Here's the 2011 art reviews I wrote on the Exhibit-V blog ~ Art Reviews - starting with the last one first.
As a regular contributor to the Exhibit-v blog 'Art Reviews' section,
I have the privilege of interviewing artists in Victoria, BC,
and learning about their art practice.
Exhibit-v has posted my reviews of some work shown
locally: http://exhibit-v.blogspot.com/search/label/write%20ups
Exhibit-v promotes artists in Victoria by listing current art exhibitions
and art galleries. Through video clips of shows, artist interviews and commentary on the Exhibit-v blog, podcasts and Facebook exposure, this virtual compendium of media is Victoria's indispensable
visual cultural information source.
From the Exhibit-v website,
you can also access the blog, as well as a calendar
for openings ~ interviews for the Victoria, BC
and area art community, and art enthusiasts.
A great site!
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Philip Willey “Provincial Life “ by Debora Alanna
Unlucky the hero born
In this province of the stuck record
From: “The Times are Tidy” by Sylvia Plath
The Province of the Saved
Should be the Art
From: “The Province of the Saved” by Emily Dickenson
“It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories” [1]
Provincial Life is this year’s oeuvre for Philip Willey. An unassuming exposition, this show contrasts existent historical references with the past. He introduces themes from a documented archive, which brings the visual commentary to the forefront and allows drawn and painted portraits intermingling local backdrops to propose a reassessment of history’s recollection that may intensify present processing.
Willey plays with Hannah Maynard’s image, a photographer who challenged photographic space in 1860’s Victoria. She cycles steadily with brandish strokes of lively colour before the Spiral Café, and stopping her bike while merrily collaged, she looks at a photographed excerpt of a John Luna work in bold address of present and future provincialism, a readable argument to thwart any naysayer. An inspired entity defying convention, Maynard provides Willey with a muse.
Soonghees village life with steadfast, carved canoes shored at the current Fort Street waterfront reveals the Blue Bridge in the distance, and in another work, paddlers confront the soon to be bridge or row past a little ferry. Gallantly pointing bows, Willey points to future violations, a portent of life we have overpowered, and the presage of ruin eminent with disregard of what is valuable about our cultural mediums. A biting contrast of whalers next to whale watchers (Moral Dilemma), he drives the lost life forward. Willey postulates the affect of cultural influence. His works are deftly drawn and painted with a wash of colour deferentially shaping nostalgia, both for the past lives lived through our engineered landmarks, soon redefining our mores.
A bike rider pulling a child in a covered yellow rain cart, a symbol of a contemporary urban professionals looks at the viewer with Fort Victoria as their neighbourhood, challenging our outlook with their oblivion. In another work, a horse drawn cart is poised in Bastion square providing imagery to compare past and present scenarios of provincial life. Capable of precise draughtsmanship, when Willey is looser with his lines (Bob’s Your Uncle), he shows how we fumble with history’s lessons. We cannot remember without experience, but we can learn, clumsily.
The Kingdom (2008) by Damien Hirst bares its teeth behind smiling Emily Carr, with Woo, her monkey. Inspired by Hirst’s Spot painting, Willey dots the background of a juxtaposed BC bicycle rickshaw, touring, spotting the sights? In the pale distance, a tall sail is in harbour, reminding us of the passage of time and analogous intention for expedition. Hirst is an interpretation of the monetary credence a prominent sale (Saatchi, for Hirst) can affect the life of an artist, and reminds of Carr’s poverty. Both creatures are out of their habitat, as well. Wooing us with the unfamiliar, challenging our comfort zone poses risk to insular lives. According to Willey’s pictorial interpretation, this financial transaction brings artist and their work from provincial to international status in the public’s perspective. Utilizing Hirst, Willey distinguishes provincial providence with the strength of Hirst reputation, which is communicable.
Willey reveals reflexive aggression with a hammer placed near very delicate teacups, symbolizing a past still present (Tea with Julian). Julian Schnabel smashed his crockery. Willey shatters with associated imagery, demonstrating the calculating transgression of colonialism and pejorative provincialism. By painting aboriginal boaters riding on a moonlit waterway in the tearoom window, Willey reiterates the impact of inaction.
Woman on a Bike (after De Kooning) brings restlessness to Willey’s show. Uneasy, yet breaking out of his placid cerebral visual vocabulary, Willey embraces past influences, allowing his restraint to burst out with arrestingly substantial, attacking strokes and tight composition. De Kooning, along with other European expats were once “provincial artists in a provincial capital, living in the shadow of Europe, who woke up one day in the 1950s to discover that New York was the metropolis of art and they were the unlikely, paint-splattered princes of the city.” Aside from the fame and fortune, De Kooning found this change oppressive. [2] Willey includes the bicycle we found Hannah Maynard riding in several other works to assure continuity, to corroborate that there is consequence to non-provincialism status causing interference to an artist’s journey.
The largest work (Carthage) refers to the North African city founded in Virgil’s Aeneid. Willey exudes a salient, crepuscule timbre that launches a reverie, noting civic improvements that marginalize people, relegating them to boarders of a watery divide. The work is a tribute to Turner who emulated Claude Lorrain. Where in the Lorrain and Turner works there is a tenebrous luminosity, in Willey’s painting, with Willey’s deeply amiable colours shows us his optimism and we anticipate favorable outcome to environmental alteration, in spite of provincial circumspection.
Vanishing Point borrows a De Chirico streetscape where surrounded by a diffused orangey glow, Willey shows examples of historical buildings in isolation and between, segregating past and present, distant trestles creating a provincial surrealism segregating memory, present constructs and future possibility. Willey demonstrates the affect of isolation. The past and present edifices are inaccessible, and we connect with the girl with a hoop, endowing playful abandon necessary for creation. Maybe it’s from Hannah’s bicycle.
Philip Willey found himself in Victoria BC around 40 years ago. “Victoria has been good to me”, he says. Speaking with him, he is ready with a tapestry of stories. One of those world travelers that hobnobbed with soon to be famous artists along the way, Willey has engaged with a veritable whose-who of art icons. A former board member of Open Space Gallery and writer for numerous art magazines while sustaining his art practice, Willey has been, both abroad and here in Victoria in the welcome sphere of provincial life.
Provincial Life
New Paintings by
Philip Willey
Spiral Café
418 Craigflower Ave
Victoria West
6 September – 3 October 2011
Watch video
[1] Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Trans. And ed. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[2] http://www.robertfulford.com/Dekoonin.html
“ A Myriad of Truths “
Myriad of Truths is a passionate undertaking where synchronistic plots appear in painting and sculpture, divulging illusory stories. Mythos strives to disclose visual legends she senses. Working with mystical knowledge from many cultural inspirations, there are literal and ephemeral references to allusive mystic energies. Bone and feather brings the essence of creation and nature into play, allowing the subjective choices to supersede objectivity with a skill and adoration for how the materials originate. (Tunnel of Eternal Return) Bringing images together with found objects, Mythos layers and develops her personal archetypal narratives. She demonstrates the truth as she experiences it, truth that has a universal realism although the work can be mistaken for cultural appropriation.
In his review (1)of Cultural Appropriation and the Arts by James O. Young (Blackwell Publishing, 2008) John Rapko points out that “cultural appropriation dissolves under scrutiny.” “There is little left for the philosopher to say other than to urge, with Picasso, artists to steal.” A warning about objects or content use by an ‘outsider’ may decrease the “richness, an idea, a style, or a motif; and of a subject or 'voice'” is immaterial in this work because Mythos heightens the viewer’s awareness of primordial forces that dominate a variety of aboriginal cultural arts, allowing her own voice to manifest in authentic intermingling imagery.
An autodidactic artist, Mythos’ production is vigorous and dedicated, although itinerant with each thought process she engages in. However, she adheres to the veracity of the moment, producing ardently with a mostly muted monochromatic palate that writhes with dream-like visions, sharing her consideration and veneration of ancient enquiry processes. A Jack Shadbolt introspection can be seen, yet Mythos’ probing is more eager, an internal investigation that utilizes beings challenging surfaces with combating strokes. Pairing collage sculptural elements with painted surfaces, Mythos assembles her strength’s conviction.
Mythos’ latest work (Rebirth Canal and Ribbed Tunnel of Eternal Return) begins a new exploration with intensely warm colour and unfalteringly feminine shapes. This work projects kindliness with intense assurance, confronting the value of integrity. What will Mythos mythologize next? She has begun to unravel a myriad of truths.
