Memory – visual arts news

Beyond The Island, Another Island

vanews — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 19:19:16 +0000

Cape Breton has existed as a Shangri-La of sorts for Americans for over half a century, firmly rooting itself in the imaginary of New York’s avant-garde circles, political radicals, draft dodgers, back-to-the-landers and, more recently, those simply looking for an affordable getaway. AMISH MORRELL, a Cape Breton-born writer and curator, chats with New York artistic duo ERIK MOSKOWITZ and AMANDA TRAGER about their memories of the Cape Breton of their youths, exploring the pull of place and the idea of Cape Breton as refuge and site of utopian projections.

Early back-to-the-landers making hay. Photo: George Thomas, Northeast Margaree, 1973. Courtesy of George Thomas and Cape Breton University Art Gallery.

AMISH MORRELL: I’ve been reflecting on our conversations from this past summer, about our respective projects focusing on artists and members of the counterculture who came to Cape Breton during the 60s and 70s, and how this place was a refuge for many of these people, whether they were draft-dodgers searching for an alternative to mainstream society, or artists who simply wanted a quiet place to make their work. One of the things that struck me was the similarity between Erik’s and my own stories. I’ve also been reflecting on the relationship between aesthetics and survival, and how Cape Breton inf luenced culture and ideas that came to circulate internationally.

My story is that my parents came here from the United States in 1972 and bought a farm at the end of the road in Cape Breton that had a barn and a run-down farmhouse with no water, phone, electricity or indoor plumbing. Although they installed these modern conveniences, we otherwise lived as families had lived there for generations, raising animals, growing our own vegetables, cutting our own wood and lumber, existing almost entirely outside of a cash economy. And while both my parents had gone to college and were part of an educated American middle-class, they had skills that enabled them to readily integrate into a rural subsistence economy. My mother knew how to care for livestock and my father could build and repair the kinds of machines that people used, such as sawmills and farm machinery. At the time, young people were moving out of rural communities and these practices were being abandoned, so there was a vacuum that people like my parents could inhabit.

“As children, Margaree Island was a psychic and literal destination for me and my friends, and the adults also seemed to focus on it as a locus of endless fascination; it seemed to embody our deepest collective desires.” — ERIK MOSKOWITZ

ERIK MOSKOWITZ: My parents bought their original property in Cape Breton around 1973. My mom’s sister, married to a draft resistor, had been living in Montreal. Around 1969, a group of artists from the downtown scene in New York that included Joan Jonas, Richard Serra, JoAnne Akalaitis, Rudy Wurlitzer and Philip Glass started spending summers in Cape Breton. They ran in the same circles as my family in New York and they initiated our first forays to the Maritimes. Cape Breton gave my mom and her sister time they wouldn’t have otherwise had to see one another.

Photo: George Thomas, Northeast Margaree, 1973. Courtesy of George Thomas and Cape Breton University Art Gallery.

My parents would set up camp for the summer on our forty acres of land on Sight Point Road. The setup was surprisingly similar to the way we were already living in New York: artists were inhabiting industrial buildings that had been under-utilized or left behind by the manufacturing sector. The spaces were completely raw, equipped for the industry that had existed for the past century. Makeshift arrangements enabled workspace for making art, along with living spaces but with no residential infrastructure. We camped out in our huge abandoned loft space, using white gas for cooking on Coleman stoves. We collected used wooden trucking pallets from the street to heat our loft, whose heat shut off after working hours (5 p.m. at the time).

Summertime we’d pack up our loft’s camping gear, bring it north and live in tents. Once a farm, our property was now subsumed by rose bushes and spruce trees. Being in Cape Breton was a chance to leave the city heat and be in a different culture, but a culture that afforded yet another re-interpretation of space left behind in the wake of previous economies. During the first days of our arrival, a man named Dan Huey MacIsaac came around and pointed out the foundation from the old farmhouse that had collapsed and melted back into the land. He showed us where the spring was and other physical details of earlier life there. The other families from New York also moved into neighboring abandoned farms or hunting lodges that had outlived their original purposes. In both New York and Cape Breton there was what felt almost like a mission: to utilize and re-purpose the abandoned spaces that related to industry and economies from another era.

