doc. He owned all the Western artifacts displayed in the park. He would sit in his rocking chair beneath his portrait and tell tall tales to the tourists. I would ruffle the fur of the wolf at his feet. He would say, “Careful boy! That is a wild animal and not to be trusted.”
~ Michael Lewis
M             A couple of years ago, I went online to look up Doby Doc. I found several stories about this “Robin Hood of the West”. I also found a photo of his portrait. There was no image of a wolf at his feet. There was just an untrustworthy looking dachshund.”
I was making this was when I was doing the blog about stories about growing up in Vegas.
D             How old were you?
M             Five, six, up till I was seven.
M             Still in my memory it’s a wolf, but obviously never was. I remember the portrait distinctly, and when I saw the photo it is exactly like it was except with a little dog instead of a wolf.

---

A triple self portrait, Lewis has painted the business of a Western theme park. The Lone Ranger in a Stetson poses with Pocahontas in front of a Saloon. on one side of the central painting of Doby Doc as an armchair Western adherent in the wild blue yonder, with a Sweet Shop on the other, the store where Lewis’ mother worked.. Lewis was allowed to remain in the Western while she sold sweets. The aficionado, Mr Doc in the foreground has aged, and retains the image of the artist as a boy with a wolf that he was allowed to pet is in the lowest edge of the work. This is ostensibly a three staged rendering of the artist in various life stages. Robin Hood of the West steals the artists’ childhood memories and gives them back to the mature artist to preside over and reinvent, replete with his compassionate storytelling.

Lucy - 30 x 24" by Michael Lewis
“I never wanted chickens. It is my partner, Jennifer, who has the feathered thumbs. Yet now I grieve for the ones who fell under the shadow of an owl or the neighbour’s dog. I’m happy their coop is no longer a drunken shed; but an egg layer’s Taj Mahal.”
~ Michael Lewis
M             That’s Lucy. The chicken’s named Lucy. She’s doing strong. She was on the nest box this morning when I left.
D             Why have you painted crosses in the background?
M             Lost a couple of chickens.
D             It is a happy scene.
M             Ya.
D             Spirals in the sky. Parquet on the walls. Chickens animated. Most of them are just doing their thing. One is really animated.
M             That’s Henny. She runs. She’s nervous. She is a nervous chicken. She tends to run.
D             Chicken layers’ Taj Mahal. A palace.

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Lewis began chicken farming reluctantly but is now charmed by chicken husbandry. Lucy is a cock-a-hoop fowl theatre where red drapes suspend skyward. Asymmetrical hutches dazzle with jewel hues, a jumble of colours and textures but the gems are the hens painted affectionately. Lewis paints day and night as a simultaneous merging of time. Swirly stars on one side of the work, the gentle day’s sunnyness on the other gracing an apple tree with a white hen favouring a branch. The central female chicken care giver wears sunny cheer as garb. Although a few of the brood has met their demise, which Lewis sadly notes, most of the free range cluckers roost anywhere but in their coops. There is love and respect for the chicken family, where individuality is celebrated. Lewis’ chaos is intense and cleverly stirs. Lucy flaps off the picture plane, a lovely, complex tizzy of fluster and resolve.

Dryads - 30 x 30" by Michael Lewis
“In the gardens, three young women sat on the grass under the shade. Their bicycles and roller blades laid about them. They could have been forest nymphs, except for their clothes.”
~ Michael Lewis
M In the gardens at UVic there were three women just under the trees. Bicycles, rollerblades. They looked like they could have stepped out of an old painting. Except they were clothed. They could have stepped out of some symbolist painting. Mythological beings. I took off their clothes.
D That tree is sumptuous. It also looks like a coffin. At that time, people in many cultures were buried upright. They were the markers in the road. That dryad is coming to life.
That looks like a pig headed dog. He’s got his bone. Crooked purple road. And zebra trees. What are the zebra trees about?
M Birch.
D They look more like zebras than birch. It makes me think...
M Zoo?
D Wildness.

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Mythical wood nymphs, have been conjured by Lewis in his work, Dryads, more than Sylvia Plath [4] was able to do. They appeared in a park, one emerging from a central tree, one on a bicycle and one jogging on a crooked purple path, a picnic and a playful dog complete the scene. Let’s call him Cerberus, the dog that guards, here, light-heartedly, the underworld.
It doesn’t matter if the tree is oak (Greek drys=oak), or in other cultural imaginings, ash or apple etc., it is the tree of life depicted throughout mythic history, within many cultures as ‘the tree that extends between earth and heaven. It is the vital connection between the world of the gods and the human world. Oracles and judgments or other prophetic activities are performed at its base.’ [5] Lewis’ tree is a dappled mottled flush, the twilight, a darkened city. In the background, separated from the park by a white fence, a lighthouse sized lamp is erected between metropolis and recreational area, lighting the way back to citified, sophisticated certainty.
‘... It was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.’ [6]
The dryads are curvaceous, a trio of ample nudes, each endowed with a selection of hair colour (a blonde, black haired and a brunette), representative of illusory, instrumental female enchantments. Like Coleridge, Lewis paints his willing suspension of disbelief in the creatures that mourned for Narcissus, that tried to prevent Erysichthon’s violation (cutting down) of their tree. He has resurrected their novel mettles, strong life-forces occupied with urban leisure in the park. Lewis’ Dryads is a celebration of all-encompassing harmony and excellence, telling virtue. His Dryads show femininity to be plucky and sincere in all their variations of natural splendour.

Definitely Not the Ripper – 36 x 48" by Michael Lewis
“A few years ago an article appeared in Vanity Fair. It proposed the theory that Walter Sickert, an English artist may have been Jack the Ripper. One day I went to an art gallery to see a painting by Sickert. The gallery director was being interviewed by the media. The director was asked about the Sickert/Ripper possibility. The director got very red in the face and shouted: ‘Definitely Not The Ripper!’”
~ Michael Lewis.
D             As in Jack the Ripper?
M             Yep.
D             Why definitely not?
M             Because that’s my version of the Walter Sickert painting. A few years ago there is was a theory that he was Jack the Ripper. When that article had come out, I was at a gallery. The gallery director was being interviewed by the media. They got to the Sickert painting and the media person said, so what do you think about this theory, that Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper? The director got vivid red and said, get out! He’s definitely not the ripper. He got really upset. So I loved that – definitely not the ripper. I went home and painted Sickert. I painted the Ripper in there.
D             The woman in the painting is who?
M             She’s the media. The interviewer.
D             There is an ominous shadow behind the people.
M             Again, this is my version of the Sickert painting.
D             The over coated male is quite large, square. The overpowering of the mystique.

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Definitely Not the Ripper gives credence to the painter Walter Sickert’s story that he was definitely not (Jack) the Ripper. Known for painting musical halls and poverty stricken women, Lewis’ work includes a version of Sickert’s ‘The New Bedford (1915/16)’ in the background. Sickert painted music halls because they were a construct, a microcosm of his time period, epitomizing society. Lewis too paints societal constructs, the challenges imposed upon people by society. Lewis’ respect for Sickert is woven with the never ending yarn regarding the accusation of his involvement in homicide(s).
In the foreground, we have an enlarged, enigmatic male figure, seemingly of that artist, mysteriously clad in the period’s plaid overcoat and top hat, his back to us as a query that a female journalist in 20th century might have asked him, and plagued him in his lifetime – the possibility that he was Jack the Ripper. The story was based on his paintings, one that came to be known as ‘The Camden Town Murder’, one of a group of four paintings by he painted in 1908 titled by Sickert as, ‘What Shall We Do for the Rent’ or ‘What Shall We Do to Pay the Rent’.[7]  Although Sickert enjoyed performance, had worked as an actor, dressed up in costume acting as different characters, as a painter he was adamant that he was not responsible for Emily Dimmock’s murder in 1907, nor any other murder of women. Lewis’ portrait shows Sickert dressed as the Ripper, asking us for the benefit of our doubt, not to assume his guilt.
In his defense, Sickert explained he could not sever subject and from the way he painted his subjects:
“Is it not possible that this antithesis is meaningless, and that the two things are one, and that an idea does not exist apart from its exact expression? ... The real subject of a picture or a drawing ... and all the world of pathos, of poetry, of sentiment that it succeeds in conveying, is conveyed by means of the plastic facts expressed ... If the subject of a picture could be stated in words there had been no need to paint it.” [8]
Lewis’ work safeguards Sickert, both as a revered painter and shielding him of the accusation that he was a murderer because he painted nudes with clothed males present in the paintings. Offering us the public drama of grave accusations of serious scope, Lewis paints the accuser as a forthright red head, in contemporary outfit, with microphone, her backside thrusting out, questioning her capability to be balanced. Her shirt cut down her back, black skirt slit up reveals that sexiness matters when it comes to influencing the public belief of the truth. Apparently there is still a question today that lingers, and within Lewis’ earshot (see interview above). Sickert, in Lewis’ work is larger than life, sinister, but because he has chosen to paint Skickert’s back only, we see Lewis offers us the adage, not guilty until proven – we cannot see, as Lewis does not allow us to see that there is a face to a crime. If there is no face, how do we know whodunit. In the spirit of Lewis’ crime fiction influences, we can assume nothing. And Lewis gives us all the intrigue and mystery inherent in the narrative, generating a thriller. He imparts his indefatigable capacity to marry the social realism of today’s attitudes with the murder mystery genre.

