James Gardner at Le Gallery

by Shannon Bateman

Upon passing by LE Gallery on my way see the group show at Show and Tell Gallery, the unfamiliar form of a hanging artwork caught my eye, and curiosity drew me inside, my mission to Show and Tell cut short. Inside, I found myself fascinated by the presence of each painting in my personal space as a viewer, and the way in which the artworks seemed to reject the confinement of the walls. Not only were these paintings altering my usual experience of viewing artwork, but offered some artistic irony, as paintings of paintings. The five paintings comprise the series Paintings in a Room, and represent Toronto artist James Gardner’s first solo show at LE Gallery.

Gardner is a recent graduate of the University of Guelph, and holds the position of co-director/co-curator for the CS Galleries collective and is the co-founder of the Toronto’s VSVSVS, the collective gallery and studio. His exhibition at LE Gallery explores the relationship between a painting and its support and the space it occupies within a gallery setting. The series is but five paintings, and Gardner’s intent and execution of the concept are direct and impactful. The amorphous wooden structures that serve as Gardner’s interpretation of a support blurs the artwork’s identity between painting and sculpture, and the painted surfaces act as caricatures of paintings displayed in a gallery. Each piece depicts a scene of an abstract painting hanging in a white walled, wooden floored gallery setting, the context in which most art is exhibited today. The work emphasizes the cultural/institutional norms associated with viewing art and the expectations that influence the experience of viewing.
The artist’s intent of bridging the gap between the two physical necessities of a painting, the support and the surface, succeeds boldly and appears almost intrusively into the space of the viewer. The sculptural support presents itself on same level of significance as the surface, an exploration that is refreshing to see. Gardner’s organic rendering of a support allows us to question the standard formula of rectangular wooden support hidden behind the painted surface. The layers of wood that comprise the support are fully visible, constructed in relation to the painted surface, instead of for the painted surface.

The hybridity of the series as painting/sculpture is the first-most striking element of the exhibition, but upon closer examination, the elements of the painted surfaces are also quite impactful. Engaging in this double window of looking into a painting of a painting provokes contemplation of the expectations one enters a gallery with, the context in which we assume we will be viewing artwork. Has the gallery experience become so redundant that one may successfully build a series of paintings around it? Gardner answers this question with his series of paintings, but does so in a fashion free of mockery and in a clear concise manner. The artist takes into account how the physical elements such as the color of the floor, the light, the hue of the viewer’s clothing, and the angle of viewing all affect one’s experience of art. Also, the formal qualities of the painted component to each piece are rendered with such detail to texture, from the “plaster” walls to the “hardwood” floors. Though not key to the conceptual intent of the work, the miniature abstract paintings are strikingly beautiful, providing some color in an otherwise neutral colored series.

The relationships explored in Paintings in a Room are that of an artwork, the space it occupies and the viewer. Gardner approaches these entities in a method that is both direct and complex, providing the basis of an unexpected experience of hybridity. The physical components exist in these works not as structural necessity, but as enhancing elements of a concept. Gardner’s series of paintings succeeds in altering one’s notion of experiencing art, and in turn exists as evidence of a worthy exploration.

Shannon Bateman is a second year Drawing and Painting Major at OCAD University.
Instructor: Pete Smith

David Blackwood at the Art Gallery of Ontario

by Sarah Arnott

There is something so irresistibly quaint about the Newfoundland artist; one who allows us to peek into cozy, welcoming family homes, and to imagine adventures of life on the sea. David Blackwood's “Black Ice” series, currently displayed at the Art Gallery of Ontario, visually explores a deeply visceral, yet still overtly narrative side of Eastern Canadian lifestyle. Immediately when entering the exhibit, goose bumps crept up my arms – perhaps a result of the deep indigo and dark algae greens surrounding me, or perhaps from the eerie illusion that the ghostly gray figures in each scene were still moving about, as if not to have noticed their watchers from outside the frame.

