Marigold Santos, asuang, Forton, fiberglass, synthetic hair, calcite crystals, paint, pigment and steel, 157.5 x 53.3 x 53.3 cm, 2011; Photo: Guy l”Heureux.

Artist Marigold Santos creates the kind of work that resonates with viewers on a deeply personal level, as you discover talismans and symbols embedded in each piece that feel as though they’ve been placed there just for you. Inspired by the terrifying tales of mythical monsters she connected with as a child, Santos unravels her memories and experiences to form her own personal myths, inspiring viewers to do the same.

Lizzy Hill interviews Santos, following her recent exhibition MIRROR/MOTHER (fragments) at Eastern Edge in St. John’s, about her fascination with the occult, the influence of folklore on her work and her identity as a Filipina/Canadian woman.

Marigold Santos, shroud (dirty harvester/Jodorowsky’s hat), ink on paper, 55.9 x 76.2 cm, 2015; Photo: Stacey Watson

Lizzy HiLL: What impact did your family’s move from the Philippines have on you? Where is home?

MARIGOLD SANTOS: Our immigration is a huge part of my work, as I reflect on it as a time of change and adaptation at such a young age—it sneaks up on you, and you are so unaware of the process. I didn’t know how to speak English, and then in no time, I did. I was a young girl when we moved to Canada, and all I wanted to do was become Canadian, fit in, whatever that meant—learn pop culture, learn the language, learn the social politics of children. A lot of the colour palettes and designs of the time make their way into my work. I consider Canada my home, but my roots are very important to me. I explore what they mean, in tandem, everyday, and in my work.

LH: I have to admit, when looking at your work, Blanket Asuang (Big Sister), I had to Wikipedia what an “asuang” was and found out that it’s “a shapeshifting monster” that combines traits of “either a vampire, a ghoul, a witch, or different species of werebeast” from Filipino folklore, which sounds quite terrifying! Were stories of these creatures part of your upbringing or did you discover them in later life?

MS: The folklore of the Philippines is incredibly special and rich, and the stories vary depending on the region and the storytellers. That is what I most love about folklore in general—the idea that there are many elements that remain the same, but that through the oral sharing, variations can occur and thus change and transform the narrative. They are also ever-evolving and changing, informed by their landscape—an organic and definite, yet intangible thing.

My aunt, Tita Rosel, was pretty much responsible for introducing me to the asuang, and its many characteristics. When I started making work that addressed multiplicity and fragmentation (and referencing my family’s immigration from the Philippines to Canada as a departure point) it was so fitting to look at the figures in my work as asuangs also, reconfigured to speak about a greater sense of self-hood and fragmentation. The asuang inherently severs from the waist, and divides itself, discarding it’s lower half, while the upper half hunts in the night, and must rejoin it’s lower half before night’s end, or risk dying fragmented.

LH: There’s a clear fascination with the macabre in the works on view in BLACK MIRROR [Santos’ recent exhibition on view at Ontario’s DNA Artspace and Hamilton Artists inc, as well as Calgary’s Pith Gallery]. I’m thinking of one painting in particular where you feature a golden corpse serving as fertilizer for a beautiful array of flowers and foliage. Is death and what comes next something that you ruminate upon often? Or would you say you use death more as a metaphor for something else?

Marigold Santos, re-grounding (detail), 2011 / marigoldsantos.com

Marigold Santos, light as a feather, stiff as a board (1), charcoal, chalk, phosphorescent, fluorescent paint, pigment on canvas, 274.3 x 434.3 cm, 2011; Photo: Guy l’Heureux.

MS: The golden piece is the third of a triptych [the first two are light as feather, stiff as a board (1) and (2)] and features a re-occurring figure that is in the process of levitating—whether about to float, or about to sink. The figure is caught in interstitial time and space. It began as a series that played on my themes of multiplicity and fragmentation, accessible magic and childhood games and folklore. So this third one, re-grounding, is the figure fallen, in the process of decay and decomposition, and is in a space that is partially recognizable, but at the same time a void realm. The cycles of death and rebirth, creation and destruction, attachment and detachment, woven and unravelling are present in this piece. Because my work is cross-referential, I thought it applicable to include this older work in with BLACK MIRROR [BM] because it relates to my previous themes, but also addresses the current ones in BM, those of selfhood, empowerment, concealment and revelation, light and dark (in bodies of light, and in passions and desires).

LH: There are elements of magic and ritual at play in your works, as you integrate talismans like teeth into your art. One gets the sense that the works themselves are designed to be part of some unknown ritual, evoking hidden spells upon the viewer—Is the occult a pure academic interest for you or does a belief in the supernatural play a role in your personal and creative life?