AMANDA TRAGER: My summer camp experiences in Vermont didn’t quite prepare me for Cape Breton! I only started coming in the 90s, as an adult. Amish, I’m curious about your regard of Cape Breton as a creative site. Can you speak more about your thinking around this, and how this has been a discursive project for you?

Amish Morrell’s childhood home in Cape Breton with machinery for making shingles in the front yard. Photo: George Thomas, Northeast Margaree, 1973. Courtesy of George Thomas and Cape Breton University Art Gallery.

AMISH: I see Cape Breton as a creative site in a few different ways. In the case of my family, my mother, Anne Morrell-Robinson has been making and selling quilts since the mid 70s. After my father died in 1984, that was how she supported our family. For people like my mother and other artists and craftspeople, selling things they made often supplemented subsistence food production. While this kind of work circulates as part of the tourist and craft economy, and reinforces ideas of rural cultural authenticity in Cape Breton, it’s also shaped by more global influences and forces. For example, one of the events that informed my mother’s beginnings as a quilter was a show at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1971, called Abstract Design in American Quilts. Many back-to-the-landers used craft as both an ideological and economic means of support. While this work can be found across
the province, it tends not to be shown outside the region.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the way that Cape Breton has operated as a creative site for the artists who come here in the summer. I’m referring to Erik’s parents, and many of the other artists from New York, who for the most part have hidden out in Cape Breton, where their work isn’t really legible to a lot of people. But there’s a middle-way between these two worlds and that describes what happened for my father. After going to art school, in 1971 he went to the Whitney Studio Program in New York, and then did his MFA at Rutgers. At the time, Rutgers was ground-zero for the Fluxus movement, and he worked with Robert Watts and knew Geoffrey Hendricks, who had already been coming up to Cape Breton. My father was familiar with a lot of the people and ideas circulating in the art world at the time, but he and my mother decided to come straight to Cape Breton after he finished his MFA, because at the time Cape Breton was more interesting to them than New York.

“I remember my father describing our life in Cape Breton as a more perfect realization of his work as an artist. He had to apply his skills in ways that were more utilitarian than aesthetic, as part of surviving in Cape Breton.” — AMISH MORRELL

It was always obvious to us—to me and my brother Ezra, and to other people around us—that my mother was an artist because she made quilts, but it wasn’t as clear how my father was an artist. He was constantly building and repairing things, like an elevator that lifted firewood from the basement, cars, tractors, sawmills and antique machines that served one function or another on the farm. He would sometimes show us his movies or artworks, which could be quite abstract, like a film that simply repeated a single- frame of someone throwing a rock 1,000 times. But I remember him describing our life in Cape Breton as a more perfect realization of his work as an artist. He had to apply his skills in ways that were more utilitarian than aesthetic, as part of surviving in Cape Breton. My parents weren’t working with other artists as much they were working with their neighbors with whom they exchanged skills and labor; taking care of horses, making hay, or cutting wood. In retrospect, I realize that this was an aesthetic project in the sense of making a life that fit with their Quaker social and spiritual ideals, which included simplicity and self-reliance. They emphasized labour and being known by one’s actions, as well as direct experience and learning by doing, which were the primary ways that knowledge was transmitted in Cape Breton at the time.

Amish Morrell (right) with parents Anne and Gary. Photo: George Thomas, Northeast Margaree, 1973. Courtesy of George Thomas and Cape Breton University Art Gallery.

AMANDA: So interesting, beginning with your mother’s quilts! I saw that Whitney show when I was 12. There was another amazing Whitney exhibition thirty years later of quilts made by members of the Black community in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, which was even more revelatory in terms of connections between local craft, long traditions and contemporary art. Quilts are so interesting in the way they conflate or problematize these connections, but also in how they sustain life, providing a living to the quilter and keeping folks from freezing to death! Plus they’re made from scraps that would otherwise be thrown away. This relates to Anna Tsing’s discussion of salvage accumulation; the idea of life outside of capitalism. Thinking about survival within an aesthetic modality feels urgent now.