Blackwood's large-scale mixed media prints tell a story of loss, fear, and a shoreline community so close it moved in unison like the ocean waves. His caricatured representations of people he knows, or once knew, are depicted in major events Blackwood recalls; mainly revolving around the hardships and fear of losing local fishermen to stormy weather. You feel a sense that Mr. Blackwood is such a cool, collected observer that he has been able to, over time, detach himself from the heartbreak taking place in much of his imagery. It has distinctly become a cloud of nostalgia. His style references old biblical illustrations, which he claims on video at the end of the exhibit were a treasured part of his childhood. However, the style has inarguably been made contemporary. I would even go so far as to say it looks very much like popular illustration among OCAD students, but with a remarkable maturity from his 60+ years of practice. It reminds me somewhat of Inuit drawings; exaggerated bodies with delicate thought put into the action or story role of each figure, but also a great focus round, smooth shading. Instead of creating a realism, it reached a very knowledgeable animated look. Further enhancing the nostalgia, each scene is set in the night – or feels very night-like, with blue washed and white speckled skies. When light is portrayed, it is always in a soft red glow – a feature which ties the series together. The medium of choice to accomplish these washes is aquatint: an intaglio printmaking technique using acid and acid-resistant resin to form a smooth gradation of colour. It could nearly fool for watercolour or calligrapher's ink – in fact, this is what I assumed it must be. I have never seen an artist make such beautiful use of aquatint before, and it was truly a treat to the imagination.

Blackwood has an incomprehensible ability to take urgent situations from the past and tint them with the look of a memory; slowed so much that you can spot every detail. Beams of white light on the horizons, birds floating atop the breeze, and men with tall, sleepy eyelids make numerous appearances throughout the show. Every flowing garment appears heavy and sheepishly rises for the ocean's bluster. The signs of winter, snowstorms and occasional peeking of dead, browned grass, seem to tell the psyche: “it's time to rest.” Being the viewer of these scenes makes me feel very much as if I were looking outside a window in wintertime; warmed from the indoors, but feeling a sort of internal chill with the whitescapes before me. I feel like I know each figure personally and treasure their company, as Blackwood undoubtedly did. He truly brings a personable aspect to his work that not many others have done.

Much like a statement that has been said about Lucian Freud by critics abound, I feel that David Blackwood captures an incredible psychological depth in his paintings. Clearly the foundations of this man's life have been rattled so hard, all he could do was allow the images to overflow. One of the most intriguing things about Blackwood, I find, is the life he's lived. As a boy, this man saw all his school friends' fathers set sail and vanish past the tallest icebergs, sometimes never to return. He's carried practical, self-sustainable knowledge and tradition from his family that many of us in western culture hunger for – as if it's become a fragment of the past. To experience a life based on such permanence, yet having to gain acceptance that the next day may take everything you knew away, is a very humbling thought. With a global focus on rising individualism and consumer culture, it is not often that we encounter communities anymore which rely so heavily on each other, and the ability to be in touch with the earth's ever changing moods. Art may have been Blackwood's way of telling it, but his life stories are very profound, precious old knowledge that his community will no doubt carry with them for generations.

Sarah Arnott is a second year Drawing and Painting Major at OCAD University.
Instructor: Pete Smith

Kim Dorland at Angell Gallery

by JunYan He

When I first walked into the Angell Gallery, the smell of oil paint exploded throughout the gallery, filling my nostrils. This is where the exhibition of the Canadian painter Kim Dorland’s recent work took place. The exhibition contained drawings and paintings by the artist. Most of the drawings, however, seemed like preparatory work for his large-scale paintings.

Dorland exaggerates the expressive handling of paint and dynamic brushwork. The mixture of various painting mediums - acrylic, oil and spray paint all seem to have found a home within his compositions. Thick, generously applied pigment sits abundantly upon wood or canvas surfaces; “muscular mark making” describes foliage and terrain. Sometimes fluorescent under painting isolates reduced human forms, filled by an ultra-fat layer of directly squeezed dark black tube paint. He employs these unexpected devices to generate arrangements that combine beauty with vulgarity, only to depict that which is familiar.