MS: The weird, the otherworldly, the supernatural, the occult, horror and fear have always been part of the landscape of my everyday, even as a child—especially as a child! My parents didn’t shelter me from all things horror-themed because I was drawn to them so much. Perhaps this is why I incorporate the awkward and scary into my work. I’ve always liked to scare myself; I still do. What it is about these things is that they require a sense of belief to make them work, because they are unexplainable and unknowable. So we push boundaries as kids to see how they affect us, what we fear, what we can take, what we can’t.

Objects in my work that appear to be talismans of sorts are just that. They stand in for the power of belief we place on things, to make them magic—to make them real and have a dual life, beyond what meets the eye. The body in my work always appears fragmented to an extent, and the severing from a whole also stands in for a greater talisman. And when this conceptual body comes together to make new configurations, new conversations, new dialogue, can occur. And the possibilities are what make them magic and powerful.

LH: BLACK MIRROR directly references the tool painters in the 18th century used to frame their scenes. What drew you to this reference?

MS: The reference to the black mirror as a tool used by painters is not so much about who was using the tool, but how it was used. Painters would turn their backs to their subject matters and view the reflection through the black mirror, which enabled them to cancel out the visual noise, and helped them to compose and edit their imagery. I loved the idea of turning your back to the thing you wanted to see and then re-inventing it, creating a new visual narrative. In my work I want to edit and re-configure experience and ideas and thought into my own myth.

LH: in Shroud (overhead) and Shroud (crouching), we see two different images of human characters huddled together so closely that it’s impossible to make out what kinds of interactions they’re having with one another—There are secrets being kept from us as the viewer, which I read as a theme in your work. We live in an age of the confessional personal essay, where many of us spew our deepest secrets on social media—Do you feel something is lost when we move farther and farther away from having a private inner life?

MS: The images of figures draped in shrouds began with BM, and I’ve since continued to create figures with this reoccurring cloak of fluidity and ink. It can be read as oil, or dirt, or rot, or mud, or blood or the cosmos even, but what is most important for me is that the shroud represents experience. It is not a physical garment, so much as it is an image that stands for a second skin. For me the shroud does not hide or conceal (even though at first glance it appears to) but instead it reveals—it is a choice to wear our experiences as informed by our ever-evolving surroundings that make up the fabric of our lives. In terms of private and inner lives versus the public, I think it’s important to always have a choice, and to be able to have to right to practice that choice. There are things we want to keep special and secret and there are things we want to share.

LH: Can you tell me a little bit about what the creative process is like for you? Do you work from life? From memory? With a plan of what you’re going to draw?

MS: Drawing can be very intuitive for me, and sometimes it can be very organized and planned. Sometimes I’ll draw thumbnail sketches of what I want a drawing to look like, but minimally, because I love letting the drawing take place all at once, to include the unexpected marks, to allow it to live, and then each mark you place invites you to respond. I work from both life and memory, from models (myself mainly) and from references. I listen to a lot of music when I draw, lots of heavy metal, lots of Dolly Parton and audiobooks—and eat a lot of snacks along the way.

Marigold Santos, black hole, 2013. Photo: Guy L’Heureux

Barb Hunt, (l to r) “Lace Dress,” 1995, plasma-cut, cold-rolled steel, “Small Dresses,” 1994, plasma-cut cold-rolled steel, Collection of the Canada Council Art Bank, “Orchid Dress,”1993, plasma-cut cold-rolled steel.

Mention paper dolls to nearly any North American woman and the response is a soft “Oh, I loved my paper dolls.” While huge numbers of little girls spend hours happily re-inventing themselves through playing with their dolls, in later life, the notion of “paper doll” goes sour. Taking her cue from a line in “Tulips,” a poem by Sylvia Plath—“And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow…”—curator and Mount Allison professor Anne Koval assembled a range of contemporary artists’ responses to the cut-out to explore the shadows that paper dolls cast forward into adulthood in her exhibition Paper Doll (September 16 to November 6, 2011, Owens Art Gallery, Sackville, NB).

After discovering that Plath made her own paper dolls and invented scenarios for them, carefully described in her journals, Koval arranged to borrow a collection of them for exhibition from the University of Indiana. The dolls represent attractive women with glamourous, sexy wardrobes with jewel-like colours and details. Made when Plath was 12 or 13, they evoke a magic, miniature, idealized world of childhood play and provide a window into Plath’s sense of imaginative agency before her attacks of depression.

Today, Lynn Yamamoto’s “Silhouettes” (1998- 2011) make visible Plath’s line of poetry through chains of hundreds of uniform, faceless, ephemeral figures cut from translucent white silk tissue paper and peppered with minute holes, burned in with incense sticks. Held out from the wall on steel sewing pins, they capture a passage from childhood magic to later feelings of loss and emptiness.