AMISH: I’m also interested in how Cape Breton was connected to an international avant-garde. While we can look at how people who came to the Island had a role in shaping its culture, I think that it’s more interesting to consider how the Island and its people have secretly inhabited a more global art world. In Joan Jonas’s They Come to Us Without a Word, the work she made for the 2015 Venice Biennale, she uses fragments of ghost stories from The Cape Breton Book of the Night and populates her videos with characters and objects and scenes from near Inverness. For anyone from Inverness county, her performance and installations are clearly made in and are about this place. It’s the same with Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer’s film, Keep Busy, which was set on Margaree Island. The connection isn’t just artists, though. Stewart Brand, who founded The Whole Earth Catalog and was one of the key architects of the back-to-the- land movement, also lived near Mabou Mines for some time during the early 70s.

AMANDA: We saw Robert and Rudy’s Keep Busy together at Anthology Film Archives in 2008. Erik had seen it earlier, but we went crazy over it because, for us, it functioned first as an expanded home-movie exercise, literally so in that it included many of the adults Erik had grown up knowing in New York and Cape Breton— people I had also come to know. The film was made in 1975. Rudy wrote the script on the back of an envelope as they made their way to Margaree Island to begin shooting. JoAnne Akalaitis invited the late, great Samuel Beckett actor, David Warrilow, up from New York to participate and the story, such as it is, seems like a Beckett-like take on Cape Breton locals as they prepare for winter, but in a way that is somewhat vaudevillian, with Richard Serra seen constantly astride one of the shacks while disassembling it, and Joan Jonas laughing hysterically as she pushes a mound of garbage up a hill. JoAnne gives a marvelous performance as a feckless yokel. There are many stories about them being stranded on the island while making the film and nearly losing the footage when they came back in a storm. Absolutely no one seems to agree on how long the process took. Was it a few days or a few weeks? We’ll never know.

But June Leaf told me that some of the locals who saw the film felt they were being mocked. Local people lost lives and limbs through their work on that Island. We interviewed a man, Herbie MacArthur, whose parents both drowned on their way to tend the lighthouse there. The gap between these groups’ stories about the island is stark.

In about 2013 we came around to wanting to make work in response to the film and its production. At the same time, we got turned on to the speculative fiction of Octavia Butler through Kodwo Eshun and Angalika Sagar of the Otolith Group and wondered: Can we somehow combine these works? Can we tell the story of the New York artists coming to a remote place of great natural beauty, living among agrarian people from another time— from the perspective of Afro-futurism? To many folks this seemed fanciful and in need of defense. But we’ve held on, in a landscape of changing awareness wrought by the Black Lives Matter movement. We’ve spent the past few years in research mode.

“Thinking about survival within an aesthetic modality feels urgent now.” —AMANDA TRAGER

ERIK: As children, Margaree Island was a psychic and literal destination for me and my friends, and the adults also seemed to focus on it as a locus of endless fascination; it seemed to embody our deepest collective desires. The coast curves around the smaller, abandoned island and creates a natural amphitheater so that it becomes a central figure in the landscape and psyche of the community here.

After first seeing Keep Busy, Margaree Island became a logical place to imagine a re-centering of my own sense of cultural identity. What if the planet had begun a process of cultural remapping during the Keep Busy production, with Margaree Island the center of this newly terraformed culture? I saw the Keep Busy cast and crew as back-to-the-land psycho-geographers. The flâneurs of Paris re-imagined on that abandoned island, literally deconstructing the shacks that housed the former fishermen, for no other reason than the inevitability of poetic gesture while the camera rolled. Keep Busy exists for me as a document of a production, a distant remnant of that original gesture, those folks wandering through that landscape, at that time, and also an imagined future that unfolds from that time and place.

AMISH: I’ve been trying to map out the points of early contact for some of these American artists who started coming here in the late 60s. A key actor in that story is Carmelita Hinton, who founded the Putney School in Vermont, in 1935. This past summer David and Tamara Rasmussen in Bay St. Lawrence told us about how Carmelita and a group of students from Putney came to Cape Breton on a bicycle tour in the 30s or 40s, and bought a disused farm along the coast between Mabou and Inverness, to use for the school’s International Program. Over the years the Putney School sent students to Cape Breton to work on the farm, and to run summer camps there. A lot of people, including David Rasmussen, Jon Hendricks, and Parker Barrs Donham, came to Cape Breton as counsellors for the Putney School camp, or as Putney students.