A Myriad of Truths
Artist: ‘Mythos’ aka Tessa Fenger
Olio Gallery
5 – 20 August 2011
614 ½ Fisgard St
Victoria BC
By Debora Alanna
Watch Video
[1] http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23644-cultural-appropriation-and-the-arts/
In his review (1)of Cultural Appropriation and the Arts by James O. Young (Blackwell Publishing, 2008) John Rapko points out that “cultural appropriation dissolves under scrutiny.” “There is little left for the philosopher to say other than to urge, with Picasso, artists to steal.” A warning about objects or content use by an ‘outsider’ may decrease the “richness, an idea, a style, or a motif; and of a subject or 'voice'” is immaterial in this work because Mythos heightens the viewer’s awareness of primordial forces that dominate a variety of aboriginal cultural arts, allowing her own voice to manifest in authentic intermingling imagery.
An autodidactic artist, Mythos’ production is vigorous and dedicated, although itinerant with each thought process she engages in. However, she adheres to the veracity of the moment, producing ardently with a mostly muted monochromatic palate that writhes with dream-like visions, sharing her consideration and veneration of ancient enquiry processes. A Jack Shadbolt introspection can be seen, yet Mythos’ probing is more eager, an internal investigation that utilizes beings challenging surfaces with combating strokes. Pairing collage sculptural elements with painted surfaces, Mythos assembles her strength’s conviction.
Mythos’ latest work (Rebirth Canal and Ribbed Tunnel of Eternal Return) begins a new exploration with intensely warm colour and unfalteringly feminine shapes. This work projects kindliness with intense assurance, confronting the value of integrity. What will Mythos mythologize next? She has begun to unravel a myriad of truths.
A Myriad of Truths
Artist: ‘Mythos’ aka Tessa Fenger
Olio Gallery
5 – 20 August 2011
614 ½ Fisgard St
Victoria BC
By Debora Alanna
Watch Video
[1] http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23644-cultural-appropriation-and-the-arts/
Monday, July 18, 2011
John Luna’s Home Show and sale by Debora Alanna
PART 1
Eyes born of night
are not eyes that see:
they are eyes that invent
what we see.
From: The Constellation of the Body
by Octavio Paz. Figures & Figurations (2008)
Permitting an elucidating intimation of intimacy born of layers of meaning, a sampling of John Luna’s previously exhibited painting over the last decade graced the walls of his home for a two-day glimpse this past June. Luna’s pellucid offering was too briefly presented. The time allotted too fleeting. Like a novel that engages you within the first sentence and you must return to at the earliest opportunity, Luna’s work demands further attention. Luna’s art takes time to breathe in - each breath imbibing a persuasive aroma of an intricate, sensuous mystery. Windows of confident tenderness and convincing ache, where indulgence of beauty’s excruciating disposition appears entail more than a peek.
Untitled (Delft Shepherd to Ghost) from Untitled Suite (#5/8) (2000) might be titled to refer to a period of Delft blue faience where glazed earthenware decorated with opaque colors may implicitly direct us to that historical time and place, to a shepherd on a plate in the 1600s, a nostalgic pastoral simplicity, to survival’s necessity. The wagging ghostly finger could be the subtext to shepherding of relationships, or a reference to the movie, “The Good Shepherd” based on Norman Mailer’s book, Harlot’s Ghost. The allusions are all conjecture. We cannot know without asking. The naming of this work suggests how the viewer may enter into thinking about the work. In her essay, “The Critic as Cosmopolite: Baudelaire’s International Sensibility and the Transformation of Viewer Subjectivity”[1], Margueritte Murphy cites Charles Baudelaire’s inquiry into understanding Chinese ceramics:
What would he say, if faced with a product of China—something weird, strange, distorted in form, intense in color and sometimes delicate to the point of evanescence? (…)—it is necessary for him, by means of a phenomenon of the will acting upon the imagination, to learn of himself to participate in the surroundings which have given birth to this singular flowering.
What is important is the ability of the viewer to intervene, to wander in the bucolic. Scouring the surface, unlike Jasper John’s search in Good Time Charley (1961), Luna’s encircling is caring while circumventing exactitude. Perhaps learning its definition, he traverses liberty as he circumscribes Eros, a paling, subtle space. Bulging, blistering blue with familiarity and hope, what is most striking is the luminosity that sings of haunting memories, which cannot be titled.
Buttress (2001) portrays an encumbered, covetous and madly reinforced vigor. Using fierce Franz Kline black, charged ominous rivers streaked with vivid blue vitality washed with pale yellow thrusts between arches of intractable fleshy tenderness. The intermediate is decisive, intervening with separating dominance. Leaning, favouring the brighter, widened curve on the left a spilling of watery xanthous bleeds and diverges to the other marred, withdrawing sphere that seeps out transitory yearning, wistfully.
Drawn in the peripatetic spirit of Dali’s “Catastrophic Writing”, Quatrefoil (2001) is an ominous disclosure where adversity is intertwined within the strengthening structure of the four delineated familial foils, interlocking power. Luna’s roughly stretched thick, palpable fawn painted burlap calls attention to the coarse fabric bite and endurance of the wood support, which holds the uneasy shield. A confused, stained interior of rough, circuitously drawn outlines with meandering marks, awkwardly. Oozing of cobalt infiltrates, articulating the ideal arising from absence:
For his art did expresse
A quintessence even from nothingnesse,
From dull privations, and leane emptiness:
He ruin’d mee, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.
From: A Nocturnal upon St. Lucie's Day by John Donne
Luna’s East Estuary (2002-2003) is where billowing courses of preoccupied energy meet pressing tides of change. The heat, smarting red infiltrates. Rabbit skin glue pigments under white peeled paper, channeling the widening horizontal waves ripped by underlying crimson, his colour is grounded and mortal. Impasto and tear texture the breakers. Clyfford Still: "I never wanted color to be color. I never wanted texture to be texture, or images to become shapes. I wanted them all to fuse together into a living spirit."
[2]
Luna fuses an emergent surge.
Luna paints silence, a quieted whiteland, where the void is incised by elliptical apertures, sacred Yoni, opening into deified space. Data, Davadhvam, Damyata (2002) cleaves like an avatar, illustrating the personification of virtues described in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishads. In his poem, The Wasteland, T.S. Elliot adopts characters’ qualities from the second Brahmana passage of “The Three Cardinal Virtues”, [3] datta (charity), dayadhvam (compassion) and damyata (restraint). [4] Launching this precept, a path of moral excellence emerges. But Luna includes 4 ellipses [5] in this work. Cut carefully, vertical vacancies in the painted surface readdress the virtuous course, acknowledging human inadequacy. The lowest and nearly determined opening has the remnants of the elliptical cutout hanging. Discerped from virtuous ideals, and dangling, mortality demands a connection between a suspended vision. Needing to know the process is a means to realize what is wanting.
Winter Composition (2003-2004) is a flourishing use of material to build up a stormy palette, inundated with chilly thrashing. Seemingly blithe strokes of sky meander above restlessly smeared, sandy earth. The watery discharge below jumps, cuts and smears into the middle ground from somber suffusion. Amee F. Carmines wrote that Paul Celan explores the ‘frozen rubble of language and humanity, salvaging a warm pulse, even though the carrier of that warmth is banished and burned. He seeks something that can only be found on the edge of silence” [6] I’m wintering over to you. ~ Paul Celan (Snow Part) [7] Luna’s winter swells and thrashes with contrapuntal intensity of harmonious discord. Influencing turquoise is tortuous and pulsating, pervading the central hush – Luna’s brumal season.
Canyon [front] & [verso] has a similar dual existence as Window (2003-2008), Sign (2008-2009) and Messenger (2008 -2009), reviewed on the Exhibit-v blog . [8] Canyon [front] is a chasm where erotic contemplation hovers and becomes a melancholic memory held tight and succinct. Canyon [verso] ties memory, reticulating reason into a grey twist, an entwined prickly tract.
It takes time to absorb John Luna’s paintings. Because he gives you plenty of surface loci to focus and ponder, suggestive materiality to feel, poetic maturity to allow thought divergence, expand insight. And profound scholarly knowledge references to discover, if willing, which will ultimately stimulate further awakening. The looking cannot be rushed. He dissuades cunctation, as his work identifies urgent, purposeful questions that demand concentration, now. Precipitance will prohibit knowing, or what can be known or felt. Feeling is germane. Surfaces are rough, scarred, besieged with colour and incised with distress. The works caress space and we recognize the longing for delicacy of soul’s refinement. Luna’s paintings are strength weighing, stretching fear’s wrapping to breakage, the point of positioned views where past presents and future is possibility.