On the Rocks - 30 x 30" by Michael Lewis
“One day a body washed up in the harbour. At the time I knew his name. I have forgotten it by now.”
~ Michael Lewis
M             On the Rocks.
D             It’s a very lonely looking piece. A white tug boat echoes the man’s white t-shirt. You painted the tugging of distress, the wrenching of anguish.

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A large middle aged male corpse lies prone, exposed on a projecting mass of sharp boulders. Lewis paints a man who may have had to choose or had no choice between sickening and intolerable alternatives – addiction and or illness, poverty and death. Adversity is largely featured in On the Rocks. Misfortune, hardship, danger of needs not met are bared as an austere and inhospitable demise. The harbour is distant, but visible. The body’s place of origin is unclear, but Lewis paints industry and its effluence prominently. A mention of religious thought lies in the cityscape’s turbulent skyline. Near the city, he paints pillars that haphazardly consort with no dock or harbour access.
Lewis shows a man that was strewn far by the tides by self destruction tendencies and or societal rejection and neglect with no information to ascertain his origins or identity. What is clear is Lewis’ pathos. His account of suffering confounds social theories, painting the reality of wanting. Lewis surpasses his predecessors Gropper or Grosz with his profundity emerging from his years of experience with others’ depths of despair appearing as a testament to misery. Lewis is not preachy or imbued with the incongruent social mores and narrowing politics. Leiws’ work is sober and illustrates the arcane, reveals heart wrenching inexorableness. The man is painted large and is unavoidable because this solitary event is a quandary of instability we all share, is present and is unavoidable.
Lewis gives us a bit of reprieve from tears by incorporating a comic book styling to his imagery. Maybe this guy was really a comic book villain? Maybe Tracy or Mr Lucky will save the day? If only.

Beach Open - 20 x 16" by Michael Lewis
“The day your buddy’s older sister becomes more interesting than he.”
~ Michael Lewis
D             Becomes more interesting than he. Parquet beach. This towel design is a very period design – the zigzag. It was used in design beginning in the 1930s (produced through to 1955) Gerrit Thomas Rietveld’s Zig-Zag chair, the impossible construction that defied physics, and later the Missoni family fabric/ fashion design, with others’ designs for the past 6o years worn to defy the norm.
You get the feeling the diver is diving shallow, that there is danger with the dive. Floating logs curve, forming a separation between the idling person on the floatation device and the broken line formation creates a swimming lane. The boys are much smaller than the girls, who seem much more grown up. The girls pose for a photo. The towel becomes a mirror image of the dock – another kind of platform – a runway. Your crooked tail cat is about to plunge, tempting fate.

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Youth, the memory of it, the summery solace and beckoning enchantments of sexual awakening possesses us in Lewis’ Beach Open. The work refreshes us with watery splendor. Beach side antics in the forefront of the delicious scouring of blue water beckons as the cross hatching of the beach holds us captive. Laps as recollections of effortless foreplay, the inner tube of repose after the facts of life are experienced are smooth as the jackknife diving and observations within tranquil waters of first encounters. A full leafed tree leans forward, a voyeur, an avid list into teenaged expectations. The tidy shingle has no clutter, no preconceptions of angst or roughness. A magic carpet towel is forward of the girls to dare the boys’ access, lest they have the courage to trespass on their territory. Lewis’ crooked tail cat is oblivious to the tease, and his crooked ash can denotes some cockeyed teenage thinking. Innocence is as fresh and untainted as Beach Open. 


Bang - 36 x 24" by Michael Lewis
“Tribute to George Grosz.”
~ Michael Lewis
M             One of his paintings was a guy sitting outdoors with a liquor bottle. That’s sort of this set up.
D             He’s got a dummy on one knee. Is that a plastic heart on the table?
M             Could be a real heart.
D             Chained to his waist. And a mask.
M             His hand is holding the mask.
D             I like that you put Grosz there. Who’s the little puppy dog?
M             Just a little puppy dog.
D             And a Gap head. A pink balloon head.

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Bang is a complex work, heralding George Grosz’ 1919 painting, ‘Café’ with many other Lewis fascinations luring and enthralling (archetypes, gumshoes, comic stripping) included in this composition. Lewis’ work is a composite of café cultural anomalies, the single guy lying in wait, the solo drunk, the incongruity of masking one’s true nature in public), a decoy, really, with his thoughts about popular fiction in various media pitched, projecting in the painting’s structure.
He entices us to join him at a table with a precarious liquor bottle and gun that is a toy with ‘Bang’ printed on an extending cloth, assuring us of distraction and appeasing us, that this might not be a too dangerous proffer. Detective fiction as a Tracy doll sits propped in the embrace of a chequered suit, vivid yellow and orange squares that would work best as a floor in a café, rather than as a patron’s suit fabric, sharp wariness embodied.  The masking off, held aside corroborates rather than dispelling the sway of the painting’s earnest clowning.  Droll, the man that has advances, plays a comic functionary role wears a red orange tie flag pointing out, warning us of a ruse. Oblivious tomfoolery is muddling as the complicated checks that blind us, distract Lewis’ intent in his intricate portrait.
A balloon on a stick for a head and neck, a little small proportionately for this yellow gloved, embellished body is pink as Bazooka bubble gum.
Behind the café dweller, lavender walks point to his slight neck, a vice, street ends as wits’ ends. The walks hold buildings with windows that view the scene on the left, and the right bricked construction shows a tricky and outlying escape to a TV room. A tiny sun echoes the colours Lewis has painted as the seated figure’s attire, the latter being more vividly conspicuous than the sunshine.
The portrait’s heart lays exposed on the table. A woman cut off from the entire picture plane walks a crooked tailed terrier, blending into the orangey hues, but a symbol of the terror of any male that is uncomfortable with his persona. The outlandishly costumed is too encumbered to do more than stare desirously, signified by his bauble head. The clowning, the impediments of his preoccupations shows the poser to be awkwardly positioned, and the bang is the subterfuge, his self deception .He is in finery as fiery as a café designer might employ to enable guests enjoy their surroundings but leave as quickly as possible. The fellow fires ineffectual mixed messages, is bamboozled. Lewis discharges impossible relational hope. Lewis paints how self deception is obvious to all that encounter it except to the individual experiencing his private, inhibiting feat toys, at first. One’s eventual self realization becomes a bang to be set on the table.

French Kris - 15 x 30" by Michael Lewis
“Captain of the Dandy Pucker”
~ Michael Lewis
D             Which mask of the Italian masks is that?
M             What I was thinking, because these are both from Sea Czar City, from the story, when I thought of him, I thought of Scaramouch [9], from Comedia d’ell arte . I really liked the long nose.
D             It makes you think of Italian, not French, but he is masked.

