Culture – visual arts news

Portable Culture: Soheila Esfahani

vanews — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 05:00:08 +0000

Soheila Esfahani, “Cultured Pallet: Indian Chest at farmhouse II,” detail, mixed media on wooden pallet, 2018

Billions are said to be in global circulation. In the United States alone, five hundred million are manufactured every year. They are everywhere, including inside and outside of our large retail shops. Their ubiquity and number, however, do not guarantee their visibility. Few of us look at, let alone think about the wooden shipping pallets at the heart of global trade and therefore of our daily lives. For Canadian artist Soheila Esfahani, the pallet constitutes both the material and conceptual node of her current body of work aptly called Cultured Pallets. What better symbol could there be, after all, of the circulation and migration of goods, people, technologies and ideas characterizing the global, contemporary world?

“What I like the most about Cultured Pallets is its nomadic aspect,” Soheila tells me. “I generally work with pallets found in the vicinity of where I work and exhibit. This makes the concept, process and product all equally portable,” she adds. “I also think it’s uncanny how the pallet mimics culture in that, although it surrounds us and dwells in every location on any continent, we don’t usually pay attention to it.”

Soheila recuperates found shipping pallets only to etch and paint them with decorative designs, often hailing from her native Iran. Cultured Pallet: FMC (2015), for example, displays an all-over blue and turquoise design that evokes Persian manuscript illumination, while the blue mandala-like arabesques on Cultured Pallet: Annie’s Garden take inspiration from the dazzling dome of a famous monument in the Iranian city of Isfahan. The pallets, however, obviously change the motifs’ purpose, meaning and aesthetic. While the works represent the artist and her peregrinations, they do not nostalgically hearken back to the past. Instead they probe the process of cultural transfer and translation, in its radical sense of “carrying across.” The artist, who chose to move to Canada as a young woman, has found in the pallet the ideal object to both map the experience of living across cultures and frame culture as a dynamic, complex process rather than a static, hermetic reality. Esfahani’s Cultured Pallets not only broaches cultural translation across space, but also across time as the historical designs question what happens to cultural markers in an age of global capitalism and the commodification of culture.

Soheila Esfahani, “Cultured Pallet: Annie’s Garden,” detail, 2018, mixed media on wooden pallet

Soheila Esfahani, “Cultured Pallet: Scot’s Bay,” detail, mixed media on wooden pallet, 2018.

Soheila Esfahani, “Cultured Pallet: Scot’s Bay,” detail, mixed media on wooden pallet, 2018.

Although based in Waterloo, Ontario, Soheila’s art has brought the artist twice out east. Last year, she participated in a group show at Halifax’s Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, and this summer, she had a solo show—Interstice (April 15-June 20, 2018) —at the Ross Creek Centre for the Arts, where she also engaged in a three-week residency and offered a workshop on Middle Eastern calligraphy. Soheila loved the setting and staff and enjoyed meeting fellow travelling or local artists as well as exploring the region’s lush landscapes and culture. “What struck me about Ross Creek Centre was that it seemed to embody all that Canada stands for, to the point that if someone wants to get an idea about our country, I think: “Send them to Ross Creek,” she recalls. “Multiculturalism is usually associated with large, urban centers, but here is an all-inclusive art center in rural Nova Scotia where people with different roots assemble to share and learn from one another. It was a beautiful experience for me, a living example that inclusion happens naturally.”

Two of the pieces produced and exhibited at Ross Creek witness, in particular, the residency’s impact on the artist’s work, thereby shedding light on Soheila’s modus operandi. Having discovered a chest made in India—its exact origins unknown—at the Ross Creek farmhouse, Soheila reproduced its vase and flower motif in her latest works: Cultured Pallet: Indian Chest at Farmhouse I (2018) and Cultured Pallet: Indian Chest at Farmhouse II (2018). That Soheila felt moved by the object’s handsome design evinces how her work possesses a personal, intimate dimension linked to life experience and encounters. It also demonstrates the artist’s fascination with the relationship between place, decorated artifacts and memory. Soheila often refers to “portable culture,” by which she means the small decorative objects that we carry with us when we move to another country or that we acquire as mementos when visiting countries abroad. Like the concept of the pallet, that of portable culture suggests the importance of visual and material culture to subjective and cultural memory, as it equally establishes culture as a site of ongoing transcultural connections.