With more humour, Cindy Sherman’s animated doll (“Doll Clothes,” 1975) updates Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” stepping out of her plastic sleeve in a paper doll book to strike a series of overlapping poses. A pair of human hands interrupts her play at trying on outfits and returns her to her prescribed, slotted space.

In contrast, other exhibiting artists develop more nuanced positions based on the cut-out that re-claim and celebrate feminine identity. Cybèle Young celebrates her pleasure in the cut/fold/play of miniature paper dresses while wryly acknowledging the confining constructedness of post-war North American femininity. In pristine white shadow boxes, she juxtaposes exquisite miniature paper dresses with evocative partners such as jellyfish and scaffolds, all made from fine Japanese paper. One exhibits Young’s delight in the critical potential of her paper doll imagery: curled sheets rise aloft from a tiny curling iron to coalesce into a whirling orange radiance.

Barb Hunt transforms the cut-out doll dress into a symbol of formidable female strength. Subverting both the passive ideal of femininity and the feminist rejection of feminine floral prettiness, Hunt reclaims “paper doll space” with three massive (c. 200 x 100 cm), lacy cut-out dresses executed in plasma-cut, cold-rolled steel (1993-95).

In a further critique of dismissing feminine floral ornament as merely decorative, Jeannie Thib’s wall relief, “Double” (2011), takes its motif from a historic tile pattern found in Barthète, France. Cut from thin plywood, panels composing the repeating pattern are hinged together, so that the relief transforms into a flexible, three-dimensional shape-changer that plays with unexpected shadows on the wall. While eschewing the doll image, “Double” exploits the cut/fold/play procedures of paper dolls to imagine structural flexibility based on decorative beauty.

Anna Torma explores with delight the “back-story” of paper dolls in the most feminine medium of silk embroidery. Transforming embroidery into a drawing practice, she creates a sensuous garden driven by desire. The first large panel of “Vanitas I & II” (2011) overflows with fanciful paper doll-like clothes and posing models. Close inspection reveals small figures in the throes of lust, surrounded by swarms of tiny transforming creatures. The teeming fecundity is countered by the second panel, bearing a nearly life-sized embroidered figure of the flayed man of medical drawings, who re-figures the consequences of time passing that no art can arrest.

With “Revel” (2011), Ed Pien revels in the cut/fold/play of cut-outs in a large, spiral installation of clear mylar suspended from the ceiling, enriched by a projection of itself doubling its shadows on the wall. Viewers follow a path between barely visible mylar walls, populated by mysterious cut-out figures crouching among branches. At the centre of the maze is a random web of mylar line entangled with miniature houses, also cut and folded from clear mylar. Bricks remaining from the gallery’s construction anchor the web to the floor. The entire rear wall of the exhibition space is covered by a haunting video projected through the installation and its shadows. The video shows Pien’s female assistant playfully fastening the little houses in the web. The video of the installation shot through itself caught light refracted through the houses, so that some in the projection shimmer in delicate spectral colours.

It is pure magic and completes an argument made by the exhibition as a whole for the feminine cut/fold/play world of paper dolls and ornament as creative ground for re-thinking relationships among ourselves and with our built and natural environments.

Graeme Patterson, “Player Piano Waltz,” 7ft H x 5ft W x 4ft L. Working player piano, wood, mixed materials, video/audio components.

Editor’s note: This article originally ran in the Summer 2014 Edition of Visual Arts News.  Graeme Patterson’s Secret Citadel is on view at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery February 14-April 12, 2015. 

Enter into the imaginary world of Graeme Patterson’s Secret Citadel where memory, invention, and fantasy collide to provoke a multifaceted narrative of childhood friendship, rights of passage and adult isolation. Conveying a much more personal psychology than the social resonance of his iconic Woodrow (2007)—a multimedia installation inspired by his family’s Saskatchewan homestead—Patterson’s Secret Citadel reveals the breadth of his creativity and the complexity of his imagination. It is an ambitious exhibition that integrates sculpture, animation, robotics, music and video projections with humour, insight and melancholy.

Patterson admits the subjective nature of this work as an incarnation of his memories and imaginings of a lost childhood friendship and male friendships in general; and he chooses two animal avatars, a sprightly blue bison as himself and an energetic orange cougar as his childhood friend Yuki to guide our way through his tale. The transmutable nature of these avatars invites the viewer to imagine or remember our own childhood adventures and turning points as we assume the role of one or the other of the characters.

Although natural enemies in the wild, this unlikely pair form the binding link between the four sculptures, which allude to four pivotal scenes in their relationship. The bison and cougar appear in various incarnations throughout, from lifeless costume hides suspended mid-air to bouncing animated video projections. These two characters begin as whimsical compatriots and end as somewhat maudlin loners; their transformation underscores the vagaries of a life and implies a rather pessimistic depiction of growing up and becoming an adult.