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Lewis has painting another of his Sea Czar invented characters in his online narrative. French Kris, captain of the Dandy Pucker meets his eventual reprisal with Cutlass Kate slicing off his masked nose:
“At dawn, we finally chased the Pucker down.
There was much cannon fire and grappling.
In fact Cutless Kate was in such a snit, she nearly drew blood for the first time.
She gave The Mask a nose bob and something smelly was revealed.
The Mask and French Kris were indeed one in the game. Bubbles was released from the bath. The Dandy Pucker was sent on its way with the fishes and one romance was a flounder.” [10] .
Lewis disguised French Kris in a Scaramouch mask.  The mask is appropriate for Lewis’ character. French composer, Darius Milhaud composed Scaramouche for the theatre, Op. 165b, named after the Théâtre Scaramouche that produced children’s productions created by Henri Pascar.[1]. Lewis’ French Kris, and his other Sea Czar characters induce childlike trust in their existence. There were also several movies with Scaramouche titles, leads in the early movies, often based on Rafael Sabatini’s novels of adventure and romance. In the 17th century Comedia d’ell arte, created by Tiberio Fiorilli he is known to entertain by “grimaces and affected language". Apparently the story goes that he was beaten by Harlequin for his boasting and cowardice. [11] Cutlass Kate befits Harlequin in the Sea Czar story.
“It is said that one day, when the two-year-old Dauphin cried (the future Louis XIV), Fiorilli, as Scaramouche, made any possible sound to comfort him. He achieved this task with grimaces and tomfoolery; consequently, the Dauphin had "a need, that he had at the time, the hands and the dress of Scaramouche". Fiorilli was then ordered to visit the court every night to amuse the Dauphin, which helped the Scaramouche character become a stock figure in the theatre of the time.” [12]
Lewis painted the swashbuckler with a grimacing red mask and one can imagine, affected language, posing with dandyish strippy pants and a grand sword. One can imagine this is a character from a silent movie made Technicolor, challenging his dignity ‘by crook(edness) or by rapier, matey’. Well, Cutlass Kate had a different idea. French Kris was foiled. Lewis paints him as he might like to be remembered, before the dismemberment of his mask nose. Lewis eloquently paints vainglory.

Sea Shanty - 22 x 28" by Michael Lewis
“There is a place I call Sea Czar City. It resides only in my pun-addled brain. It is a kind of Never-Never land by way of Dogpatch. This is one of the ways I get there.”
~ Michael Lewis
M             Again, this is from Sea Czar city, the blog with the puns. It started to become an imaginative place in my head that was becoming a little bit like Sydney, a little bit like Victoria, like other places I have been and kids fairy books.
D             The boat’s name is Sea Shanty. The title of the work is Sea Shanty.
M             Because that is the boat. The boat is the way into the city.
D             Right, Because you have these open gates that are only boat accessible. You have a mermaid that is much nicer looking than the other one. But her tail is the bridge of a chest, with rib bones. Then you have a fish jumping up that could be Jeep’s cousin. The pilot of the boat is a shadow.
M             By way of dogpatch
D             Tell me about dogpatch?
M             Dogpatch is L’il Abner’s town again, Sunday Funnies. I always liked Dogpatch. It is supposed to be this fallen down poor town in the Ozarks. It is where the comic strip was set. Fallen down buildings. It must have had a huge impact on me as a kid. Most of my dreamscapes are wooden buildings that are askew and falling down. I seem to be very comfortable in my head in that kind of mindscape.
D             Its delightful how you bring that into the work. It’s also very German Expressionist.
M             That’s also reflecting my three huge influences, including. Robert Ben Shahn. William Gropper. Social Realists of the 30s.

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Sea Shanty is about a journey’s conclusion, returning to intimate familiarity. Lewis names the vehicle of his travels Sea Shanty, shanty, a sailor’s work song, or a ramshackle building. The boat has access to its destination, by way of a gate to the town on the edge of the sea. Al Cap’s ‘Dogpatch’, a poor, broken down place with ineffectual people, Lewis tells us (above) is the inspired destination. Lewis, during his childhood invested a lot of time in ‘Dogpatch’, because he enjoyed Lil’Abner, Capp’s comic. The town painted in Sea Shanty is not at all crude. Neither is the boat bleak.
What one can deduce is that Lewis has transformed the mutability and convolution of humanity’s utmost compromised folks and their reciprocating local(s) into intriguing and quaint characterization, à la Victoria/Sydney, imaginatively. He shows his love of all human contrived oddities and that he can be at home in the mires of intrigue, which can be vibrant and joyful, if only you let it draw you to its vibrancy. His work shows how, if you engage kindly with the untoward, one day it can be the best incentive to welcome the convoluted hospitably within memory’s fray, which isn’t all that bad, in retrospect, allowing the establishment of the blue clear skies of enduring contentment.

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Gallerist - guess how many weapons in the paintings without looking. Lots of weapons.
M Without looking?
D Do we count paint brushes as weapons?
M The plane is a weapon.
D The ocean is a weapon because it killed a man.
Gallerist - 20.
D Many weapons to fight inconsistency, to fight for the underdog.

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[1] http://www.allmusic.com/composition/scaramouche-3-suite-for-2-pianos-op-165b-mc0002364142

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Assemblage by Rachel Hellner, Dorothy Field, Dale Roberts and Martin Batchelor - review by Debora Alanna

Assemblage 
30 November – 24 December 2013
Martin Batchelor Gallery
712 Cormorant Street
Victoria BC

Boccioni and Tatlin did it. Elsa von Freytag-Lorinhoven and Meret Oppenheim did it.  Braque, Picasso and Duchamp did it. Louise Nevelson and Hans Bellmer did it. Breton and Dubuffet and Schwitters did it. Cornell and Wallace Berman. Rauschenberg, Johns, Chamberlain, Raoul Houssman, Betya Saar, Rosalie Gascoigne, Robert H. Hudson, Arman, Kienholz + Kienholz, Lebel, Wolf Vestel and Wassman – all did it. All and many more renowned and less know late century artists made assemblages. Artists continued to make assemblages through the last century and continue today to make work called assemblages. So did Rachel Hellner, Dorothy Field, Dale Roberts and Martin Batchelor – the foursome that exhibited in Assemblage last month at the Martin Batchelor Gallery in Victoria BC.

The reason for the ample though incomplete list above is to show the tradition from which this show is based, the resolve and ingenuity needed to bring found objects and/or material together to make usually what are three dimensional works, is a long standing art practice. Assemblage work is still viable and provocative. If a contemporary artist emulates Tatlin’s counter-reliefs or contemplates Dubuffet’s assemblages d'empreintes (tr. from French: fingerprint assemblages) or examines and employs Rauschenberg combines sensibility, or follows purists within historical realms of neo or pseudo Futurist, Cubist, Surrealist, Dada, Pop and any other variances of one or many past and present period dictums – it doesn’t matter. Each artist that ever combined, boxed, married one material with another, often objet trouvé, ready mades, junk, parts, discards, stuff makes work unique to their oeuvre, describes their unique thought process with what’s handy. Artists did. Artists do.

What’s different from working with the conceptual discipline of using only one or many found objects is assemblages use (in theory passed down from theorists) more than one object in juxtaposition, and usually are stuck together without glue. Collages (from the French, colle, to glue), also constructed of found things, are usually flat. As are montages, and photomontages, découpage. Also, assemblages can be bricolage (tr. from French: tinkering) where works are not necessarily, strictly found. Contextually there may be pastiche (appropriations), allusion, medleys of thoughts, mishmashes of concept and devices. Ad infinitum. This show was titled Assemblage, because that is how these artists see their work in this particular exhibition. Good enough. 

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Rachel Hellner

Goldy says, “I have drawn Mommy Bear in reverse. I forgot when I was drawing her that if it is to be printed directly from my drawing, it requires an original mirror-image master. But I am going to leave her that way because it’s well to remind everyone at the outset that we can only get from here to there by a series of errors – errors forwardly to the right, then a correcting forwardly error to the left, each time reducing error but never eliminating it. This is what generates waves; this is what generates the experience life.”
  - Tetrascroll, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, A Cosmic Fairy Tale, by Buckminster Fuller, St. Martin’s Press, 1975, pg. 4

As scientist Sheldon H. Geller explains, “scientific research cannot prove anything…it disproves error.” By contrast, the perceptive artist learns how to repeat and magnify his errors in order to create his own distinctive style for sharing new truth.
  - ABC of Prophecy: Understanding the Environment, Barrington Nevitt, 1985, pg. 77

Rachel Hellner assembles corollaries of inference, plateaus of ethological purport as refined absorbed investigation. Quasi Latin titles speak authoritatively of lapsed ideologies, dogmas that illustrate what matters, how medical sanctioning can be cogent and miss importunate outcomes of its influence. Hand drawn obsolete or invasive medical tools interact with allusions to bodies in her subtle as whispers fine distinctions of thought throughout wax and graphite grounds. Ploys of pathological excise gambit conversationally. Mounds of fingerprints or fingerprint like shapes are configured in arrays of collections, not looking in as in Joseph Cornell’s rows of holes invite, but poking out, a reversal of or mirror image of what is biometric calculation. Some hover as pressing, shadowy ovoid shapes, memories of contact overlooking or distanced from the manoeuvring between sensation and sensitivity. Animals, animalistic behaviours stir, insist on rapport in Hellner’s disquietingly precise achromatic drawing, contestations framed within potent desirous whiteness. Within Forcipe et pilum and Cattus et pilum,the white ground belies purity, boasts the wide expanse of the unknown with tips that confidently define variant points of consideration of the dominant precept. Extrusive grey cat fur tuffs tuff here and there in jaunty defiance of human presumption.