Through the subject matter and the application of paint, his work is exceedingly referential towards the kind of paintings made by international contemporaries such as Daniel Richter and Peter Doig. Dorland, however, should be more focused on looking past those influences to create some work that are more his own. The reference could be employed in the works technical/material component but shouldn’t influence the subject matter as well. It is tiny nuances like this that distinguish the utility of each artist and his/her artwork, artistic innovation from mannerist variation.

JunYan He is a 4th year exchange student at OCAD University from Ecoles des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France.
Instructor: Pete Smith

Sarah Cale at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects

by Tamara Wong

The majority of Cale’s work is comprised of shellacked wood panels in the 5 to 6 foot square range, upon which the artist has collaged paint strokes. Considering the relatively small size of the gallery space to the panels, and the lack of sufficient spacing between panels, the viewer is left claustrophobic, reminded of low ceilinged wood panelled basements of 1970. Perhaps the artist has recreated a past experience of fighting back against childhood claustrophobia, crayon clutched in pudgy child hand, ready to deface the impeding walls? This, however, is not the case. After listening to the artist, reading the gallery website's synopsis of her work, and referencing Cale's artist statement found on her website, my lens of interpretation has shifted.

Now I stand in the middle of this space, boxed in and battered by these whirlwinds of deconstructed appliquéd brushstrokes, and I am in awe. As any creative person who has worked through artistic frustration knows, this compressing, drowning, intimidating feeling placed on the artist by her work, her materials, her inspiration, all that she has said and can never say is the epitome of familiarity in the drive that lets her continue her work.

American author, Ruth Stone best describes this force. Stone’s thoughts were retold in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Ted Talk "Nurturing Creativity". Stone describes poems as thunderous barrelling trains of air swooping off the natural landscape to rush through her, and if she was not lucky enough to have the quickness of pencil on paper then the force would continue on its way in search of another poet to collect its entirety. This personified external creative force is what I feel Cale’s pieces capture on her more or less natural wood planes, in abstract hurricanes of brushstrokes, sustained through her racing to apply and save each stroke before it disintegrates in the tender but swift movement between plastic bag palette to wooden panel.

Her titles: “Synapse”, “The Vigour”, “Pour”, “Pelt”, “Thicket”, “Nausea”, “Mask”, “Bound”, “Surround”, “Hover”, “Tangle”, “Drift”, and “Tousle”, tell a story of human desire to control and escape being controlled by the external and internal forces which drive us.

Cale herself describes her second hand brushstrokes as more of a language and typography than belonging to the fields of painting or collage; those fields themselves marred with so much human history that if they were to claim her work, the absence of individual control and the relevance of creativity itself would be lost. For me, Cale’s work explores the artist’s need to translate external inspiration into that which can be presented for second hand consumption by her audience.

Though many of her works exhibit lovely pastels, earthy browns and shocks of yellow and teal, I find myself most attracted to the large black humanesque forms being pulled along by the tumultuous uplifting strokes. Perhaps they have indeed pulled the artist into the hurricane of creativity, for her studio chair remains in the center of the room, itself exhibiting marks from the creative hurricane, with only the artist’s painted skin, casually draped across its back, left to own it.

We are all prey to inspiration and Cale's work profoundly exhibits this truth.

Tamara Wong is a 4th year Drawing and Painting Major at OCAD University.
Instructor: Catherine Beaudette

Perception, Accumulation, Circulation and Materialization: The Employment of Objects by the Grange Prize Nominees