Among these people was Timothy Asch, who had worked with Ansel Adams and some of the other modernist photographers including Paul Strand and Minor White. After coming to Mabou Mines on a Putney School trip, Asch returned in 1952 to make a photo-documentary as part of the Stirling County study, a project that employed visual anthropologist John Collier to study mental health effects on people as a result of migrating from fishing and farming communities along the Digby Neck to larger centres such as Digby. The Mabou Mines photographs were to serve as a “control group,” documenting subsistence farming and fishing. The images he produced were in the style of the Farm Security Administration photographs of the 30s, documenting rural conditions during the Great Depression. I suspect that in looking a lot like the rural United States in the years before WWII, Cape Breton would have occupied a particular place of imaginative potential for these critics of modernity and leftist-progressive educators.

For me, this shows that the idea of Cape Breton as a refuge, from the kinds of political and economic changes going on in the United States after WWII, existed among leftist-artistic circles as early as the 40s. Timothy Asch came to Cape Breton almost 15 years before Robert Frank, Joan Jonas, Richard Serra, JoAnne Akalaitis and Philip Glass. Cape Breton inhabited the imagination of successive generations of artists, from the 50s through the 70s, in similar ways. This attraction and integration was aesthetic, ideological and practical. The Putney School students, for instance, helped their neighbors make hay, repaired the farm buildings and went on hiking trips. The school’s educational philosophy was heavily influenced by the ideas of American philosopher and progressive educator John Dewey. Instead of athletics, they did farm labour or went on hiking trips.

“Cape Breton as a site for so many people’s utopian projections is something that defies easy explanation” —AMANDA TRAGER

AMANDA: I love hearing this history, particularly about the visual anthropologists. The overlap between political radicalism and the avant-garde is fascinating. I see Robert Frank’s work as a turning point in this tradition of documentary photography. Although The Americans could be used as a visual textbook explicating class and racial divide in America during the 50s, it also represented a departure. It was not distanced or objective, but intensely felt, off-kilter in every way; profound on another level. And then he abandoned that kind of work at the moment of its highest acclaim. He became a different kind of photographer, more playful, and he became a filmmaker. I don’t think he wanted to be associated with photojournalism or social justice issues. He wanted to be an artist, which in those days, didn’t dovetail with politics too much, or not in the ways that it had. He fell in with the Beats, that quintessentially optimistic American movement. But growing up in Switzerland as a Jew during WWII, he was a doleful guy. So maybe for Frank the move away from overt politics is more akin to the Surrealists or the Dada movement’s cultivation of the absurd in the aftermath of WWI—a purposeful response to, and escape from, that period’s horrors. During the time that we’re speaking about, Frank’s horrors included the deaths of both his children.

The New York artists who came here shortly after Frank in the late 60s and early 70s were also not like the socially-conscious photographers; their work was not motivated by politics. Nor did they embrace the ecstatic chaos of the Beats. But then, what were they, as a group? We tried all summer to link the older artists in our circle to the larger countercultural moment—a.k.a. the hippie movement—to no avail. Their disavowal is almost comical given the way they lived. But they were not seeking alternatives to consumer culture. They possessed outsized ambition, and they desired recognition and financial support, all of which came from New York City and other urban art centers. Needing to get away for the summer, they came here because land was cheap and they had very little money and this was a place they could all be together. They came to know other communities of people “from away,” like the back-to-the-landers, only gradually or not at all. They were self-involved and involved with one another. Their work was what it was all about. For artists like your father who came to live on Cape Breton as part of the back-to-the-land movement, life and art came together. Not so for these driven New Yorkers.

Even though that’s the scene to which we’re most connected, perhaps Erik and I are trying to return to the attitude of the earlier visual anthropologists and the back-to-the-land artists. We’re thinking about a work that re-invests in the idea of Cape Breton as a place that actively models alterity and ways of re-thinking community. In our fantasy, the avant-gardes and countercultures come together—but informed by Black theory and Black presence, like an aspirational, alternative history realized in a future. We learned so much about Black Nova Scotian history this summer, including the fact of thousands of free Blacks coming here as British Loyalists after the American Revolution, and other waves of migration. Marcus Garvey visited in 1937. He delivered a speech in Sydney that formed the basis of Bob Marley’s Redemption Song. We heard a lot about this history from Theresa Brewster, chair of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Glace Bay. The UNIA was started there in 1914. According to her, there’s a general lack of knowledge regarding Black presence within Canada. Scholars like Katherine McKittrick, Rinaldo Walcott and Afua Cooper say the same thing. For us, as Americans, this ignorance was even more pronounced in that we weren’t even fully aware that slavery had existed here.