Like Goldy drawing contrarily, Hellner draws deviation, inexact sizes, describing acuity of sensation and erroneous medical intervention. Enlarging or reducing encroachment, systems anticipate interaction in her scrupulously rendering of truths through medical oversight, misconstrued dismissal of unnerving relationships to animal delineation. Hellner scenarios are experiential montages that entail human anatomy interplayed with medical mystification throughout investigational human landscapes of compelling imposition. She draws on the mistake of ignoring our discomfort at what is awry. The results of this dismissal can be dastard foxy machinations and spiteful catty conduct. Hellner emphasises the wiliness of humanity with impish candour.  

Retractor cannula cum pilum – Rachel Hellner. Actual artwork 10x10"/Including frame 16x16” (photo courtesy Rachel Hellner)

A cannula retractor or tube, usually containing a trocar, a sharp-pointed surgical instrument at one end, is inserted into an intimate view of a frenzily skinned body surface, the eye of an outburst the stacked finger marks with fuzzy comic peak of fur, ambiguous evidence that the event belongs to someone. It is unclear if the intention is to drain or administer a substance, an extant therapeutic administration. However, one can speculate that the draining of spirit, the inserting of unwelcome convention has resulted in red dots of blood like dribble on this and other works. Hellner’s cut out and protruding rendering is instrumental in describing the thin nature of empirical practices. WithRetractor cannula cum pilum and several other works Hellner seems to adopt another Joseph Cornell type juxtaposition of imagery seen in his Untitled (Schooner), 1931, For example, in the lower left corner, an isolated and solitary reference to a body part appears as a disengaged body component. The top shoots wavy, confabulating, Hellner draws body system segments shaped to be animalistic with tentacle feathering within the composition, assembling a beckon, a wield of formidable questioning when she exposes the essential physiological segments.

DETAIL: Retractor cannula cum pilum – Rachel Hellner. Actual artwork 10x10"/Including frame 16x16” (photo by Debora Alanna)

Like Instrumenta et nervosi (instruments and nerves), a pile of finger prints designate territorial assertion, self asserting autonomy, a means of keeping distant from hostile instrumentation and encroaching bodily combat. 

Instrumenta et nervosi - Rachel Hellner. Actual artwork 10x10"/Including frame 16x16” (photo courtesy Rachel Hellner)

If suppositions[1] in reference to a plot summary or stage production in the Ancient Greek context are consequential, compositions test the accuracy and observations of how we interact, how antecedents of ideas work, how propositions can be counterfactual. Goldy’s errors, human tests of time sequencing creates a wave of substantiation to concur with the surreality that science can never prove. Hellner stages scenes of rousing apprehension by probing sincerity.

Cellulis et tenebrae - Rachel Hellner. Actual artwork 10x10"/Including frame 16x16” (photo courtesy Rachel Hellner)

Cellulis et tenebrae (Latin for pertaining to the cells, and 'shadows' or 'darkness', specifically the Christian church service requiring candle light be extinguished during readings and hymns to commemorate the death of Jesus before Easter, the Resurrection) is a discreet metaphor made into a universal experience of loss. Oceans of cellular movement transverse bodily fluid beholden to the extant instruments of healing that float ineffectually disconnected with existence. Tools languish, spent .Incised rectangular blue bits, the aberrant litmus tests float willy nilly, a discarded veracity.

DETAIL: Cellulis et tenebrae - Rachel Hellner. Actual artwork 10x10"/Including frame 16x16” (photo by Debora Alanna)

Dark foreground indicates a gloomy bewildered outcome to medical offensiveness. Waves of cellular incision cut through to venial blue ground, the whiteness of structural strength, incorruptibility cuts deep through to the other side of hope.

Homo austus cum instrumenta - Rachel Hellner Actual artwork 10x10"/Including frame 16x16” (photo courtesy Rachel Hellner)

Toughly translated from the Latin as caustic person, with instrument, Homo austus cum instrumenta shows an anthropomorphic fox, its head ejecting below the heavenly constellations of membrane, erasure forming an explosive event that extends beyond the confines of the picture plane, the sharp edge of inviolability detonated in a constellation of wonder. A buoyant apparatus lies suspended in time. Critical, the triple variant of modified fingertip pile hold blocks any allusive animosity from advancing, self confidence asserted against escaping wild instincts.

DETAIL: Cattus et pilum – Rachel Hellner. Actual artwork 10x10"/Including frame 16x16” (photo by Debora Alanna)

Cattus et pilum or cat and skin, shows stacks of finger prints becoming patterns in sequence, genetic referencing marked with colour or actual finger print prints a little roughly cut to indicate unique or distinctive unambiguous evidence of a specific entity, substance, person, animal. Holding pins become cell nuclei, the repetitions a pulse or response time. Jaunty fur caps taunt, confirm the importance of the askew, as the cat with a fur obliterated eye sits in askance of our ability to converge and merge the understanding of the origins existence, qualities of perfection and how we can accept segregation, containment. They become foci, and windows to distinguish themselves as singular doubt formations that are charming but niggling. Skin tips instruct, command the picture plane, and are apertures to see the proverbial waves of subsistence. Timothy Leary’s eight circuit models of consciousness or circuits of information (eight "brains ") operating within human nervous system, possibly, each with equal import. [2] The two rows of four configurations can also be seen in Forcipe et pilum (forceps and skin). In that work, the underlying excise forceps is latent manipulation, dormant grasping pincer like implement considered by the brains, contemplating options (skinny) for physical survival.

There are two ways to suppress or attenuate the distinction between nature and culture. The first is to liken animal behavior to human behavior (Lorenz tried it, with disquieting political implications). But what we are saying is that the idea of assemblages can replace the idea of behavior, and thus with respect to the idea of assemblage, the nature-culture distinction no longer matters. In a certain way, behaviour is still a contour. But an assemblage is first and foremost what keeps very heterogeneous elements together: e.g. a sound, a gesture, a position, etc., both natural and artificial elements. The problem is one of “consistency” or “coherence,” and it prior to the problem of behavior. How do things take on consistency? How do they cohere? Even among very different things, an intensive continuity can be found. We have borrowed the word “plateau” from Bateson precisely to designate these zones of intensive continuity. (Gilles Deleuze Two Regimes of Madness, pgs. 176 – 179. MIT Press.)

Hellners deftly drawn floating cat entreats, dubious of our reliability to position and employ our ideals and especially our capability to embrace nature’s cadences and imperfections and bond in spite of each other’s flaws. She counters irony of choices with incongruous defaced animal correlations that define human interactions and reciprocal relationships, refining assemblage. Hellner considers the intensive contours of continuity of existence, the transactions embodied in her aptly constructed plateaus.

Umbraculum cum instrumenta – Rachel Hellner. Actual artwork 10x10"/Including frame 16x16” (photo courtesy Rachel Hellner)

Umbraculum cum instrumenta, is a title describing umbraculum from the Italian ombrellino, "little umbrella", historically a piece of the papal regalia and insignia, the pavilion and symbol of the Roman Catholic Church. [3] With an instrument. Hellner’s work is dominated by an inverted and perforated cone projecting out from the surface, resembling an enlarged cone biopsy where an inverted cone of tissue is excised from the uterine cervix. An undulating crest of tissue with musculature surface incorporated extends a tubular device, as in a fallopian configuration cut off from its source.