Soheila Esfahani, “Cultured Pallet: Indian Chest at farmhouse I,” acrylic on wooden pallet, 2018

The found chest—made in India—that Soheila Esfahani used as inspiration in “Cultured Pallets”

The chest acts as a physical metaphor, reflecting the artist’s existential location: “The Indian chest was a kind of anchoring point for me,” explains Soheila. “Part of the place, it was not aesthetically connected with any of the other furniture in the farmhouse and its designs were close to the Persian one that filled my childhood. I wondered what story it would tell if it could speak. How did it get there?”

Cultured Pallets remind us that we all possess multiple identities and that these are constantly shaped and reshaped by the people, events, and even objects in our lives. The shipping pallet forms embody the movement and exchange integral to life and cultures, especially as some of Soheila Esfahani’s Cultured Pallets are left in situ ready to continue their journeys; stamped with her email address, they encourage communication and point to further, endless possible ley lines amongst us. While she “has only had a few people contact her via the email address,” Soheila is confident that creating a thousand pallet works will make “this inter-connective aspect of Cultured Pallets go viral.”

Above: Soheila Esfahani

Soheila Esfahani, Cultured Pallet: FMC, 2015, mixed media on wooden pallet, 25.4 cm x 78.7 cm x 1.2 m.

JJ Lee’s Hyphenated Realities

vanews — Tue, 04 Sep 2018 13:23:24 +0000

*This article appeared in the Summer 2018 Visual Arts News’ Special 40th Anniversary Issue

Driving down the Bedford Highway in Halifax, you pass signs for China Town restaurant—a Nova Scotian behemoth dating back to the 70s, with that kitschy “Chinese-style” font in huge fire-engine red letters across faux panelling that you can’t miss. Artist JJ Lee’s dad owned the spot when she was growing up, and it’s cemented a life long fixation for her with how people view her “Chinese-ness.” Growing up in Nova Scotia, Lee says she was always “very aware of being an Other.”

JJ Lee, detail of “ReOriented,” 2018

“It’s so funny because when I was a kid, I’d meet someone and they’d go ‘where are you from,’ and I’d say ‘Halifax’ and they’d say ‘no where are you really from.’ And I’d say, ‘no really I’m from Halifax,’” explains Lee. “And then I’d say ‘I’m Chinese,’ and they’d go ‘Oh I love Chinese food! I just love like the sweet and sour chicken balls with the egg rolls!’”

The thing was, that food didn’t feel remotely “Chinese” to her. “That was nothing at all like what I had at home, what my mom would cook, what my grandmother would cook—completely different. So there was, like, this outside Chinese world,” she says.

“What’s interesting about the history of chow mein and chop suey and those kinds of things is that they were modified specifically for Western palettes,” she explains. “So it was Chinese people making up this fad almost, or ‘memories of’ Chinese dish. I kind of see it as this way of sort of trying to assimilate or accept it—”

“Or smart business?” I question.

“Yes! Smart business.”

JJ Lee, Detail, ReOriented, Mixed Media on Rice Paper, entire dimensions 18″ x 60′, 2018

The juxtaposition of private and public presentations of Chinese identity inspired ReOriented—a recent exhibition at the Ross Creek Centre for the Arts (Feb 12-March 29, Canning, NS), featuring a 60-foot rice paper scroll exploring Lee’s own cultural hybridity. The works focus on that hyphen between the words “Chinese” and “Canadian.” “Growing up there was a lot of ‘you’re not really Chinese because you grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia,’ and ‘you don’t look like a Maritimer’—somebody actually said that to me,” she laughs. “And then I started thinking, what really is ‘real’?—you don’t really know.”

“I’ve actually never had sweet and sour chicken balls. The colour of that sauce kind of freaks me out. It’s really fun to paint though!” — JJ LEE

The truth of her hyphenated reality lies somewhere between the juxtapositions she presents: “I focused mostly on North American food and compared it to the food that we might have at home,” she says. “So for example, I might have a drawing of chop suey and then beside it a whole carp with green onions and soy sauce and things on it. I wanted to contrast the differences.”