Connections between Black life counterculture and nature became more tangible only after absorbing Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman’s 2016 talk “The Black Outdoors,” at Duke University. We’re still thinking about the similarities, and mainly the differences, between the escaped slaves of petit marronage finding temporary refuge while hidden in mountain homesteads and 60s American draft-dodgers escaping to the Canadian woods. However inadequate the comparison may be, both are instances of people living outside capitalist space, however precariously. Fred Moten’s talk with Robin D.G. Kelley earlier this year at University of Toronto (along with Rinaldo Walcott and Afua Cooper) was also eye-opening, particularly Fred’s way of seeming to speak not on the level of theory, but quite literally, about saving the planet through small self-organized cells.

AMISH: Earlier you referenced Octavia Butler and the idea of speculative fiction. As I understand it, it projects a possible future.

AMANDA: This fall we’ve been in Los Angeles, of all places, with fires raging like never before, but predicted in Octavia Butler’s fiction. We’ve been studying under the great Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes, keepers of Octavia’s flame and prominent figures in the field of Black horror and sci-fi. Our project is a geographical mash-up, as was the North Atlantic slave trade and its aftermath. Black horror is a rising genre without, completely unsurprisingly, much white contribution. But centuries of slavery and post- slavery have taken a toll on everyone, including slave-owners, who grotesquely dehumanized themselves to do what they did, and went so far as to institutionalize their crimes against other humans. To that extent, slavery is everyone’s horror story. Fiction can re-tie threads in different patterns; it can heal; it can re-think a future.

AMISH: Many people who were attracted to Cape Breton during the 60s and 70s—back-to-the-landers in particular—sought to create a future that was radically different from what they’d left behind, but had elements that were well in place within Cape Breton communities. Cape Breton was an emancipatory space—at least in their imaginations, and at least until cold cashless reality sunk in. How does the speculative play out in how you approach the history of these artists in Cape Breton?

AMANDA: Cape Breton as a site for so many people’s utopian projections is something that defies easy explanation. We’re adapting our research into a script that includes all the groups we’ve been discussing, not just the artists. The back-to-the-landers, the Buddhists are now all part of the story. We’re aware that re-telling the story of Cape Breton as refuge through the lens of Afrofuturism and Black horror may be controversial, or feel random. But a trope within Afrofuturism and social justice-oriented sci-fi is that imagining a better future is foundational to realizing one. Enslaved Blacks believing in and fighting for slavery’s end meant investing in a fantasy; it was their science fiction. But it happened, miraculously, more or less. Believing capitalism can end is our current science fiction. The global ecology, of which Cape Breton is a part, has always been at the heart of these struggles.

The myth of home

vanews — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 03:02:29 +0000

View of “jerry ropson: to kiss a goat between the horns” at The Rooms, 2017. Photo: Darrell Edwards

Jerry Ropson’s to kiss a goat between the horns is an examination of the withering and slow death of not only Ropson’s grandfather, Albert, but of the rural culture of which Albert was a part. The loss of Newfoundlanders’ connection to our outport communities has long been grist for the artistic and political mills. If the blustering strain of resurgent Newfoundland cultural and political nationalism that existed in the 1970s through to the 80s and 90s operated as a warning against the cultural colonialism of Canada and the United States (a movement in many ways, by the way, which saw young middle-class artists and musicians appropriate the culture of the rural poor for their own purposes—the entertainment and heavily codified rubber-bootery of urban, middle-class audiences), and sought to abate what was and is seen as a threat to Newfoundlander’s cultural heritage, then Ropson’s exhibition presents viewers with a death that has already occured. It is a memorial to a cultural vernacular and way of life that has already left us.