DETAIL: Umbraculum cum instrumenta – Rachel Hellner. Actual artwork 10x10"/Including frame 16x16” (photo by Debora Alanna)

Again measuring instrument hovers, dark ovoids lurk, fingering the humanity. The reference to the reversed papal symbol indicates a contentious reproductive tissue issue. The sculptural phenomenon is rigorously extensive in its complexity, observing explicative exactitude in the cutting and assemblage. Neither Goldy nor Mama Bear would be able to circumvent or reverse this incalculable life experience one little bit and would indeed be waves of intercession. No ifs ands or buts, hypothetically. Medical presuppositions are impudent conjecture. Hellner shows the truth of the matter. 

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Dorothy Field

In the unresolved, our unfolding continues in our imaginations and therefore in our souls, grappling up from bare-bone facts.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 250

Most of Dorothy Field’s assemblages entail found wood boxes of a uniform size. She conjoins tools, metal, stones, skulls and single bones to each work’s box and within herSardines #1 and Sardines #2 assemblages, many bones. In Treasure Box #11 –Ruler Pulley, Field pairs a pulley to the seemingly suspended box compartmentalizing a rusty ruler. With her sardine can constructs, Field diverges from the otherwise consistent containment process.

Sardines #1, Sardines #2 – Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Her utilization of sardine cans filled with aviary, predominantly spinal bones, is at first whimsical, then terrifying. Holocaust commentary erupts. Fledgling or mature centra bone fragments are indistinguishable and jumbled into open tins. Sardines are sustenance, tinned victuals eaten to survive. The most disturbing relationship to sardines is the reference to human packing of those that perished in gas chambers during the Holocaust. Crowding people into the death chambers have been referred to as being packed like sardines[4] ‘Sardinenpackung’ in German. Each of Field’s sardine cans is a slightly different size and colour opened with a slightly different twist, similar but different. Those that were released from camps and those that were killed become symbolized by bird bones, could be thought of as represented by each can, one can for each assemblage of people, perhaps. The work becomes a memorial to those that dreamed of escape, flight, and could not flee from imprisonment, spirits being released - in Psalm xi, the soul is compared to a bird: “Flee as a bird to your mountain.” The work can also reference those that are imprisoned by memory. Together, the assemblages seem like eyes pried opened to the bones of death exposing tousled mortality, the continuance of retained memory.

Treasure Box #3 – Rock Scissors Glass – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Treasure Box #5–Brush – Hake – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Treasure Box #7 – Scissors – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Many of Field’s Treasure Box series together are reckonings, assaying the merit of disuse from dereliction, decline, abandonment in the works Treasure Box #1–Rock Paper Scissors, Treasure Box #3 – Rock Scissors Glass, Treasure Box #4 – House Paint Brush, Treasure Box #5–Brush – Hake, Treasure Box #7 – Scissors. Objects place in singular, vertical compositions become symbols of spent humanity.

Treasure Box #4 – House Paint Brush – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Treasure Box #6 – Pliers and Bone – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Treasure Box #9 – Bird Skull – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Treasure Box #4 – House Paint Brush , Treasure Box #6 – Pliers and Bone and Treasure Box #9 – Bird Skull share a gold or golden background. Preciousness is associated with gold. Patinas of uneven and faded prestige Treasure Box #4 – House Paint Brush, a longing for sophistication, past wealth, even gestures that recollect extravagance, dismay. Field employs the most decorative but tattered gold paper treatment in the work titledTreasure Box #6 – Pliers and Bone. Once glorious wallpaper is highly contrasted with rusty pliers and a bone fragment attached beside the tool, ostensibly portraying a forgotten tool of torture with the staging of bone, humanity lost in the golden metallic, a pattern of a past life. Treasure Box #9 – Bird Skull employs luminous golden treatment, scored. A bird skull top centre dives towards the rock below, a memorial stone (seen in other works too) the immutable finality is imperfect as the small hard grey mass is lumpy, offers no comfort. Field juxtaposes death and downfall.

Treasure Box #1–Rock Paper Scissors – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Treasure Box #8 – Rust and Bone – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

These works are contrasts to the whitewashed backgrounds of Treasure Box #1–Rock Paper Scissors, Treasure Box #8 – Rust and Bone, denoting an effort to enhance appeal in the course of privation. Broken dreams, promises, fragments of a life lived and damaged through chance appear in the first of these two. The second, a bent bar is overlaid with a triangulation of bone, furcula or a wish bone. A single stone becomes a figuration, a touchstone for the promise of endurance where the circuitous, worn metal path intersects the wish. Something had to die for the wish to become fact.

Treasure Box #2 – Curly Kelp Korea – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Treasure Box # 10 – Rusty Angles – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Treasure Box #11–Ruler Pulley – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna

Treasure Box #2 – Curly Kelp Korea utilizes a unique Korean newspaper background with dried kelp curling centrally. The dried kelp, primarily harvested as food in East Asia is also has industrial applications, used for fertilizer, for sodium and potassium salts, thickening agents and colloid (as in paint suspension) stabilizers in commercial products. Field’s choice of a kelp ribbon dance movement or a wave of a prayer flag is still life. Harvested kelp becomes a liberating agent. The kelp gracefully choreographs freedom on the discoloured news, a memorable sheet remarking on Field’s multiple travels to Asia. Field was profoundly nourished there, and her adventures liberating. All other Treasure Box works utilize bare wood simplicity of the box, acceptance of the found as purposeful and useful.


Twisted metal strips evoking Rauschenberg’s metal choices (Treasure Box #8, too) and a stone low and disconnected from the main, another memorial. Treasure Box # 10 – Rusty Angles is displayed with hand painted background, sweeps and whips of subdued colour. A wobbly helix, a rusted shambling life force continues to move, reigns above the nugget, a perfect truth. Field’s painted scenery shows the way to be gentle and dreamy.

Treasure Box #11–Ruler Pulley shows the same humble box as in the other treasure boxes hoisted in a suspiciously incongruous configuration. Inside, a rusted metal ruler is fitted to the upper edge. The attachment suggests an immeasurable figuration, the weight of which must be held fast, and suspended, winched lest it be allowed to fall – a corroded bias assigned to an ineffectual pulley to delay, hinder its inevitable collapse. Field’sTreasure Box works are caches replete with contest and cost, treasures of acknowledgement. She encloses brave testaments tackled, confidently structured with inspired combinations segregated - suspended belief. We find deep sincerity in her Assemblage contribution. There is no absence or deficiency. Her work is commanding. Field assembles valuable wisdom. 

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Dale Roberts

The Greek word Symbolon means the halves of a broken piece of pottery. One part of the physical object rests in the physical world, the other part in the invisible. Symbolic moments are those events when we are conscious that life has taken on powerful metaphoric vibrations. Life feels heightened. We sense that we are being struck open, in our hearts, or drawn upwards, away from the cracked world. Every meeting of the vertical and horizontal planes is a layering of realms, in the ritual crux. These are the experiences that seem to move us beyond matter, into a spiritual realm.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 162-3

This was the trick, [Allen Ginsberg] now figured, to distill visionary experience into a poem and convey it, through a kind of supernatural mental transmission, to the reader. Poetry might set off similar explosions in people’s heads. Take away the “sawdust of reason” and the poem becomes a machine whereby the juxtaposition of real and unreal images, the telescoping of time, combines with the suggestion of magical emotions to release the fleeting “archangel of soul.”
~ A Blue Hand: The Beats in India, Deborah Baker, the Penguin Group, New York, N.Y., 2008, pg. 36

Dale Roberts gleans private and shared chronicles, distilling histories. He extracts the phenomenon of appearance elegiacally. Each work conjures the essence of remarkable, irrecoverable pasts with wilful abandon. Encapsulating the venerably intrepid, each sculpture, assemblage is a story. Robert’s pieces are fraught with poetic incarnations, personification as sculpture. He activates materials with deference to its origins. Private significance surges along with socially preserved notions, some sullied. Gathered, melded and handmade treatments champion, assert gallantly, solicitous. Roberts’ contributions toAssemblage are eagerly exuberant, patient explorations that reflect his facility for knowledge of humanity with serendipitous finds availing the juncture between life and assembled circumstances, soulfully. Materialization is embodied as assembled relevance.