PART 2
Over a diminutive tajine of salt, bread and Moroccan soup, John Luna spoke about his inspiration, motivation, and art practice. Tumbling ideas, interweaving angulated poetics with quotes, I tried to assimilate each explanation in hyperspeed tangents of thought and I wandered from his original remarks, over and over. Looking at my notebook afterwards, I realized I had only snippets of the conversation written in a scrawl I would barely decipher, having to write at least as fast as John Luna spoke, which was not possible. Using a recording device might have been useful, but would have detrimentally coloured the conversation, I thought. So, I will relay a collage, morsels of Luna’s acumen in no particular order that I managed to learn. His ideas are all with variably specific contexts, and are recorded as faithfully as possible, however, are not transcribed entirely verbatim.
John Luna likes to be at home (big thing), home being where there is an adequate language of relationship, being somewhere and not be there, maybe no where in particular. He refers to Paul Celan’s The Straightening: “no body asks after you”. He says these lines are poetic directions, and “in part, risk language”.
The topic of Jasper Johns’ ruler paintings demonstrate Luna’s attention to use of tools, where he observed an absence and inertia. Inertia resulting when wants, fault, problem, over shooting, and bearing exist. Abandon is a kind of absence, proof you were there, being led array, “an alleviation of burden”.
Luna imparted that your (your – collectively, he uses the collective ‘you’, as opposed to ‘I’ because ‘I’ is a distraction, “pain of ass”. He is uncomfortable with personal, indirectness) dreams are microbes, little lights that expiate burden. Slow insufficiency pours. Homonymy is how dreams work.
He talked about the serious repetitions of gesture. “Being in slipstream feeling.” He relayed the “way of relating to equatorial fatalism” - self secrecy. And mentioned an “anxious, just in case (feeling) vs. compulsion”. He spoke about fear as a transaction. And ethics, which are “hard to make clear”. He speaks about Beuys as a resistant character, and impurity, as the action of Darwin.
Paraphrasing Cezanne: ~ “I will always be the primitive of the path I discover.” ~ Luna explained that in his work, Eros is “a state of tension, all at once available”. Although a distraction, as in Rauschenberg (Luna says). The act of irritating a surface becomes fatigue, tension. Tension is valued. Having a job, task, a reusable one that evolves ~ the temporary doing and undoing of knots. Landscape relocates the crisis/problem history with structure. And can be “danger swapping”.
He refers to 'Bataille' and 'Formless' (referring to Formless: A User's Guide by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E Krauss), an invaluable book for him. He is now reading Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, which he also thinks is great.
He talked about character development, about being an artist/teacher, the stability required to make art with art school as an outlet, providing freedom. And trust. Creating an imaginary social life, as expression - this becomes an “expanding conceit”. Luna relays how relationships shift and how the blurring autonomy of work impacts the domestic setting.
Auspicious and humbling, Luna wants to be “just domestic” make work about the lyric domestic space, disappear into the domestic landscape, and be with the work. Endeavoring to pass into anecdote, he creates persona, and resists insecurity. John Luna is treasure.
PART 3
Giacometti approached, nuzzled by a dark silky guardian. The dog bade him welcome. “John Luna has been waiting for you.” the dog communicated. The tall, walking man’s suspicious eyes approaching the doorway asked, “Why?” Giacometti’s look returned, “Because.”
With a mouthful of home-made steamed baguette dripping with melted butter, Dante appeared in the doorway, beckoning and spoke excitedly from the porch. “In this house dwells a divine comedy. St. Lucy’s eyes are everywhere. Courtly love challenges intimacy lyric.” Upon entering, a quatrefoil was secreted, visible through a glass door, mirroring.
Inside the salon, they faced newly painted grey walls gathering abstracted thought. Straightening the aged estuary canvas, “(It) shows me up better.” Luna grinned. “It peels away memories,” Jasper Johns added, having just coming into the room to join the others.
Having come into the house silently, the others saw him beyond a cut-out aperture to the fore room. Paul Celan spoke, sharing his usual complexities as he turns over one of Luna’s reversible paintings. “Glad to see I can see both side of the questions you pose.”
Smelling of ages, Cezanne floated in, stealthily hovering behind Luna, whispering, “I swear I have seen you somewhere, some winter on the Riviera, perhaps?”
Poking his finger rhythmically through some ellipses, T. S. Elliot shouted to the others from an adjacent canvas, “Dot, dot, dot and into infinity…” (No one could remember exactly when he arrived.)
Baudelaire wandered up the stairs and joined, “There is a shining girl hanging from a tree!” “Let’s drink some of your redolence over coffee and talk.”
Absence is present.
25 & 26 June 2011
Victoria BC
[1] http://www.palgrave.com/PDFs/0230551165.Pdf
[2] Clyfford Still, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1976, p.123
[3] http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/4081/WasteLand.html#431
[4] http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts/east-meets-west.html
[5] “[Greek, ellipsis, a want, defect, ellipsis < to fall short, leave undone > en-, in + leipein, to leave].” Webster’s New World Dictionary. World Publishing Company. 3rd ed. 1958. Print.]
[6] www.unca.edu/postscript/postscript5/ps5.5.pdf
[7] Schneepart (Snow Part), translated by Ian Fairley (2007)
[8] http://exhibit-v.blogspot.com/2010/08/john-luna-tyler-hodgins-storage-room.html
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Thursday, July 7, 2011
Blair Taylor “ You Blew It “ by Debora Alanna
Blair Taylor dreams white dreams of bare efficiency colouring consciousness. Little rises of figures in arrested action impale and huddle, reflect and evince sensation. He delineates and miniaturizes his dreams into equal portions, creating language components, meronymy where isolated parts of dreams relate to his entire dream lexicon. The dreamscapes colligate with size and form. Unnervingly smooth with anonymity, Taylor’s ambiguous figures interplay amongst diverse variations of open architectural configurations. The figures, still as statues from the Abu Temple in Tell Asmar composedly contest. Taylor produces drama within dreamy smooth spaces.
Voyeurs into his dreamworld, we peer into lulling whiteness. Taylor sets his dreams on stark plinths in ordered rows. Taylor’s sculptures can be paralleled to Sandro Bernardi’s assertion about film: 'Il cinema come insiemi infiniti' (infinite sets)[1]. Or scenes like comic book captures that draw tidy, simplified significance with one important dreamed moment, and then another and another. The exhibition space ticks like a silent clock.
Fine, sinister silhouettes summon mysteries’ shadows, contrasting the blanched incidents. Oneiric definition and separation haunts stealthily. Whitened meandering cords suspend white-painted oval speakers narrating. Taylor whispers his dreams into our ears in two locations on the side and end of the exhibition space. Unlike George Segal’s white peopled vignettes, influenced by John Cage to “connect art with tangible reality”, [2] sitting down between Taylor’s undertones, the captivation translates the dreamscapes’ without associating to any particular delineation of his sculpted dreams or our awake world. The auditory sublimates visual wanderings, disengages us from private associations visually presented, developing the pictorial dreams as movie sounds will brings fresh scope to the pictures on screen.
Taylor works small, keeping involvement disconnected in spite of pragmatic building. The events depicted are affectedly dramatic. In her 1999 feature article in Kinema, Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory, film theorist, Laura Rascaroli writes:
For Jung, dreams develop according to an authentic dramatic structure, formed by a phase of exposition, in which setting and characters are presented; by a development of the plot; by a culmination or peripeteia, containing the decisive event; and by a lysis or solution. [3]
Each of Taylor’s works punctuate with some decisive moment, point of intensity. We are obliged to imagine a resolution. Clarity through simplicity details austere incidents and decorum presupposes we accept that drama will result in a resolve. Preoccupied figures situated in architectural isolation are analogous to painter Paul Delvaux’s Dawn over the City (1940). Unconscious solutions wake a dreamer. Like a Surrealist perplexity, Taylor’s sculptures are subterfuge. [4]
Thinking about Taylor’s numerous stair configurations, there is a structural interrelation to Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s stage design that transformed Die Tragödie des Teufels (The Tragedy of the Devil) [5] at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich in 2010. This opera transported the “Hungarian Faust”, Imre Madách’s The Tragedy of Man into an architectural environment dominated by a prominent luminous white staircase. The stairs conceptualized can signify ascension or descending, a substantial symbol illustrating the timeless struggle to forestall tragedy. “Mankind, it seems, is beset with plenty of inherent evil and requires no outside agency to foment more.” [6] Taylor’s work encourages a devilish bias as many of his sculptures are skewered with quiet violence.