View of “jerry ropson: to kiss a goat between the horns” at The Rooms, 2017. Photo: Darrell Edwards

The title of the exhibition (showing at the Rooms Provincial Art Gallery in St. John’s until September 24) comes from a malapropism uttered by Albert as he described a friend stricken with terminal cancer, and refers to how emaciated this friend had become due to the disease. Albert himself would later contract the same disease and die from it. The installation is littered with these odd and idiosyncratic turns of phrase, either written directly onto the gallery wall, cut into the black, felt banners in the show (which are reminiscent of something one would see in a funeral march for a head of state or to memorialize a national trauma, and which bring to mind, at least to this writer, Joseph Beuys) or appear as spoken or written text in the videos Ropson presents to us. That this malapropism is at the heart of the exhibition highlights the importance and defining character of the rural Newfoundland culture Ropson is memorializing—namely, to be “incorrect,” to exist either geographically or conceptually or linguistically outside dominant orthodoxy is a fruitful place from which to critique and stand in opposition to that orthodoxy. The question in Ropson’s exhibition seems to be: Does this place really even exist anymore? Or have we reached the point in the trajectory of Newfoundland culture where the myth of our cultural difference has finally collapsed in on itself?

Various and numerous objects or casts of objects, painted black, are presented upon table tops without index cards from the gallery or the artist himself, and mimic at once, two things: museological display cases, and your grandfather’s basement or shed workshop. Of seemingly random provenance—handmade dolls, pens, tools whose purpose is unknown, a cast of an animal leg taken from just below the knee, an antique guide to provincial liquor laws, amongst many other things neatly laid out for our consideration—the objects point to an absence, a puzzle in which most of the pieces are missing and you are left with a scattershot and incomplete rendering of the whole picture. As one young visitor to the gallery said while I was viewing the work, “I just don’t get it”—and I was like, “Yeah kid, I think that’s the point.” Therein lies the twist, the wistfulness, and the tragedy of the fragmented narrative Ropson, the exile who’s returned to the place that bore him, the perennial outsider, has revealed to us—you can never go home again.

View of “jerry ropson: to kiss a goat between the horns” at The Rooms, 2017. Photo: Darrell Edwards

The tension between absence and presence, figure and ground, is a formal motif that operates throughout the exhibition, and reasserts Ropson’s investigation into personal and cultural loss. For a body of work ostensibly about Ropson’s grandfather Albert, the man himself remains virtually absent from the exhibition and exists as an almost ghostly presence embodied in the mysterious sundry objects with which Ropson presents us. Rather than present viewers with a catalogue of life events or precious objects that describe a person’s life without an understanding of its deeper meaning—if such meaning can be said to even exist, at the risk of busting out some Philosophy 101 on you—Ropson gives us the cast off bits and detritus of the mundane as signifiers of Albert’s complex interior life as a practitioner of a culture that is lost to us.

Marigold Santos’ hybrid selves

vanews — Thu, 25 Aug 2016 22:26:27 +0000

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

Q + A: Jordan Bennett

vanews — Thu, 19 Nov 2015 20:49:13 +0000

Visual Arts News was excited to feature the work of artist Jordan Bennett in our Fall 2015 issue. In this online installation of her interview series, Current Conditions & Forecasts, Eryn Foster chats with Bennett about everything ranging from his experiences representing Newfoundland in Venice to his work bringing traditional Indigenous art forms into contemporary art discourse.

Jordan Bennett, “Sky Container,” 9 in x 12 in. Courtesy of the artist.

ERYN FOSTER: You were in Venice this summer representing Newfoundland (along with Anne Troake) at the Biennale. How was that experience? What was the response to your installation Ice Fishing?

JORDAN BENNETT: The opportunity to exhibit Ice Fishing at the Venice Biennale was great. It has been very well received throughout the past few months with a large number of visitors interested in both Anne’s work and mine. Venice is an amazing and unique city and being part of such a grand event is something I will not soon forget. It was exciting to see so many viewers come into the exhibition and interact with the installation. The curator of the exhibition, Chris Clark, did an amazing job choosing the works to be part of the show. Anne’s work really gives the viewer a sense of Newfoundland in spring and summer. It’s very poetic in nature. I feel that my work gives a glimpse into the ways of being and existing on the land and water during the long Newfoundland winter months.