Heaven Cent – 36 x 56 x 10”  Dale Roberts. (photo courtesy Dale Roberts)

Heaven transverses cultures as a long standing evocation to an ideal local, somewhere where everyone might ultimately benefit or a place abundance is available, or a target of hopeful, timeless feats. Who knows when people started divining heaven? Homer wrote about heaven in The Odyssey, for example. “Someone may tell you something, or (and people often hear things in this way) some heaven-sent message may direct you.” Cent, a humble coinage, a fractional monetary unit is currency the world over, a minimum exchange or tender. Ancient antecedents - Celts, Greeks, Romans, many in all parts of Asia, India – cultures all over the world. Pervasive, too was the use of coins in the mouth or on the eyes to pay for transport to the land of the dead, paying the ferryman, referred to as Charon's obol by the Greeks and in Latin liturgy – Charon, being the ferryman, obol, the money. [5] In Canada, the minimal coinage was called a penny. Pennies are no longer in circulation in Canada.
Roberts changes the idiom, heaven sent which was believed in past generations as god-given fortune and employs his version of the song title, Pennies from Heaven, the Frank Sinatra song where

Every time it rains, it rains pennies from heaven.
Don't you know each cloud contains pennies from heaven?
You'll find your fortune's fallin' all over the town
Be sure that your umbrella is upside down
 
Sinatra’s lyrics describe life’s adversity as fortunate, encourages collection of these resources, the rain or challenges can be valuable and enriching.

Robert’s Heaven Cent is a morality tale, the retired pennies of life, innocence, humble notions or inspiration lost in the proverbial sea with no chance of rescue. A remnant of sail canvas shrouds the work, with debris of nautical journeys stationed around the window full of pennies recounting past ideas of sense woefully. The hardened pennies float forever in the beyond surrounded by references to a lifesaving devices, the float framing the view with net and pulley, rope – all means of recovery lie about the work in a haphazard embrace. Heaven Cent deliberates drowned humility. Roberts entombs outmoded pennies in resin as consideration of engulfed simplicity. A dislocated lock from the ultimate treasure chest is rusty, and ineffectual. Pennies were once the exemplary means through simpler times. Now no amount of pennies will ever pay the cost and are just pretty pennies. Uncomplicated troubles, straightforward solutions symbolized by the inaccessible pennies gathered in shinny copper array become a view to lost means of change, unavailable delight, the demise of a common denominator. No umbrella will ever collect life’s scarcity as treasure that can be accumulated and dispersed. No penny will ever be a heavenly sent resolution, a song of hope ever again.

(Feather suitcase) – 22 x 16 x 18" Dale Roberts. (photo courtesy Dale Roberts)

(Feather suitcase) –22 x 16 x 18" Dale Roberts. (photo by Debora Alanna)

(Feather suitcase) –22 x 16 x 18" Dale Roberts. (photo courtesy Dale Roberts)

(Feather suitcase), the title parenthesised as the work is a parenthesis, a collective entity. A departure, an interval, an isolated commentary about recycled substance is a recapitulated personal story. Roberts covers a suitcase with down from a pillow his grandmother made, a pillow he lied on for 20 years and relates his experience of her walls once packed with feathers, insulation. The contents’ once fine, soft, fluffy feathers that formed first plumage are now hardened by adhesive. Whiten exterior and greyed interior glued feathers constitute the outside of the cardboard case and the interior. Upholding pillars, with a picture framed window to the interior on the right side, on the left side, a boat bumper he crocheted a white cover for, protrudes within and can be seen on the outer wall. The bumper fits between the pillars if the case is closed. Roberts has encased the buffer cushioning, support columns that nicely fit together. We can see into the/his attachments, as we can see the shock absorber through cleverly crafted swathe and lozenge shape, details of life’s mercies revealed. Roberts’ work is candid and endearing. He shows we can adorn with and carry fitting feathery recollections.

Night and Day –26 x 36 x 14" Dale Roberts. (photo courtesy Dale Roberts)

Night and Day –26 x 36 x 14" Dale Roberts. (photo courtesy Debora Alanna)

Night and Day –26 x 36 x 14" Dale Roberts. (photo by Debora Alanna)

“..night and day are very necessary for my kind of thinking, the light and the dark: very important.” ~ Louise Nevelson. From interview of Louise Nevelson conducted 1964 June-1966? May 11, by Dorothy Seckler, for the Archives of American Art.
Louise Nevelson, master of collage enshrined, Roberts felted bust inhabits a light and dark reference to her creations. His stunning depiction of Nevelson’s head and shoulders is portrayed regally with celestial cap and ermine like collar. The intromission is poised. An upright entailment nestles among deeply dark wood fragments with panache of gold heralding Nevelson’s sculpture assemblage oeuvre. White sides, black interior containment on a slim wood strut stand, rhythmically syncopated dances, brings an arrangement of legs to the portrait.

Nevelson thought of black as all encompassing, aristocratic. She said it was a colour that gave you totality, quietness, excitement ‘I have seen things that were transformed into black that took on just greatness. I don’t want to use a lesser word. Now if it does that for things I’ve handled, that means that the essence of it is just what you call – alchemy.” ~ Louise Nevelson s 'quote prefacing Arthur C. Danto’s essay, p. 39 in The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend by Louise Nevelson, Jewish Museum (New York, N.Y.). On page 45, Nevelson describes white as a transformative process result through heroic action, a ‘spiritual promotion.’ She considered gold contrary to natural time cycles, however she used gold to enhance, enrich forms (sic, p. 46).
Roberts’ Night and Day shows opposing parts of time but more importantly, experiential light and dark emotional responses. He chose to make the interior black, with the luminous portrait, instrumentalist and guide, and the outside of the work white. The gold in the background, flaunts - ostensibly a halo to the felted Louise along with bits of shimmer on some of the black wooden bits and pieces enhance and enrich the visual experience. The outside feels like Roberts has engaged in a transformative process and objectifies his thoughtful acceptance of Nevelson’s influence allowing a transformation become the mantle to the mystery, a balancing agency. Robert’s white surfaces are tenuously painted showing the conduit of transformation is integral to the assembled, abstraction of surface forms precisely cut explication. Forms are prevailing and enlighten giving the dark internal enigma intellectual clarity.

The edge between the dark interior and light surround is slim. Roberts describes how the inscrutable night exists, is dependent upon and within the construct, possible because of the light of day. He shows the depth of the past enables the presence of the present. Broken, cut and fragmented found or reclaimed bits function as metaphor for bringing together disparate parts towards a unified whole and timelessness of night from the continuity and precision of day.

Hommage to Schwitters – 18 x 18 x 5" Dale Roberts. (photo courtesy Dale Roberts)

Roberts’ Hommage to Schwitters is a Merz-like construction, including collage, design, built as a wall hung sculpture. This fragmented “merz” assemblage celebrates the potential of leftover materials while addressing the boundary between art and life, Schwitters’ and Roberts’.
October 1985, The sorrows of Kurt Schwitters, an essay by Hilton Kramer in the New Criterion quotes Schwitters’ assembled works as being a “new art forms out of the remains of a former culture”. Kramer claims the assemblages to be “his most distinctive and original work. Yet despite this new sense of personal freedom which the revolution gave Schwitters, its political program appears to have meant little or nothing to him, and it was his adamant refusal to attach his art to the politics of revolution that caused the ideologues of the German Dada movement to condemn him as hopelessly bourgeois.” Although Richard Huelsenbeck, and Schwitters were once colleagues that reciprocated efforts towards each other’s endeavours. Schwitters explains:

“Huelsendada
So, Huelsenbeck has put our feud in print -- HA HA
So he sneers at my bourgeois home -- my child
who cries, who has to be changed and fed
So he laughs at my solid wife -- that she's no Anna Bloom
So families are not dada -- HA -- neither is the future then
So an artist has nothing to do with kids,
with homes, with Christmas trees
And this is commitment -- HA -- this is communist art
Well, art is not communist -- not bourgeois either
It's no club and has no party line
Not wild nights make an artist -- not drugs or manifestos
It's art -- HA HA -- that's no secret
The one who makes art -- he's the artist
His one duty-to shape the stuff that comes to hand
So he can't serve two masters -- [6]

Not art in the service of revolution, not revolution at all -- if it fetters art: There were many fractions and factions of Dada, the early 20^th century movement against reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition. The origin of the name Dada is unclear; some believe that it is a nonsensical word [7] but the predominant raison d’être was art itself.