From: There are Crimes and Crimes. (Act 1 Scene 2) by August Strindberg (1899)
MAURICE. Well, if we had to answer for our thoughts, who could
then clear himself?
HENRIETTE. Do you also have evil thoughts?
MAURICE. Certainly; just as I commit the worst kind of cruelties in my dreams. [7]
Through Taylor’s work we collectively experience different versions of unconscious darkness or “Shadow”, an archetypal representation of what disturbs us, about what we do not want known, what we are pained to know and need to know. His use of white distils, counters malevolence. “When it [shadow] appears as an archetype…it is quite within the possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature…” [8] Utilizing objects (spears, swords and flying projections) for which eroticism is symbolically characteristic, [9] Taylor’s sculpted consciousness is as evocative as Uccello St George impaling his Dragon (1456), a 15th century symbolic through and through of male eroticism, killing ‘sin’, personifying ruin. Taylor stills, piercing ruin’s intensity with an arresting perseverance to remember.
Blair Taylor
" You Blew It"
Art Gallery of Greater Victoria - LAB
22 April - 3 July 2011[1] Sandro Bernardi, 'Il cinema come insiemi infiniti', Filmcritica, 332 (1982), pp. 98-105.
[2] http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/guggenheim/education/05.html
[3] Serge Lebovici, 'Psychanalyse et cinéma', Revue Internationale de Filmologie, 281 (1948), p. 53
[4] http://www.yuricareport.com/Art%20Essays/SurrealismAndTheUnconscious.html
[5] http://www.ilya-emilia-kabakov.com/index.php/installations/die-tragoedie-des-teufels/description
[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/arts/03iht-Loomis3.html
[7] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14347/14347-8.txt
[8] C. G. Jung, Aion in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. William McGuire et al., trans. R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series XX (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954-79) Vol. 9/2, p. 10.
[9] http://www2.arnes.si/~uljfdv15/library/art06.html
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
The Rosen Women, exhibit reviewed by Debora Alanna
Hinda Avery’s billboard sized paintings proclaim a resistance to war, to the Jewish persecution and decimation in the Holocaust or “The Shoah” ([1]), confronting the repercussions of another and very different time and place than we in British Columbia presently experience. With a series of photographically documented wartime events that are reclaimed and reconsidered through buoyant optimism, Avery advances the approach of and need for collective female resistance to the protracted outcome from the Holocaust calamity. The work exhibits actions that combat the oppression of morale, showing how to withstand and counteract the long-term effects of the tyranny and murder of about 7.3 million European Jews at the hands of the Nazis ([2]) and help generations’ consideration to follow. Avery’s work counters the enduring harmful influence of this World War ll slaughter and residual heed to Nazis’ measures by painting the largess of campaigning women that are colourfully strong and infectiously cheerful - familiar and familial.
The Rosen Women upholds and fosters decisive denotations of female resistance fighters. Utilizing photographic portraits, Avery reconstructs the document images onto her canvases. She substitutes her female family’s faces on these painted compositions, keeping the original stance of people experiencing the processing prior to the genocide and on soldiers preparing for war. Additionally, Avery accentuates the women’s features with enlivening smiles.
Avery begins each work with pencil drawings that she leaves visible, while colouring in various details. We witness the piecing together of partial memories. Some more vivid than others. Some just outlines, some vaguely textured with hints of specificity. The bare architectural perspective rendering is unpainted in many places, showing structural layering. Layers build understanding. Avery shows how history’s narratives begin with the simplicity of a thought, a mark.
Avery discharges healing ammunition through the fiery force of expressive opposition to typically haunting war images. Injecting beaming countenances onto the scenes of Nazi invasion, parading explosive happiness in fitness exercise preparation (The Rosen Women working out, just before their advancement on the Nazis), and wielding weaponry to attack oppressors (The Rosen Women – Resistance 1) Avery displaces impassivity with proud determination, asserting joy in passionate resistance. Painting female heads on male physiques of an exercising assembly, Avery asserts an integration of the perceived physical strength of masculinity with female intelligence.
Leafy textures, shadowy garden-like patches that camouflage,
embeding the rifles of the resistance fighter busts (The Rosen
Women in their camouflage) seems to ask questions Blake posed
in his 1793 poem, Visions of the Daughters of Albion:
Tell me what is a thought? & of what substance is it made?
Tell me what is a joy? & in what gardens do joys grow?
And in what rivers swim the sorrows? and upon what mountains
Wave shadows of discontent?
Avery’s camouflaged gardens defend against the rivers of sorrow because her mountainous formations protrude gunning female power.
In War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937–1945, the author Chang-tai Hung speaks about challenging society to personalize the death and destruction of war by considering the power of female symbology in street theatre. “If the patriotic resistance struggle could somehow be reduced to human terms, if it could be individualized as a person —a flesh-and-blood human being endowed with authentic feelings and experiences—then powerful nationalistic reactions among the people might be evoked… Their ability to understand and identify with the female symbols presented to them, to feel that "she is one of us," was therefore crucial to the success of the play and to the creation of a sense of common heritage and purpose.” ([3]) Avery’s heroines become characters portrayed by her immediate female family members symbolizing moral responsiveness (The Rosen Women – Resistance 2) and (The Rosen Women – Resistance 3). She includes her own portrait amongst these characterizations. Her paintings cultivate the spirit of solidarity with women we can relate to, creating the bridge between subject and viewer. Avery’s work identifies a connection that enables the viewer to aspire to countering oppression, utilizing the painted subject’s comic pathos. We can confront the horror because of Avery paints theatrical cheerfulness.
From the Harold Bloom collection, Literature in the Holocaust, Mark Cory’s essay, Comic Distance in Holocaust Literature (204): “Beyond marking moral boundaries and establishing nuances of credibility in incredible circumstances, the comic in Holocaust literature also functions as resistance, as protest.” ([4]) Establishing authenticity with the composition’s photographic documentation Avery’s comically happy resistance fighters become protestors. Her risible interpretation launches The Rosen Women with resonant integrity, producing an ethically comedic response to the staggering decimation the Holocaust created.
Avery’s subjects release intense curative powers, heightening the complicated and difficult memory of the slain and afflicted. We are shown an accessible way to think of the carnage. Avery challenges us with effusive enthusiasm, painting a vigorous force.
The Rosen Women by Hinda Avery
Martin Batchelor Gallery
712 Cormorant St
Victoria BC
May 28 - 23 June 2011
[1] http://frank.mtsu.edu/~baustin/holo.html
[2] Gilbert, Martin. Atlas of the Holocaust 1988, pp. 242–244).
[3] Hung, Chang-tai. War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937-1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1994 1994. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft829008m5/
[4] http://www.scribd.com/doc/40067590/10/Comedic-Distance-in-Holocaust-Literature
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
“ Buffet “ review by Debora Alanna
Maître’d: (Curated by) Tyler Hodgins
On the menu: (Artists and sculptures, à la carte)
Ø Megan Dikie 
– Fowl Chic #1, #2, #3 2002. Wax.
Ø Kathryn Ellis 
– Solo 2005. Italian Marble.
Ø David Gifford – Retread 2 2008. Chlorite.
- Colony Collapse 2011. Marble, granite, bronze
- The Bee’s Knees 2011. Wood, wax.
Ø “The Creative Production Division with support from the New School of Inquiry: Domestic Preservation and the Archive & Library Special Collections at the L.S. Benschop Institute for the Preservation & Veneration of Imagination & Nostalgia” (aka Lisa Benschop)
– The Recipe 2011. Wooden recipe box, index card.
Ø Ian Rorie 
- Hunter-Gatherer 2009. Plywood, wire, compact florescent bulb.
Ø Christine Clark 
- Aluminum Circle 2011. A year’s worth of beer cans.
Ø Robert Wise 
- Mold for Ratgnaw 2006. Ceramic, wax residue, photo.
You are what you eat. Who said that first? Was it Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin who wrote The Physiology of Taste or Transcendental Gastronomy in 1826 ([1]): "Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es." (Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.), perhaps? In his introductory note, curator Tyler Hodgins suggests we sample Buffet, select from the courses of work where you can taste an assortment of sculpture. Each idea you savor may reveal something about you, the consumer, in the manner of Brillat-Savarin’s philosophy. The works reveal much about the makers, 6 sculptors that interpose the stark Slide Room exhibition space. Let’s feast!