EF: Did you feel any stress or pressure in preparing for your show in Venice? Or did you approach the opportunity as you would with any other exhibition?

JB: I approached it with the same mindset as I would have with any other exhibition. The only difference was ensuring the work was securely protected in rugged crates to withstand the long trek. It was truly an honour to be included in the official programming of the Venice Biennale.

Jordan Bennett, “Double Rainbow,” acrylic on wood, 12 in x 16 in. Courtesy of the artist.

EF: You are now in the second year of your MFA at UBC Okanogan. What is it like for you living on the other side of the country? Do you feel that the experience of living out West has influenced the way you make and think about art?

JB: Living in the Okanagan is quite a beautiful experience. Being in a MFA program is definitely a change of speed, as now I am balancing both my ongoing art practice and completing a thesis and exhibition. Being out West has really allowed me to explore new ideas, materials, and methodologies within my practice. [In September] I was at a conference, Performing Turtle Island, in Regina. During his presentation, the academic and actor Michael Greyeyes said, “Being so far from home allows the lenses in your eyes to refocus on it.” This resonated with me, as this is precisely how I feel about being out West.

EF: Can you tell me a little bit about your MFA thesis project? From what I understand, you are looking at the parallels and similarities between the visual cultures of the Beothuk and the Mi’kmaq? What brought you to this research?

JB: Yes that is correct. My thesis work is re-imagining the traditional art forms of the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq into a contemporary art discourse. Through this new work I am making a series of carvings accompanied by sound to create an immersive and interactive environment. My ongoing research came from thinking about the shared history of the traditional people of Newfoundland— the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq—and how centuries of their shared history have been reduced to vague one-liners and inaccurate interpretations, assumptions, and statements by European explorers and settlers on the island. Through creating this new work, I am bringing an Indigenous perspective to the assumptions and myths regarding the historical, physical, and cultural erasure of the Beothuk by European settlers. This is exemplified by the death of Shanawdithit in 1829, who is believed to be the last of her people. In Shanawdithit’s testimony, recorded in the 1827 diary of Bishop Inglis, she recalls that “the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq held relations and had a partial oral understanding of one another for centuries, but in the last 150 years this relationship turned for the worse.” This statement has been one of the factors that has driven me to create artworks rooted in re-imagining a space for both nations to coexist again.

EF: And how has this research informed your creative practice?

JB: Through this research I’ve been employing mediums that I have not explored in a long time such as drawing, painting, and I’ve also been learning wood-carving. Recently, I had the amazing opportunity to visit and learn from fellow artists Dean Hunt, Shawn Hunt, and their father Bradley Hunt of the Heiltsuk Nation. Bradley and his sons are very well known for their mastery in carving amazing cedar panels and totem poles, pushing the limits of both material and visual. I had the honour of spending two weeks with them in their studio, learning techniques of which I am employing in this new body of work. Through researching Beothuk and Mi’kmaq visual culture, I have been creating new drawings based on Porcupine quill designs from the turn of the 19th century along with the drawings of Shanawdithit and Beothuk items and articles found throughout Newfoundland archaeological digs. These new drawings are the basis for my new carvings.

EF: Having grown up in rural Newfoundland, do you feel the landscape and the culture of the island has influenced you as an artist in any particular way?

JB I grew up in the town of Stephenville Crossing on the west coast of the island. I believe that the whole reason I am an artist is based on the landscape and culture of this place. The landscape is both beautiful and brutal, growing up only a rock’s throw from the Atlantic Ocean really makes you appreciate the power of where you come from. My ancestors have lived in this area off the island for countless generations and I think that through a tie like this, you are born with an inherent connection to the land. In our community, as with many other communities in Newfoundland, we still greatly depend on the land for sustenance, be it food or spiritual.

EF: Once you have finished your MFA, do you think you will you move back East? Or do you have some other ideas as to where you might go next?

JB: I would love to move back home. If the opportunity arises, I would be back in a minute, the east coast holds a very special place in my heart. I am also not against going somewhere new that might hold exciting new opportunities.