Roberts Hommage is adhered to a wall, a plaque of commemoration on the most middle class of materials, plywood, with frame and furniture fragments that might appear in any bourgeois dwelling. The circular work is almost face-like, a Roberts’-like countenance. Protrusions above seem like eyes askew, a Schwitters’ contortion, a vision out of place, off centre. A chevron from a frame suggests a bearded chin, a chin defiant, bravery and confidence. Slats crisscross, confining and obfuscating collage, and a paint brush with wood bristles, nodding to Schwitters’ and perhaps Roberts’ painting endeavours confined and restrictive. Roberts’ choice of assembling the remnants of a bourgeois casement to a sphere, a flattened realm is portentous. His use of substantial and warmly worn material carves out a life in conflict. Hommage to Schwitters is rugged and resolute, stalwart adornment emulating Schwitters moral strength and physical prowess This work is a symbol of Roberts’ fidelity to Schwitters’ choices, his respect for his work practice while honouring an indestructible, substantial spirit that adheres to vision through imposing peer pressure.

Caution Prayin' Ahead –32 x 14 x 27" Dale Roberts. (photo courtesy Dale Roberts)

Caution Prayin' Ahead –32 x 14 x 27" Dale Roberts. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Bejesus! A case of conflict, Caution Prayin' Ahead holds a Jesus figure surrounded by torn and bunched rosettes of bible pages. Thick, sinisterly sculpted serpentine arms sly and tempting originate from behind Jesus on the left of the suitcase, with a cuckoo clock, an alarm clock (time is running out?), a blood orange segment, hymnal, poetry elements, a pinecone halved, the cross section of a Papal symbol of the everlasting (also found along with the penny window in Heaven Cent), (‘And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel (pinecone): “For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved./And as he passed over Peniel the sun rose upon him.’-Genesis 32:30-3. (Literal Biblical translation of the word “Peniel” means “Face of God”), a purple (a Papal colour) strobe light occupy the face. On the right, a fire alarm, the word, Passion diagonal and prominent, birth announcements, a burned photo, a Zen story, letter, Come to Jesus Now pamphlet, and the like. Celluclay oozes out and holds the outside of the containment, the same material as the serpent. On the right top/side, a footprint relating to the poem, by Rachel Aviv[8]or the opening paragraph of Charles Haddon Spurgeon’s 1880 sermon, "The Education of the Sons of God” [9] or Mary B. C. Slade's 1871 hymn "Footsteps of Jesus". [10] Leona Lewis wrote "Footprints in the Sand" for the television program, Footprints in the sand, and more people claim authorship. Whatever the source, the point of the sandy foot print onCaution Prayin' Ahead refers to a dream. The dreamer walks on a beach with God, and two sets of footprints are imprinted. Footprints of the dreamer reveal points in their life. At the most difficult times of the person’s life, two sets merge to one set. Assuming he was abandoned during the times of trial, the dreamer questions God, who explains that at those times of pain, he carried the sufferer. One of those footsteps is implanted on a door on the right side, leading inside the case. A Virgin and child look over the doorway. A record scores the scene. On the other case face, a sign, Caution praying ahead is a broken street notice, serves as a warning and indicator of a struggle within the entire work. Robert’s title utilizes the more vernacular Prayn’, a colloquial speech, a conversational declaration. The title and the statement, the caveat qualifies the assertion by using the apostrophe to abstract the concept and enlist the audience to imagine that the artist through the work is addressing someone or something. The prayin’ is for clarity, wrestling through liturgy, through religious influence and popular belief. Robert exerts his flair for assemblage to compose a cautionary tale. If unease and distress prevail, and the alarm is pulled, will faith combust?

DETAIL: Caution Prayin' Ahead –32 x 14 x 27" Dale Roberts. (photo by Debora Alanna)

DETAIL: Caution Prayin' Ahead –32 x 14 x 27". Dale Roberts (photo by Debora Alanna)

(Hommage to Stella), another title in parentheses, this time Roberts tells us a secret, his admiration of this historical figure that resided in the Duck Block on Broad Street in downtown Victoria where his studio is located. This work is also a jam packed with revere for Victoria’s notorious madam.

(Hommage to Stella) –26 x 28 x 14" Dale Roberts. (photo courtesy Dale Roberts)

Hannah Estelle Carroll called Stella by her mother, a woman that did business and resided in the artists’ building was, according to Linda J. Eversol, in her 2005 biography of Ms Carroll, an unrepentant madam in the turn of the last century. In addition to engaging in the prostitution trade and providing a haven for others to ply their wares in several brothel locations, notably her Broad Street bawdy house, and lesser known locations in Chatham and Herald Street houses, gambling and liquor sales on her premises supplemented her income from real estate and rental property, and a boarding house, and horse racing. Her premises’ were reputed to be exquisitely decorated, impeccably clean (she liked to clean!). Her girls were carefully selected, beautifully attired. Clients, the rich and powerful were offered elegant food and fashionable entertainment. She was also recognized for her philanthropic activity, giving food to the poor and orphans, supplementing the coffers of charities.

(Hommage to Stella) –26 x 28 x 14" Dale Roberts. (photo courtesy Dale Roberts)

A valise full of invented memorabilia, and some objects found in his studio that could have been hers spill out exemplifying her fame and fortune. A cat head from Cairo, lamb’s wool, jewelled candle snuffer. Negative and positive images of mostly men, an allusion to clients titillate, although the photos are only suggestions. Tiles with 324 signify her Broad Street, Duck Block address. On the left side of the case a RCA 78, fluted with a heat gun chosen for the songs melted as Stella melted hearts. Side 2 would have played Stars of the Summer Night, Home Sweet Home, Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,Home Sweet Home, Good Night Sweet Ladies, Seeing Nelly Home.

(Hommage to Stella) –26 x 28 x 14" Dale Roberts. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Roberts generates a glamorous appeal for the life replete with tempestuous politics and savvy business acumen. Roberts testament to a life lived with panache and fortitude is displayed with a top pineapple, a multiple use symbol – a pinecone on top of the Papal staff, for example. Here the imposing finial is a symbol of virility and caprice. Roberts’ whimsical opulence features Chinese shelving that extends beyond the case structure. Dice and bric-a-brack that could have been Stella’s valued accoutrements are proudly displayed. On the ceiling, a jewel clasped bag becomes a chandelier. The left face of the assemblage holds a record moulded to rivulets, as a hair style might have been crimpled. Sherry, jewellery, fool’s gold are imbedded into the tablature and at the forefront, a photo of Stella Carroll. 
Roberts encases an exceptional life with multiple winks and a plethora of nods. Vividly imposing, he carefully enshrines Carroll’s fortuitous but contrary existence established with the support of the desirously bamboozled throughout the work's bountiful veneration, charging the sculpture with teasing charismatic awe that peaks intrigue. Roberts’ work is impenitently glorious.

Dale Roberts – Installation (photo courtesy Dale Roberts)

Dale Roberts – Installation (photo courtesy Dale Roberts)

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Martin Batchelor

Anyone who plunges into infinity, in both time and space, farther and farther without stopping, needs fixed points, mileposts as he flashes by, for otherwise his movement is indistinguishable from standing still. There must be stars past which he shoots, beacons by which he can measure the path he has travelled. He must mark off his universe into units of a certain length, into compartments which repeat one another in endless succession. Each time he crosses the border from one compartment to another, his clock ticks.

~ Oneindigheidsbenaderingen (Approaches to Infinity), by M. C. Escher, in De wereld van het zwart en wit, ed. J Hulsker, Wereld-Bibliotheek, Amsterdam, 1959, pgs. 41 – 49

Although still life has been depicted since the Greeks, at least, artists have, if not boxing their household paraphernalia and life events, examining them in a jumble Anne Vallayer-Coster style, as seen in her The Attributes of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture c. 1769. Assembling life, encasing the inanimate to still life has been around a while, as an idea. Assembling life’s artifacts in box like settings can be seen in precursors to assemblage work in paintings by Juan Sánchez Cotán, Still Life with Game Fowl, Vegetables and Fruits, 1602, Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts (ca. 1660-1683), Trompe l'oeil (c. 1680), for example. As artists’ practices, in retrospect galloped through the last century, and variations emerged to address the immediate social constructs, philosophical and emotional sensitibilites lived within. Original ways to make work that tangles life and object as a still life assemblage through the multiple isms has transcended time constraints. Artists continue to be compelled to respond to life in an assembled still.