Entering, Megan Dickie‘s plucky work arrests us. We encounter 3 wax chickens (Fowl Chic #1, #2 and #3 - 2002) molded from reclining, birds prepped for some future gastronomic possibility lounging on low, round IKEA tables. We pause akin to a tableaux vivant. Or is the paused action of the chickens (seemingly conscious of their dramatic solidification) a declaration of Dickie’s detachment forcing us to pull our feathers, sounding our stir of this impudent display with compliments of delight? Unlike Babette’s petted quails, a symbol of a past life in Isak Dineson’s short story, we do not witness the neck breaking, nor the dishing of something epicurean like Cailles en Sarcophage. Dickie’s headless, flightless bird work does inhume sentimentality, waxing potential. And some of us may even pet the cuties. Gobble.
Suddenly, to the far back corner, we spy a spoon shape, an outsized white, seductive marble sculpture carved by Kathryn Ellis. Approaching, we unexpectedly shrink to an Alice miniature after consuming the “Drink Me” bottle. Weighted powerlessness transforms beauty’s consuming repose within a derisory relationship. We look, and consider the seductive attraction to the material, wondering about the capacity that will be required to raise this imposing implement to slurp up the soup (a sturdy course)? A ready comparison exists to the monumental fountain-sculpture Spoonbridge and Cherry (1985-88) by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Big spoons, both, allow us a standing or walking stance toward an icon of our daily occupancy with what sustains us. Ellis’ work, removed from the pedestal is vulnerable. No bendy handling, no jolly cherry splashes to refresh. Solo scoops up our attention, drawing us to the alluring mat surface ensuring we pay attention to a singularly preserved reality where substantial passion is obscure, smoothly confounded and the story is immobilized. Crunch.
Swerving to the right, is more to tantalize our appetite. Cajoling us with content, David Gifford presents 3 works in close juxtaposition affording a scenario with an inverted chair with wax honeycomb remnants (The Bee’s Knees ), a curvilinear chlorite skid carving turned to its side (Retread 2), and an engraved granite platform holding rosy wall stone pieces askew, with broken bronzed honey combs poised for scrutiny (Colony Collapse). Together, the honey is afoot! The bee’s office chair suited the hive, once, as the leftover comb shards demonstrate. Once excellently habitable, the chair becomes a thing forlorn. What happened? The retreading of a journey? An incised track reestablished the form from is aptness, shaping destiny with domination through processing. And finally, the collapsed colony made memorial, pouring bronze to saturate the honey vessel, the place of industry and awe though with inadvertent placement on a granite squared. Diagonally cockeyed, stone boarders fail to follow function, counterbalancing the weight of regret’s transport. Words inscribed in granite from past works become obfuscated by shadow’s ledge.
Maurice Maeterlinck wrote a book called ‘Le Nid d'Abeilles’ or ‘The Life of the Bee’.
“She (nature) eludes us on every side; she repudiates most of our rules and breaks our standards to pieces. …He (man) has, hitherto, legitimately feared that the attempt to adapt his morality to that of nature would risk the destruction of what was her masterpiece.” ([2])
Gifford juggles, forming structures with features of a struggle that is inward, present and visible that results from his thought provoking actions on material. This sculpture examines convictions, the chaos resulting from revamping ideas within the context of our natures. Sweet. Better than honey.
The Recipe, We all need a recipe. Begin with a recipe. “The Creative Production Division with support from the New School of Inquiry: Domestic Preservation and the Archive & Library Special Collections at the L.S. Benschop Institute for the Preservation & Veneration of Imagination & Nostalgia” (aka Lisa Benschop) exhibits her recipe for Nostalgia in Buffet. Hand written on an index card, placed in a worn wooden recipe box from another era the solitary instructions describe a creative process. Her recipe suggests personal history, gathered with “fondness and nostalgia”, acknowledges the significance of creativity that results in originality when reverential memory triggers imagination. Thinking about some recipes for creation by artists over the years, F.T. Marinetti’s 1932 “The Futurist Cookbook” begins the recipe roster for how to venerably disseminate doctrine creatively. The 2010 “Street Art Cookbook” by Benke Carlsson and Hop Louie also comes to mind as a means to explore a creative processing. In her essay entitled An Aestheic of Nostalgia: Wallace Berman and his Proximity to the Object published in the UBC Undergraduate Journal of Art History Issue 1 | 2010, Sophia Zweifel writes:
“Berman’s works not only simulated a patina of age, but were consciously placed within a history that Berman was constantly in the process of safe-guarding against the changeableness of society. The social, personal, and physical interactions between these pieces and their beholders, helped to construct his group’s identity, one strongly rooted in the shared sense of their own collective present. Along with that sense of a shared moment, however, came the subtle consciousness that this present was constantly being transformed into history.” ([3])
Each artist follows a recipe of their own making, Nostalgia, when mixed well with wakefulness to the present is a technique to create future consideration and becomes the object of nostalgic reflection. Benschop has made her quaint work a podium for an essential undertaking. Recipes are fun to share, imagining what morsels can be made - Mmmm.
From: “Les Fleurs du mal (The Evil Flowers)” by Charles Baudelaire
CXXIII. La Mort des Artistes (The Death of Artists)
(Google Translation)
How many times does it shake my bells
And kiss thy low brow, dismal caricature?
To strike the target, mystical nature
How, O my quiver, losing javelins?
We wear out our souls in subtle plots,
And we demolish many heavy frames,
Before contemplating the great Creature
Whose infernal desire fills us with tears!
There are those who have never known their Idol
And those damned sculptors and marked with an insult,
Who will be pounding his chest and forehead,
Have only one hope, and strange dark Capitol!
“It is Death, hovering like a new sun,
Will grow the flowers of their brain! ([4])
Ian Rorie built Hunter-Gatherer with plywood, and fastened a trap, labeling it, so we would know what lurked inside, lighting the way to entrapment. Sustenance begins with death of some kind. Whether it is the reaping of grain, produce and gathering of the harvest or hunting the animal to produce the sustenance of the meal, there is the death, transformation and nourishment, ultimately. But is this really what is happening here? As Baudelaire points out in his 123rd poem of Les Fleur du Mal, “Death… Will grow the flowers of their brain!” Death, personified as the hold that cannot be captured, grown and gathered will, when we are faced with this fact, allow ideas to manifest. Artists must let imitation or misrepresentation die or die creatively. Rorie presents the diversionary plotting we must struggle with, and face to overcome trepidation. We must hunt out our nemesis, gather our wits, be aware of contrivance and allow our minds to feed us. Be hungry and you will capture what you need.
Thirsty? An ebbing and flowing beckons in the corner of the gallery. Christine Clark’s glistening aluminum disks glimmer as we approach. There is cornering, there is flow from, towards, a stream of overlaid water-like circles, and as Richard Long considered, the beauty of circles are neutral and abstract. Clark’s circles are tiny and part of another formation – Long’s are fashioned from natural material and large in landscape. Nevertheless, Clark’s work does address neutrality and an abstract sensibility. Last month, at the Ministry of Casual Living, Clark displayed this work rising up a wall, ascending in celebration of a year’s abstinence. Neutralizing the cut outs by ensuring no beer labeling exists, Clark objectifies her material and relates a nonjudgmental presence. Abstraction relinquishes past and present. Now the work streams into the gallery, and like a geisha (artist), “But she told me I was like water... Water can carve its way through stone. And when trapped, water makes a new path.” (Sayuri Narration: [while little Chiyo is on the train to the hanamachi], in the movie Memoirs of a Geisha, originally from the novel written by Arthur Golden. This sculptural installation reflects on cessation, how the flow of consumption stills and transforms with time. As the work is now horizontal, transcending enigmatically towards aesthetic idealism, in good company with the forefathers of abstraction ([5]), Clark’s work carves consciousness towards abstracted fulfillment. Soul food.
Bob Wise’s cast for his 2006 Ratgnaw, posthumously exhibited is a fragmented glimpse into his original mind. Buffet presents his ceramic mold, with vestiges of wax drippings used to cast a rat chewed potato, later made into bronze. Honouring Wise’s memory by adding the celebration of past fare to keep memories fresh emphasizes the diversity of the buffet we are partaking of ensuring we “narrow the gap between the act of being and the task of being.” ~ Robert Wise ([6]) Hodgins displays the remnants of Wise’s work process on an altar like table with a photo of the finished work above. Like Vincent van Gogh did when he painted The Potato Eaters (1885), through Wise, Hodgins has us foraging at the community table to feed our ratty hearts. Lots to chew. Epicurus would approve.