JJ Lee, detail of “ReOriented,” 2018

Lee, who jokingly calls herself an “equal opportunity appropriator,” has created a deliberate cultural mashup: a sprawling world where toxic-looking red and yellow mounds of sweet and sour chicken balls rest beneath faint brush strokes referencing pagodas, alongside imagery of a railroad and those blue and white Willow patterned dishes (imitations of hand-painted designs from China created by 18th century British ceramic artists for mass production). And a single long golden noodle dips in and out of the frame, twisting through each symbolic incarnation of cultural identity.

Lee’s intent is more a playful vision quest of sorts for an authentic depiction of a hard-to-define hybridized reality, than it is didactic or moralistic. She references writer Jennifer 8. Lee and her book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, and says she was drawn to the writer’s idea that Chinese food was “a culinary prank” pulled on the West. The author searches for the origins of our favourite Chinese-American restaurant dishes, discovering, for example, that chop suey may have actually been concocted by a Chinese chef in San Francisco whipping up a dish that would “pass as Chinese” for his boss as a practical joke of sorts.

JJ Lee, installation view of “ReOriented,” 2018

Humour seems to be a potent self-defence weapon for Lee as well, who laughs when recounting dark moments of racism from her childhood in Nova Scotia—where the Chinese community was “really, really really small”—which she spent in Halifax’s Westmount subdivision. “It was good. It was very safe,” she says, pausing, “but there were the incidents.” Her warm smile fades for a minute as she recalls them. “Sometimes I wonder what those people who—like they tried to burn our bushes and they wrote down “chinks” but they spelled it wrong,” she says, her laughter returning. “Like if you’re going to give a racial slur can you at least spell it right!”

The absurdity of labels informs a parallel body of work, Reproductions, on view in Toronto at the gallery, artist supply shop and workroom ARTiculations, where I’ve met Lee for a chat. We stand in front of an installation featuring over 200 label tags from Staples that she’d drawn a number of images on—some faithfully copied from life and some reproductions from photos and internet.

For this piece, Lee drew whatever popped into her head after suffering a concussion, exhuming the labels of her life from her own mind. It’s like looking at the contents of one’s brain splattered on a wall—any internal filing system at work remains a mystery. Western medical imagery dances alongside images of Gumby and Pokey and anatomically-scaled insects and biological diagrams of cells dividing. The end effect? Ordered systems are thrown out of balance, disrupting hierarchies, giving all symbols equal weight.

Some of the labels near the bottom are ripped, the artist’s 10-year-old daughter’s contribution to her work. “One day my daughter, who is on the autism spectrum, was really upset with me and she went to my studio and she ripped up the—she was really quiet and I thought ‘what’s she doing’ and there she was,” says Lee. “Of course I got really upset. No one’s ever destroyed my artwork, much less my daughter, so we had a really good cry about it. Together we decided to piece it back together.”

That her daughter would become an accidental co-creator of this work is fitting, as Lee was considering the labels her daughter would have to contend with in her own life. Her child’s autism diagnosis is recent, so it’s fresh label, the implications of which Lee’s now grappling with.

The tiny drawings cascade to the floor of the gallery, a symbolic gesture that brushes away the constructs that we attach our assumptions upon. Assumptions like: “Chinese people eat sweet and sour chicken balls.”

“I’ve actually never had sweet and sour chicken balls,” says Lee with a smile. “The colour of that sauce kind of freaks me out. It’s really fun to paint though!”

From the archives: Mathieu Léger transforms cultural detritus

vanews — Tue, 03 Feb 2015 06:17:04 +0000

Mathieu Léger, “On a Silver Platter,” 2014. Exhibition view in Galerie Sans Nom, Moncton, NB, Canada. Installation. Photo credit: Mathieu Léger

Editor’s Note: This review originally ran in the Fall 2014 issue of Visual Arts News.

In Acadian author France Daigle’s 2012 novel Pour sûr, Antoinette opens a game of Scrabble against her husband, The Cripple, with a controversial 125 points. Her word, dialyse, she argued, to her husband’s chagrin, contained two vertical words—“y” and “a.”