Martin Batchelor’s work too is a series of still lifes, artifacts of living compiled to distinguish, contrast, discern and characterize quintessential male experiences of the 20th mid century. With Raoul Haussman-like collaged imagery pasted behind or amongst personal memorabilia or collected expended objects, Batchelor has cut from magazines and newspapers to set the viewpoint of each work. Batchelor’s work is contemplative, distinguished by an understated urbane suave of that part of the period. Batchelor is very astute at summing up, garnering time and longing, reflecting on measures of existence during decades of significance and the implications of place. And we are mesmerized, never wanting to leave or let go.

Paramour –10 x 12 x 3” Martin Batchelor  (photo courtesy Martin Batchelor)

Star light, star bright,
The first star I see tonight;
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have the wish I wish tonight [11]


Martin Batchelor’s Paramour is still life situated in a sedate blue metal box (blue for boys), a found object establishes the masculine assemblage. He showcases a fancy man of biz, spiffy, and another picture of him decked out seems an ace of some kind, speaking in the vernacular of the mid 20^th century. cut out printed advertising images of a confident smoking male in the 40s or 50s. He looks like someone from Mad Men. An image of a male in white formal attire, signifying marriage or classy and expensive pursuits is complemented by buttons, a handsome period pen, a lighter. Above the assemblage is a foil star with a virgin as cameo. A Pall Mall cigarette box (so 20^th century) with its distinctive Art Nouveau font is distinguished with a knight’s helmet and regal lions on a shield, a coat of arms below reading Per aspera ad Astra,(tr. Latin: Through [the] thorns to the stars), and a banner below says In hoc signo vinces (tr. Latin: By this sign shall you conquer). The Pall Mall slogan, "Wherever Particular People Congregate", appears below the shield. All texts are apt slogans for the era. Batchchelor has represents the sentiment of “Through [the] thorns to the stars with the star placed prominently above the work.” The religious icon a prayer, and perhaps a reference to “By this sign shall you conquer”, as the paramour, for his dalliance needs guidance from Faith. Or, it may be a reference to Cole Porter 30s song, recorded by Frank Sinatra on the 1956 album, Songs for Swingin' Lovers! Lyrics includes the line, ‘Now heaven knows, anything goes’ In that song, too, ‘When most guys today that women prize today/Are just silly gigolos’. Batchelor’sParamour, with his personal memorabilia, prizes and pride might be the debonair sophisticate of the song, loving his life, his loves, posed and immortalized by Batchelor where particular people congregate – in a dramatic picturesque tableau vivant. If wishes were granted the Paramour’s life would never change and remain as he appears timeless in this work. Batchelor shrewdly devised the epitome of an enduring historical moment with precision.

Good Cop Bad Cop –12 x 16 x 5” Martin Batchelor (photo courtesy Martin Batchelor)

Within a found biscuit tin, with Batchelor’s treatment looks like a call box, Good Cop Bad Cop is loosely based on crime in the mid century televised understanding of the policeman’s experience. Paraphernalia of the era is featured that we have come to know as CSI equipment. A calliper, bullet, a gage, medicinal indigestion remedy and water pistol, for example shapes how one might play at good cop/bad cop. Batchelor has intensified the assemblage with police stances while on duty as collage in the background. They are for the most part, happy in their work. The police seen speaking on the phone is a bit ruffled, shaking his fist. Batchelor condensed summation of idealized crime fighting is nostalgic and we too wish that the times were as simple as the work illustrates. Batchelor has gathered the memory for our satiation. We cannot have too little to look at, as times have changed. We might as well be looking at a 15^th century still life, for the proximity to this innocence suggests.

Separate Lives –10 x 12 x 3” Martin Batchelor (photo courtesy Martin Batchelor)

Separate Lives lives in a cigar box that many in the mid century era utilized as a collection device. Cut-outs of men and women in their underwear are pasted to the back and front as private views assembled to mark how people saw each other in private, or at least in magazines, their convictions about the other sex based on popular imagery seen in print media, movies and TV, often. A mucilage bottle, a beetle bug button, a navy figurine, a message, chocolate, a lamp, a flower, a pinup card, a spy glass – all appurtenances contrast and distance the romanticized privacy that one might imagine another is experiencing. Again, Batchelor preserves the attitudes and outlooks, the opinions of what was expected of how people ought to think of themselves and each other. He abridges the complex while understating how underneath the dreamy and impractical, there was a quixotic but prosaic banality that inspired. Still inspires.

Dr No (No Doctor) –12 x 16 x 5” Martin Batchelor (photo courtesy Martin Batchelor)

A double o, 007 - Bond, James Bond, licence to kill memory plant, strange intrigue, lust - recounting Dr No versus severe period asceticism in the minds of film viewing public. Batchelor considers the medical in perceived lives during the mid century and absence of or limit to medical availability, understood through his title for this assemblage, Dr No (No Doctor.) – death to the fictitious and ambivalent evil doers. We could also deduce that there is a resistance to the medical treatment received, and refusal to participate in that professions intervention, being limited by understanding and technology because of his choice of containment, a child’s lunch box. Smooth faced people show brains like swim caps, in unsophisticated illustrations. Other body systems are exemplified and pasted within the collage formed inside the plaid metal lunch kit. Although a convenient holding place for this assemblage, what is memorable about the school lunch container in relation to the work is that Batchelor was a child during this period, and formative experiences are ascertained and presented, along with a measuring device, a measurement of how experiences impact and how we remember are calculated here.

A spoon hangs for the bottles of medicinal evocation. An ambulance driver figurine is dwarfed but signifies the toying of the medical practices of the time, and how we toy with what knowledge we participate in as patients. A cursive metal Skagit feature might originate on a vehicle made or sold near the Skagit valley, or reference the coast Salish tribe where the name originates. Certainly, the sign is top heavy, but gives the work a gauge of strength in its weightiness. Rust, the old fashioned containment, the paint peeling on objects allows us to develop a personal relationship with the mid century is substantiated through the bundles of hand written notes attached to the assemblage. Old things, shapes, how they fit into life suddenly is a relation to someone once living, and we can relate better than ever to what happened to someone one day, because this is a visceral connection to the past. Batchelor has enabled the connection. He includes the anonymous person writing those indecipherable thoughts in our deliberation. We see how we are attached to this past because Batchelor has conveniently corresponded to the objects of that day.

Colour red, red for Red Cross, emergency, blood, red for a cue ball (Bond and the medicine for what ails is always on cue), buttons, a red stamp. Batchelor paints with objects as a painter might paint with colour. He has chosen collage images to coincide with the colour scheme. Some of the things may seem arbitrary, however, like Gysbrechts et al, Batchelor has accumulated and responds to the immediacy of the everyday, and allows us his singular compositions, his insinuating colour treatments, his compositional rigour to appreciate how time impacts the present through the past. Batchelor assembles wistful illation.

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[1] Hilborn, Ray; Mangel, Marc (1997). The ecological detective: confronting models with data. Princeton University Press. p. 24. ISBN 978-0-691-03497-3. Retrieved 22 August 2011.
[2] Leary, Timothy. Info-Psychology, New Falcon Publications, 1989, ISBN 1-56184-105-6.
[3] Galbreath, Donald Lindsay (1972). Papal Heraldry. Heraldry Today. ISBN 0-900455-22-5.
[4] http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/secret-nazi-tapes-shocking-germany-1336922
[5] Ian Morris, Death-ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 106 online.
[6] The Merzbook: Kurt Schwitters Poems, translated by Colin Morton at theContemporary American Poetry Archive.
[7] Budd, Dona, The Language of Art Knowledge, Pomegranate Communications, Inc.
[8] Aviv, Rachel. "Enter Sandman: Who wrote footprints?". Poetry Foundation.
[9] Spurgeon, Charles Haddon (10 June 1880). The Education of the Sons of God (PDF). Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington.
[10] I sing for I cannot be silent: the Feminization of American Hymnody, 1870-1920, June Hadden Hobbs, p. 123
[11] ‘The superstition of hoping for wishes granted when seeing a shooting or falling star may date back to the ancient world.’ I. Opie and M. Tatem, A Dictionary of Superstitions(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 175-6.