[1] http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/brillat/savarin/b85p/index.html
[2] http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4511/pg4511.html
[3] http://www.ubcujah.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Sophia-Zweifel.pdf
[4] http://baudelaire.litteratura.com/les_fleurs_du_mal.php ORIGINAL and more translations: http://fleursdumal.org/poem/199
[5] Hilton Kramer, "Mondrian & mysticism: My long search is over", New Criterion, September 1995
[6] Tyler Hodgins. “Buffet”. Exhibition Catalogue, May 2011.
Buffet
Slide Room Gallery
2549 Quadra St
Victoria BC
6 May – 27 May 2011
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Lance Austin Olsen “ The Road to Esperance “ by Debora Alanna
In the spirit of John Cage’s Notations ([1]), casting the virtual I-Ching with the question “Road to Esperance”, availed the following Cast Hexagram:
45 - Ts’ui / Gathering – The Lake rises by welcoming and receiving Earth’s waters: The King approaches his temple. It is wise to seek audience with him there. Success follows this course. Making an offer will seal your good fortune. A goal will be realized now.
Situation Analysis: This in an important Convergence, and you must be part of it. Look for the Centre of this convergence. Waters running to the sea, like an astronomical convergence of planets revolving around the sun, you should let the gravity of this Centre draw you near. Others are also drawn to this Centre, and among them you will find shared bonds and kindred spirits. This tribal convergence will give you a clarity of purpose. You will no longer be alone.
Plunging in the reverberating reservoir of music/sound notation that Lance Austin Olsen transcribes and/or perspicaciously composes in his exhibition, Road to Esperance is, as Cage describes in his Notations preface,
“A precedent for the absence of information… is the contemporary aquarium (no longer a dark hallway with each species in its own illuminated tank separated from the others and named in Latin): a large glass house with all the fish in it swimming as in an ocean.”
Giving us tremendous pages where sight and sound converge, Olsen draws what sound looks like. Olsen’s current Polychrome exhibition, Road to Esperance, also the title of the first solo release from Infrequency Editions , co-founded by Olsen, and in collaboration with Jamie Drouin and other colleagues, and the title of a handmade artist book could refer to a consigning destination, a system for information transmission - a pipeline, a hope, a confounding entity; his journey is a synchronous commitment to conduction. In this collection of work we survey a narrative that conducts us inscrutably en route, through, just about and off towards a lifting, of confident resonance.
Olsen’s works shown are in two formats. Drypoint engravings from the copper plates incised during soundscape creations, pictographs of sounds in situ combined with the sounds made are august renderings that sing the depths of primordial integrity all called garden. And immense drawings on hefty paper all entitled Pipeline. The latter works are a kind of dream time symbologic mapping. In her curatorial introduction, Sarah Tanguy, curator of Mapping: Memory and Motion in Contemporary Art at the Katonah Museum of Art in January of this year refers to artists’ mapping as
“…a journey into itself that jars our well-worn habits of thinking about place and time.”([2])
Jasper Johns as one of many psychogeographers may have mapped, painted emotional responses to place, however this process seems somewhat 2 dimensional compared to the soundscape mapping of Olsen’s work.
As “a person who walks the city in order to experience it” ([3]), a flâneur, a navigator of sophistication, of culture, or as Pierre Schaeffer describes Concrete music, with the jeu, or playing of something to develop the found sound into music, Olsen transverses the oceans (literally) to accumulate both ambient tremor and timbre as well as his taboo marks – demarcation of the venerated that can only be generated with reverential abstraction. Olsen arranges macro and micro cosmic senses alighting on the brazen & jaunty gently – cantabile. Sincerely gymnastic, Olsen’s mind is at play, sometimes drifting to a smudged photo snapping through scribble or mark, ladder and dotted lines, but with sforzando.
Circumspectly isolating and seizing the way thoughts meander, swatches, scratches and scrawls musically notate. The valiant size of the paper/canvas drawings command and dominate. Uninhibited surface stillness of the prints are lusty and playfully refined, con fuoco, scores that activate, punctuate and lead with darkly extravagant thoughts processing.
Like the grand-master confrontations in Hesse’s Steppenwolf that lead, according to Hesse, to a healing, in Olsen’s work there is the memory of battling, faintly commemorated along with the bright buoyancy of the present and future adventure. In both sets of work compositions reflect the intent of performed musical excision charting his mindful drive that goes nowhere and everywhere, containing and releasing with easy nuance. Marathons of endurance and zest, the surfaces crescendo and ebb, linger, zither and especially, breathe.
We travel through time’s eclipse to resounding gardens of unknown wonder and intimacy. Olsen delineates clarity with conduits articulating the rough punctuations of time while creating space, space between – scratching life’s fetter and drawing lingering inclusions. Arresting, The Road to Esperance is our map to gather at Lance Austin-Olsen’s Centre.
SOUNDS IN A ROOM 3
improvisational performance with Lance Austin Olsen, Jamie Drouin & Mathieu Ruhlmann
Slide Room Gallery
Victoria, Canada
April 29, 2011
All photos from: http://lanceolsen.tumblr.com/
The Road to Esperance
3 April – 28 April 2011
Polychrome Gallery
1113 Fort Street
Victoria BC
[1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/22030514/John-Cage-Notations
[2] http://www.katonahmuseum.org/gedownload!/KMA%20MAPPING%20pre-visit%20packet.pdf?item_id=1570061&version_id=1570062
[3] http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/postmodernism/postmo_urban/flaneur.html#source
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Roy Green “New Works” by Debora Alanna
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| aluminum sunset |
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| andy warhol |
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| aubergine sky |
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| Champion Hi-Park Buddy. |
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| Downloader |
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| Joseph Beuys |
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| misty mountain |
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| monsoon |
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| moon river |
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| Out On A Limb |
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| over the hills and far away |
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| The Saint |
Walking into an artist’s studio is a privilege. There is a smell of poetry that permeates the psyche. The 2-day invitation to view Roy Green’s New Paintings - unconstrained work, took place where the taste of paint permeates. Breathing in colour, we begin to hear intense birds fluttering and dogs’ countenances, painted outbursts silent, urgent entreating from flushed surfaces striking our eyes. Being a gallery fainéant in the midst of Green’s panorama of paintings is impossibility.
SOCRATES: And there is such a thing as sight?
MENO: Yes.
SOCRATES: And now, as Pindar says, 'read my meaning:'--colour is an effluence of form, commensurate with sight, and palpable to sense.
MENO: That, Socrates, appears to me to be an admirable answer.
SOCRATES: Why, yes, because it happens to be one which you have been in the habit of hearing: and your wit will have discovered, I suspect, that you may explain in the same way the nature of sound and smell, and of many other similar phenomena.([1])
A prolific painter, opening Green’s studio door landscapes up on landscapes balance with more paintings without and with birds (Out on a Limb, e.g.) overlying dogscapes (Champion Hi-Park Buddy, e.g.) and portraits (Joseph Beuys, e.g.) interpose. Naïveté is Green’s intuitive projection where proportion collapses, precision is conciliated. Drawn off colour wipes across scenes of vociferous perspectives and brightens our mood. Erroneous foregrounds juxtapose with detailed backgrounds of kaleidoscope patterns (Downloader, e.g.). Green’s reputable, distinguished oeuvre is playfully copasetic. However, his new work has a novel infiltration of senses.
Although Green has encapsulated enigmatic experiences in The Saint, and Monsoon, for example, Green’s newest work begins by fostering magenta to transform awareness. Thick impasto texturing of Over the Hills and Far Away initiates punctuations of meditation, which again, begets more meditative works where there is balance and poise, stateliness. Grandeur in several small abstracted landscapes evolves calm, salutary realities beyond perception – poetic ideas.
These new works (Aubergine Sky, Moon River, e.g.) have a Schirn Kunsthalle cum Rothko a la Morton Feldman flavour. Green’s confidence speaks and these mature revelations are visualizations of his poetic sensibilities. According to Marshall McLuhan, it was because Rimbaud read Ruskin on the shadowless use of pure colour ([2]) that he found a clarifying title for his book Illuminations. Green’s poem, For Arthur Rimbaud ([3]) mirrors his latest illuminating paintings, dwells on purity and everlasting influence of a noble mind and spirit. Roy Green’s mind and spirit.