Found in the Fog

vanews — Sat, 12 Sep 2015 22:24:34 +0000

Image: Michael Pittman, “Hob”, acrylic, india ink and graphite on cradled birch paper, 81 x 121 cm. on view at St. John’s Bonnie Leyton Gallery, May 2 – 30, 2015.

As we walked downtown, my friend described how two old hags had chewed on either side of her neck the night before. It wasn’t the first time. “I’ve learned that the trick,” she told me, “is that I just have to let it happen, to remind myself that it’s not real.” This was a hag dream, a form of sleep paralysis where one wakes to discover not only the inability to move, but the presence of a dark figure and a saturating feeling of dread. On the island of Newfoundland, hag dreams are as common and acceptable a topic as the weather. This is a place where one is often told to carry a biscuit to appease the faeries. Here, there is a word for meeting a figure in the fog—a “fetch”—which may show itself as a ship, a stranger on their deathbed or even oneself. The Dictionary of Newfoundland English describes such as an encounter as “annoyingly familiar at sea.”

Michael Pittman’s new body of drawings and paintings reveal memories as a form of specter. A memory can be a lonely, haunting thing. It is a singularly personal experience that can’t be relayed adequately to others and, over time, can become increasingly tentative to the one who experienced it originally.

“This body of work started with drawing a big red trike stuck in the thin, creaking ice of a newly caught pond,” Pittman says. “It was a memory from my childhood combined with an early lucid dream that seems as real today as it did when I was four—having become virtually indistinguishable from reality with the passing of years.”

With these works (on view in the exhibition Stories at St. John’s Bonnie Leyton Gallery, May 2-30, 2015) Pittman’s narrative is contained in the layers of making and undoing. His aesthetic echoes the uncertainty found in the familiar, and explores these ‘hauntings’ as the shifting lexicon for approaching new encounters. His paintings are a palimpsest of erasures and washes that navigate multiple half-seen associations. My Brother’s Mask (2015), for example, describes the distance felt with those one knows well. Around the figures float hints of mundane objects and events from various times, clues for a story the viewer will never fully grasp.

Pittman lives in Grand Falls-Windsor, where his family is based. He learned from his mother that knitting, once made, can be unraveled. From his father he learned that bedtime stories can be made up as one goes along. The birth of a son has done very little to slow down an exceptionally prolific practice that includes paint, film and sculpture. Becoming a father has caused Pittman to focus on the stories of his childhood, searching for the language to relay them to his son. Fatherhood has also meant less time to indulge, less time to frustrate a work with corrective gestures. By Pittman’s own admission, his previous works could occasionally be pushed a step too far: “[There’s an] obsessiveness to part of my process that I do not fully understand and can’t rightly explain, except to say that [it is] necessary.” He moved to ink drawings as he cared for his newborn. In addition to allowing him multiple objects to work on at once, this medium let him step back from the keenly malleable yet precious quality of paint. Able to be tight and intensive on paper, his painted work has become more intuitive. He has discovered the benefit of letting go.

This new body of work shows that the substance of a story exists not only in the forgetting, but in the flotsam that floats to the surface in the remembering. In the drawing Breach (2015), a large whale is densely wrapped in fabric, resting directly underneath the outline of a ship. To ‘breach’ means to come to the surface: “It creates a gap through which things could be either accessed or lost,” Pittman tells me. Here, a whale is usually an enormous yet ethereal figure seen from above, made foreign by the thin meniscus of water that separates it from the viewer. In this work, it is the observer that is tentative. The tangible is found below the surface.

From the archives: Cut/Fold/Play

vanews — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 06:24:38 +0000

Editor’s note: Paper Doll first appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of Visual Arts News.

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.

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.

From the archives

vanews — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 23:44:21 +0000

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.

From Alabama fireworks to popping wheelies: Kate Walchuk waxes nostalgic

vanews — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:43:53 +0000

Kate Walchuk, work from GOOD SHAPE, A show of personal souvenirs. Seeds Gallery April 17 – May 18 2013. Photo: Katie McKay

Kate Walchuk is in the business of memory preservation. In this podcast for Visual Arts News, Veronica Simmonds chats with the Halifax-based artist and curator about her recent show at Seeds Gallery, GOOD SHAPE, and her new understanding of nostalgia.