“It wasn’t the 21 points that bothered The Cripple,” writes Daigle, “it was the principle of the thing.” While The Cripple and Antoinette play—mixing French and Acadian words—they discuss a local murder, Oedipus and psychoanalysis. The domestic scene encapsulates Daigle’s project, exploring the concept of value/values through the lens of contemporary Acadie.

It’s within this milieu that we can situate Acadian artist Mathieu Léger’s exhibition Sur un plateau d’argent / On a Silver Platter (Galerie Sans Nom, Moncton, April 25 to May 30, 2014). The show was composed of second-hand silver plates engraved with texts that, as guest curator Jennifer Bélanger explains in her curatorial statement, “address the impacts on the ever-changing geographic Acadian landscape … reference storied genealogy” and “… directly illustrate the impact on the inherited Chiac dialect.” A few examples: “best déportation ever;” “tu m’corriges en-an-on;” “fricot.”

The concept, like the engraved text, is a one-liner. The castoff silver plates, as “cultural detritus” of British aristocracy, are reappropriated by Léger using the culture the British sought to destroy.

This is Léger at his most digestible, serving the concept “on a silver platter.” An overview of his oeuvre, though, reveals the work to be more than ironic revenge. Recently, he’s been preoccupied by abstract narratives. A stretch of slush-soiled snow (Demography of Virulence, 2012) says more than what’s depicted—the speed of the plow, the placement of streetlamps and muddiness of slush, etc. His ongoing drawing series, Transects, riff on how “scientific concepts can be analyzed through mark-making.” In another photograph series, he describes aerial shots of trees: “When things get overlooked, other things become apparent.”

Frequently working with photography, the aphorisms populating his blog explain his predilection: “Sometimes things seem off, because they are”; “Similar is not always same”; and “Perspective renders different opinions of one line.”

Given the abstruseness of his oeuvre, the straightforwardness of Sur un plateau d’argent / On a Silver Platter is intentional and requisite. The show was immaculately installed and lit, eliminating the chance of aloof viewing. Léger drew you in, seduced by silver.

Adroit, he had complete control, preying on viewing sensibilities, which sees the focus placed on the engraved text, on his orientation of the pieces.

What we don’t admire is the plate itself. This neglect addresses notions of value and values in the relationship between idea and object. In this case, the idea is nothing without the object. The object, however, as “cultural detritus,” has no value, and, arguably, isn’t the object once it becomes vehicle for the idea.

Yet, we value the “art,” not the plates. This is our error, and reveals our value system as stagnant. In discussing his work with Canadian Art, Léger said, “I’m questioning every aspect of artmaking and the art world, and the place of art within culture. And the place of culture within society.” Why should his decision to engrave the plates, and arrange them in a display, engender value?

To recall Nietzsche, the great critic of morality, objectifying value, or prescribing value to an action, out of custom was “dishonest, cowardly, lazy!” Values should be determined in context, informed by “the acquisition of new experiences and the correction of customs.”

We engage art staidly—stupidly, if you consult Nietzsche—with customary values, and the values of fame and fortune, inhibiting the creation of new customs. As such, contemporary art may be invaluable to distill our zeitgeist; it’s rendered popularly irrelevant.

So what of Daigle and Léger’s interest in values? Acadian culture in both instances is posited as a potential touchstone, one of play, value-bending, miscommunication and bastardized tradition.

The cultural confusion of Acadie fosters a context for new customs, as R.B. Kitaj outlined in the First Diasporist Manifesto: ”If a people is dispersed, hurt, hounded, uneasy, their pariah condition confounds expectation in profound and complex ways.”

This is invoked in two pieces in Léger’s show, one reading “assimilable,” the other “assimilable.” This is the perspective Léger desires. Rather than point- counterpoint, the strikethrough creates a new value premised on the past. It’s an edit, an engagement—not erasure. It confounds expectation, being similar to its opposition.

Similar isn’t always the same, because it’s tinctured by history, cultural provenance, context. Engaging with his cultural context, Léger visions new values to provoke us to see if we’ll do the same. But we don’t. Sur un plateau d’argent / On a Silver Platter is a perfectly palatable contemporary art, and Léger wants us to choke on it.