[1] Plato. Meno. 380 B.C.E http://plato.thefreelibrary.com/Meno/2-1
[2] McLuhan, H. Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. 1962. http://books.google.ca/books?id=y4C644zHCWgC&pg=PA267&lpg=PA267&dq=gutenberg+galaxy+poet+rimbaud&source=bl&ots=KGV_AFStSq&sig=RPbNPFTiY4CilNj7565wqbzSynM&hl=en&ei=AeeTTfzQPIKsQPe2vnRBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
[3] Green, Roy. http://roygreenpoetry.blogspot.com/
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Arash Akhgari - Flying Figures – by Debora Alanna
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| Her Gaze |
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| Black & Yellow |
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| Embodied Float |
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| Mirror |
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| The Self |
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| Trees |
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| Untitled |
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| Violet Curiosity |
Emerging artists are abundant, however there is much to celebrate when young painter, an autodidactic (not counting a mentor) artist braves the waves of personal resistance to presenting work publically, and has a show in a cafe. Ideally, this is the means to a gallery show – put the work up, and see if the work gets noticed. Arash Akhgari has been noticed.
Akhgari’s canvases are large. Physically, size-wise and expressively. He develops decisive emotions with vast strokes and spacious investigations. Significantly, Akhgari works through ideas of personal inquiry.
In Akhgari’s paintings we see Kirsher and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff-like compositions, emulations of Otto Mueller and Egon Schiele figure positioning with attention to the latter’s finger extensions - Die Brücke (The Bridge) sensibilities. Figure distortions to articulate primitive sensations are prevalent. Akhgari’s colour palates are reminiscent of the war-time monochrome works of Picasso or Braque. Although Akhgari trusts the past to inform his work, he brings his paintings beyond history’s impact, processing his personal narratives with earnest solemnity.
Mirror and Self, although 2 separate works, investigate a self-portraiture with stirring dualities that can be considered through Hegel's comment: "Each consciousness pursues the death of the other.” ([1]) Akhgari paints the exchange or interchange, the knowledge of what he must raze to awaken.
Fond of diptych studies, divided panels bring a revisioning of intent to many of Akhgari’s paintings, creating a relating sequence of imagery that adjusts with the juxtaposing. In Her Gaze and Violet Curiosity, Akhgari plays with perspective. He creates disconcerting relationships between the figures and their position on the canvas – relating the figures to each other and to the contortions of painted space, revealing rooms of visible vestiges of the self. Akhgari’s productive insights allocated to his paintings disclose reflective documents of exploration rather than ebullition. This choice of painterly technique does not minimize the expressive quality of Akhgari’s work.
Akhgari is looking at and assimilating a Western art tradition, which does not quash his origins. Arising from a Persian background, the influence of the deep, remarkable culture where striking ancient and contemporary poetry thrives combined with the interruptions of the strife of war has the power to affect his paintings more inwardly than the cognitive factor of what his intellect dwells on. Yet in spite of these formative currents, at the heart of Akhgari’s work is his self discovery. “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” ~ Jalal ad-Din Rumi (Persian Poet and Mystic, 1207-1273). Flying Figures moves memory’s illusions towards urgent veracity. Akhgari’s painting, his pictorial reality substantiates his love of the act of painting, of flying into the realm of understanding; he has emerged.
Arash Akhgari
Flying Figures
Penelope's Café
739 Pandora Ave
Victoria BC
17-31 March 2011
[1] Cf. Simone de Beauvoir, (Paris: Gallimard, 1943). It was
translated into English as , translated by Yvonne Moyse
and Roger Senhouse (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1975).
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Aluminum Circle - Christine Clark by Debora Alanna
(From ‘The Walled Garden of Truth’)
“Why, tell me, if what you seek
Does not exist in any place,
Do you propose to travel there on foot?
The road yourself must journey on
Lies in polishing the mirror of your heart.”([1])
Recovery stories are as unique as the recounting of a seemingly shared experience in the Indian legend, the ‘The Blind Men and an Elephant, where the blind men touch an elephant, each a different part (ear, leg, trunk, tail, etc.) and all describe their elephant encounter inimitably. Christine Clark has chosen to exemplify her introspection after a year of sobriety in Aluminum Circle.
Luciano Fabro: “In all cases, use of material has been determined by human experience of which it is an especially able reporter (elasticity, luminosity, transparency, reflection, refraction...). My practical problem is not then that of rendering an otherwise amorphous material aesthetic, but rather that of rendering as clearly as possible the natural dialogue with the material.”([2]) In the 60s, the poetic and elusive Arte Povera sought to expand the boundaries between art and life. This was an art of optimism, belief in the transformative power of art in concert with human endeavor. Arte Povera continues to resonate, and Clark’s work challenges the divide between art and life.
Clark’s utilization of beer cans as material initiates wandering into ideology. Lately, Ecoart manifests through urban living though it still harbours Pop elements these days, where artists employing multiples of the same/similar easily accessed materials, found materials, recycled with the new ‘art’ use along with updated ideology. Unlike Arte Povera, Pop acknowledged consumerism as an icon of social enterprise. Ecoart continues the tradition of recycled material use, now emblems of planetary consumption diverging towards responsibility. Yet personal life is as easily separated as the recyclables. Jessica Jackson Hutchins’s newspaper glued sofa, “Couch for a Long Time” was shown at the 75th Whitney Biennale last February, for example and sustains an objectified view of the impact of a politic. El Anaatsui is renowned for his grand hanging works made of bottle tops, sheaths of splendor that are far more intuitive, yet resonant of consumerism seems to be the origin of his work as the chosen material is always important, referred to first. Aluminum Circle employs the material remnants of a life lived to create an experiential installation, akin to the Arte Povera sensibility. Clark uses used beer can aluminum, yes (and responsibly!). Clark told us so, so we look for the beer labeling – glimpse of labels somewhat familiar overlap the metal discs strewn at the base of the work. Aluminum Circle is so much more. Clark takes us from cans to candor. Honesty is a difficult subject for art, and Clark uses circles in spatial arrangements to describe the essence of growth, rendering the process of encapsulating personal responsibility - a measurement of candour.
At the opening, Clark talked about the shimmering. I thought of a Klimt glimmer, gleam. The premise here is so different. There is no erotic flamboyancy glittering here. Christine presents sensual effervescence, a gentle spirituality. Like Fabro’s ‘Edera’ ([3]), there is upward growth. In Clark’s work, her progression swells with a shimmery spray, bestowing abundance, a delicate, yet tentative vivacity.
Some may say that it is the concept that matters most. Others, that material is where the matter is. And the equation of how the artist lives/lived, what artist utilizes to make or present is subjective and will become objective with the making. What you see in Aluminum Circle is transcendence. Of material. Of hope. Recovered material objectifies a recovered life. Mind over matter. Quite an expanse of thought, of resourcefulness. Of persistence to cut out and pin all those metal discs.
1442 Haultain St.
Victoria, BC
11 – 19 March 2011
[1]
Sanai, Hakim. “The Hadiqa” or “The Walled Garden of Truth”. Octagon Press. 2008
http://www.octagonpress.com/titles/LI/wagapage08.htm
[2] Luciano Fabro cited in exh. cat., Luciano Fabro, Tate Gallery, London 1997, p. 12
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Barrie Szekely “Yardsquare” by Debora Alanna
“Yardsquare”. A Non sequitur. Mischievous, there is care and timeless clarity, a visual amphigory that draws us into Barrie Szekely’s work. We need the essential nonsense he necessitates: “…The artist must be blind to ‘recognized’ and ‘unrecognized’ form, deaf to the teachings and desires of his time. His open eyes must be directed to his inner life and his ears must be constantly attuned to the voice of inner necessity. “ ([1])
Surface skids and breaks within the black on black or stained wood. Brave abandon of delightfully unique living entities compile formations that juxtapose with ovoid configurations. Architecture’s dream or nature’s reminiscence alert, perching with presence. . “…wherever you are, you find the sun, a blade of grass, the spirals of the dragonfly. Courage consists of staying at home, close to nature, which could not care less about our disasters. Each grain of dust contains the soul of something marvellous.”([2]) These paintings reveal oblique views of mindful renderings intimately considered. With familial ideas connecting to Miro and Calder, Kandinsky, at least, Szekely discloses indirect aspirations in unhindered moments. Szekely’s work discloses his vision on voids, yards of squaring where volumes of stillness seek to understand. Each work takes time to interact with what acknowledges and sometimes follows the quondam precepts of surrealism and constructivism, for example. In spite of the unease of synaptic glimpses within forms, Szekely slows us down. There is no rush. The work punctuates with uncanny longings, with extraordinary collocation. There is no brisk incision of a Victor Pasmore line, or the ready movement of Eduardo Arranz-Bravo’s non-figurative works. Szekely’s emplacement of form insists on an insurgence of quietude that disarms and we alight on what does not follow rational thought.