Patterson’s trademark model making skills are as fastidious in their detail as his earlier work, but there is a noticeable difference in their materiality and tone. Almost a boyish creativity is evident in paperclip hinges, toothpick furniture and blanket fort mountains, which evoke childhood and adolescent pastimes. Except for in his Player Piano Waltz (2013), which retains a detached coolness and finesse. Not surprisingly, Player Piano Waltz references the last scene, where the bison and cougar are solitary adults wandering aimlessly through the rooms of a fading gentleman’s club.

Once again as in Woodrow, the model is meticulously constructed and void of any three dimensional characters within the space itself. Instead the set integrates the narrative through looped animated projections viewed through the external windowed walls of the club. The viewer is held at bay, unless a coin is dropped into the pay box to initiate the musical score of the player piano, which serves as the base for the sculpture. Patterson also wrote the lilting music reminiscent of early Tom Waits.

In the three other sculptures, Patterson moves away from the self-contained voyeuristic miniature style of Woodrow towards a more openly inviting physicality of space. Grudge Match (2013) allows viewers to choose a team and sit on their side of wooden gymnasium bleachers to watch the animated high school wrestling match projected onto the wall. Patterson’s style of stop-motion animation integrates detailed homemade puppets and sets with sophisticated digital projections to create a quirky hybrid throw back to 1960s cartoons like Davey and Goliath or the Thunderbirds.

The gymnasium stage for the animated wrestling match sits under and behind the bleachers, and includes two drawer-like attachments of a locker room and washroom alongside a weight room and coach’s office. It almost feels like a giant Barbie palace for boys that could be folded up and set up in your bedroom. Despite the playful elements, competition is the focus of this high school match, where potential alpha status is declared and clique alignments develop. Grudge Match severs the common bond of imaginative play and adventure evident in The Mountain (2013) and Camp Wakonda (2013).

Camp Wakonda (2013) is a haunting installation featuring two charred bunk beds as the platform for a reconstructed summer camp and vehicular accident. It links the structured independence of camp with the freedom of a driver’s license as complex rites of passage. Each rite carries its own inherent danger, but is an essential step in personal character development. Manly adult skills such as archery and wood chopping are practiced and tested in projected animations onto the top bunks’ replicas of the open framed camp buildings—while the lower bunks’ projections find our protagonists locked in a battle within, as the civilized avatar fights off its wild counterpart. It is a layered and complicated narrative that culminates in the final collision between childhood and adolescence portrayed in the flaming accident between school bus and family sedan.

Graeme Patterson, “Camp Wakonda” 6ft H x 10ft W x 7ft L. Wood fabric, mixed material, video/audio components.

The story begins, however, with The Mountain (2012), a massive sculptural installation with a white blanket covered mountain cloaking the ideal artist’s studio within. Two suburban family homes straddle either side of mountain linked by telephone poles that stretch over the top of the mountain and a secret passage tunnel that runs underneath the dining room table base. One house has its furniture neatly stacked outside indicating either a move in or out of the neighbourhood, simultaneously bringing the friends together and tearing them apart. The mountain’s physical inference to a blanket fort with imagined secret passageways connects the imaginative play of childhood to the imaginative play of an artist. It’s possible to envision the young buffalo and cougar running over to share their latest comics and practice their super hero moves.

Patterson seamlessly relates these childhood pastimes to his secret artist’s studio deep within the mountain, which evidently refers to Superman’s “Secret Citadel”—the earliest comic book version of his “Fortress of Solitude”—where Superman would go to contemplate and rejuvenate after saving the world. Of all the sculptural works, The Mountain is the most joyful, perhaps because it reflects the artist’s studio practice. A practice that is connected to the creative abandon of childhood rather than the dismal boredom of a gentleman’s club.

Interspersed between these four works are wall projections that fill out the narrative of the bison and cougar. Patterson includes an array of technical styles. Some are live action models dressed in the bison or cougar costumes, and others involve his puppetry. All are relatively short loops that can be caught between viewing the sculptures to add another layer of insight and detail. But one must not miss the Secret Citadel (2013), a thirty-minute stop motion animation that tells the unabridged story of bison and cougar, and showcases Patterson’s considerable animation skills. It’s a visual and aural delight. Patterson is an artist with a substantial range of technical accomplishment, but he seems to hold animation with a particular affection.

After watching Secret Citadel, the rest of the exhibition shifted context. Initially, the sculptures stood independently as sculptures, yet afterwards they evolved into elaborate sets for the animation. Not that one category holds more value; rather one reveals a lingering childhood fascination with Saturday mornings.