A leaf or wisp of feathery branch or the unhurried extension point of a straight line touches the precipice of understanding. Multiples of reverie interplay on wooden square voids, foundations to a vortex of blackness resolutely staying the undercurrent of our habit of speedy consumption. Motionless, disparate demonstrations of creature-like oddities, of nature are tender renderings to marvel, rooting attentive glimpses of abstracted considerations. “It was not that the figure had been removed, not that the figures had been swept away, but the symbols for the figures for the figures, and in turn the shapes in the later canvases were substitutes for the figures… …these new shapes say… …what the symbols said...” ([3])
Unpredictable, Barrie Szekely engages and trumps the resourceful imaginings of the past with dynamic efficiency, propounding hilarious inspirations to envelop the largess of nonsense. Significance intertwines with colour, with shape, with our wits. Preternatural, his work humbles, engaging enigmatic ideals found in any fable. “Modesty is the conscience of the body.” ([4]) Embodied in “Yardsquare” are absurdities that Szekely playfully paints to our cognitive advantage with unpretentious conscientiousness. The non sequitur here requires our diligence to be an enthusiast for what we reluctantly value. “And the old Fishes said, "Above all things, avoid eating a blue boss-woss; for they do not agree with fishes, and give them a pain in their toes."([5])
NB To augment your visual experience with Barrie Szekely’s “Yardsquare,” an astute catalogue essay by John Luna accompanies this Slide Room exhibition.
[1] ”Concerning the spiritual in Art”, Wassily Kandinsky, Munich, 1911
[2] ‘Où allez-vous Miró?’ (Where do you go, Miró), Georges Duthuit in Cahiers d’Art 11, nos. 8-10, 1936; as quoted in “Calder Miró”, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 40
[3] “Expressionism”, David Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd London, 1990, p. 142
[4] de Balzac, Honore. “Comedie Humaine” 1841.
[5] Lear, Edward. “The Habits of the Seven Families” Chapter III. 1894. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13650/13650-h/13650-h.htm#children
“Yardsquare” - Slide Room Gallery - 2549 Quadra St. -Victoria BC - March 4 to April 4, 2011
Friday, January 28, 2011
Rebekah Johnson ‘The Hamlet Panels’ by Debora Alanna
['Who is watching who is watching you?' Abstracted from the Shakespeare play, Rebekah Johnson's 'The Hamlet Panels' explores the notion of a private life lived publicly, through the use of Plexiglas, fluorescent lights, and security cameras.] from the invitation to this exhibition on Facebook.
“All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players…” As You Like It Act 2, scene 7. Oops. Wrong play. Rebekah Johnson is watching us watching as we watch each other watch through films of suspension from video input devices. Her ‘Hamlet Panels’ develop shadowing that bares us, with manipulation. Johnson impressively melds her former scenographer interests with her new juncture of sculptural installation work.
Suspending Plexiglas in 3 sets forms corridors where we are able to be staged by her inventive spacial ploy. Banking florescent lights in rhythmic groupings of 3 x 3 a la a Dan Flavin/Donald Judd combo horizon sets our stage. Although seemingly clear, without duplicity, this wily work has the feeling of entrapment. (‘Mousetrap’ is the name of the play within the play within Hamlet). We can see an influence from Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, (“The Sandwich Man") from 1959. In 1600ish circa Shakespeare, Giovan Battista Aleotti (1546-1636) introduces the flat (not angled) wing in Ferrara. Johnson explores a long historical allusion to panels in stagecraft.([1]) Johnson’s work unifies these seemingly divergent traditions.
Between two extensions of suspended translucence in the foremost corridor, Johnson has suspended 3 welded rods, a suspended place marking referring to staging, askew - also demonstrating a conspicuous imbalance that marks challenges resulting from the crossing of lineage/space creating a minimized fused bond, physically impenetrable, viewable from the sides without the frontal and back distortion of tough plastic, secure from our walking into this private space. This sequestering of an ‘Intimacy Gradient’ (“The term 'Intimacy Gradient' has become sociological shorthand for 'improving the emotional usability of a social space', after this key passage in Christopher Alexander's essay.”) ([2]) prevents us from trespassing through this inaccessible, intimate passage. This is the heart of the installation. Johnson presents a traversing intent that navigates us into a dialogue about personal connectivity, protecting this attachment in spite of adversity. Again, a theme in Hamlet.
3 security cameras scrutinize our meanderings through her ruse. 3 screens record? or at least reveal the subterfuge of our saunter through her work in a separate, open alcove. Like Hamlet, there is watching; he watches, he is watched, sends others to watch behind tapestries, curtains and other concealment, and most interesting is Hamlet’s cloak of emotional deception. (Hamlet’s Act 1 alone has 15 references to watching.)
The reference to 3s is a direct relation to Shakespeare’s play. Threes galore, there. 3 spells upon the poison to kill a king, a discussion of 3 parts to thought, three chances to kill Hamlet, to name three.
Johnson’s sculptural installation provokes us to engage with the space, other gallery participants/players, and brings us to an emotional stance by her/our need to observe us observing others. There is no complacency.
The seemingly commonplace horizontal lights, covered by opaque Plexiglas (the suffix plex- of Plexiglas means to stroke or strike) bring us round and round and round our crossing between and around panels, guiding us, encouraging us, and simplifying the idea that we are going somewhere. We are getting there. ‘There’ becomes the moment of realization of cameras on the scene. We are struck by her camera invasion into our private movements, as all movements are when noted, especially demonstratively while in a public place.
Early as 1916, the Futurists began involving technology to create a “synthesizing and technological theatrical form”. ([3]) Johnson succeeds in synthesizing theatre and sculpture, employing technology to variegate notions of space, our formalized assumptions and private ventures hung pithily. The elegance and quiet of this work distracts us from a reveal that queries our existence (“To be, or not to be" is the opening line of a soliloquy by Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1) through impaneling, judged by the screen viewers, at least. Just as Hamlet’s cast is killed off by conjecture, Johnson shows we must not assume that if we can see through something that we see everything.
Fifty-Fifty Arts Collective -13 January to 4 February 2011-2516 Douglas St-Victoria BC
[1] Oscar G. Brockett. History of the Theatre. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc. 3rd edition. 1977.
Kenneth Macgowan and William Melnitz. The Living Stage. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pentice-Hall. Inc. 1955
[2] http://www.generalhotel.org/26
[3] Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso (1996) ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ (first published in French, 1909). Trans. R.W. Flint. In The Twentieth Century Performance Reader, edited by Michael Huxley and Noel Witts, pp.289-293. London and New York: Routledge
Friday, January 14, 2011
Luis Enrique Oliver “ Baby Gun “ by Debora Alanna
Luis Enrique Oliver’s iconoclastic paintings reel in starburst explosions of socio-political arrays with overt icons of harmlessness. Oliver adeptly paints outsized, beautified babies over miniaturized piles of societal debris and weapons, where guns and tanks etc become toying. One cannot help thinking of Jiang Jie’s Yellow Head sculpture and Xue Song painting, Old China juxtaposed with an Aston Martin in a promo shot by René Staud ([1] as a contrast to Oliver’s appeal for reconsideration of the disquieting relationships to use, misuse and outcome of combat with consumerism. Oliver’s work depicts warfare as the antitheses of credulous potential.
"....art produced by self-taught individuals, usually without formal training, whose works arise from an innate personal vision that revels foremost in the creative act itself."([2]). Oliver’s autodidactic practice allows explorations of styles and techniques while he evolves his own sensibilities. Votive crowns over protagonists, such as seen in Alex Grey’s Dr. Hofmann first synthesized the compound LSD in 1938, while researching ergot derivatives as a chemist for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel ([3]) are prevalent in these paintings. Mati Klarwein collage techniques are apparent. What is uniquely Oliver is an intense authenticity. Utilizing barbed wire to interplay with embracing Middle East infants on a shard of wood is an arresting image. The paint is unconscientiously applied, and the image cinches and refuses prevarication. Oliver has a drive to respond to confrontational concerns. He has earnest aim towards society’s excessive indulgences, discharges his imagery where complacency is pampered.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/luisenriqueoliver/sets/72157625118182877/“ Baby Gun “ at the Ministry Of Casual Living - Jan. 3 to 12, 201 - 1442 Haultain St.
[1] http://www.astonmartinartcollection.com/meets-art/yellow-head.html
[2] http://www.avam.org/stuff-everyone-asks/what-is-visionary-art.shtml
[3] http://fractalenlightenment.com/20/artwork/alex-grey-beyond-art
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