By Joan Wilson

The Grange Prize exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario (September 22 2010- January 30 2011) brings together the work of Josh Brand, Kristan Horton, Moyra Davey, and Leslie Hewitt. Each artist creates photographs in a different way, addressing particular ideas, while they all share a commonality: the use or representation of objects. Visually, the work of each artist is distinct, but they all draw on the theme of objects, whether it is through the creation, the subject matter, the use, or the concept of the photograph.
Upon entering the exhibition, the first artist’s work to be viewed is that of Josh Brand. Situated in their own small area of the space, the immediate striking feature of Brand’s seven photographs is their small scale. With so many contemporary photographers presenting work at such large scales, the intimacy of Brand’s images is refreshing. The photographs, abstract in nature, present a connection between the artist and the final object. Portraying only lines and shapes, there is no sense of the involvement of a camera in the process of his work. The viewer is lead to imagine the artist in the darkroom delicately and thoughtfully creating the photographs. All chromogenic and silver gelatin prints, the images reference the tactility of traditional photographic techniques. It is unclear what objects Brand would have used to create the photographs, but it is clear that his process is a key element to the concept of his work. This uncertainty itself evokes feelings of fragmented memory, altered perception, and abstract thoughts when viewing his photographs.
The next artist to be viewed is Kristan Horton, whose work is located adjacent to Brand’s in a separate room. Of the three separate series of works, Horton’s Orbits (2009) series is the most compelling, drawing the viewer in with questions concerning the subjects the images are actually portraying. In contrast to Brand’s photographs, Horton’s Orbits are large-scale prints at 135x102 cm. Three from the series are displayed: Doorknob, Dark Center and The Original. The images portray piles of random objects photographed from above. Many of the items are indistinguishable, but one does not get the sense that the specificity of the objects is the focus of the photographs. When closely viewing the images, it can be seen that some of the objects are repeated and overlapping with each other, creating a sense of accumulation, time and space.
When entering the next room, Moyra Davey and Leslie Hewitt’s works are seen. Davey displays three separate bodies of work: a video piece, and two photographic series. The first photographic series, Copper Heads (1990), shows three magnified images of the Abraham Lincoln side of the American penny. Although each photograph is of the same object, they are all strikingly different in texture and colour, alluding to the individual ‘experience’ of each penny. Davey’s second series, The Whites of your Eyes (For Bill Horrigan) (2010), displays twenty-four photographs in a grid. The photographs themselves are of daily life, coffee cups, the newspaper, etc., but the prints have been folded and have writing and postage on them, breaking away from conventional ways of thinking about fine art photography, in terms of treating a photograph so delicately. These images have been mailed; they have been handled and damaged, but there is still a sense of preciousness to them. By folding and mailing the photographs, Davey has actually turned them into objects to be handled. Although these two bodies of work were made twenty years apart, there is a distinct connection between them; both examine the circulation of an object and the physical indications of its experiences in circulation.
Leslie Hewitt displays three photographs from her Midday Series (2009). The two most striking images are her large 132x159 cm chromogenic prints mounted in wood frames that sit on the floor of the gallery. The photographs themselves portray objects leaning against a blank white wall, which is mirrored in the way the photographs are then displayed. As noted by Hewitt, her interest in sculpture and the materiality of objects drove her to create the pieces that occupy space within the gallery. By mounting the photographs and setting them on the floor, Hewitt is turning them back into a physical object, which the viewer is then more strongly confronted by. The objects in the photographs at first seem arbitrary, but the inclusion of snapshots- most likely family snapshots, references a personal history.
Whether the nominees for the Grange Prize were chosen individually, or in conjunction with one another, their works have an undeniable connection. They all exclude the actual representation of people in their photographs, instead examining human traces left in the form of objects.


Joan Wilson studies at OCAD U
this post was added by Gabrielle Moser, her instructor

Art Battle 9 at the Great Hall

By Vanessa Krause

Art Battle is a local event that has developed over time to be one of the most popular live action painting extravaganzas ever. It is based on the idea that four people are randomly selected, given materials to paint on/with, including the paint itself. The battles are staged at the center of a large hall and the painters are situated at their own easel in the middle. All painters are given 20 minutes to paint competitively, while loud music plays in the background with 200 people in the audience. The crowd is constantly in motion and alcohol is served.

It is comparable to a live action wrestling match: the tension, the excitement, the process, the end result. After each round, the “patrons” (audience) vote for the winner by placing a ticket with the number 1, 2 or 3, whichever corresponds to the round, in a ballot box in front of their chosen painting. There are usually 2 rounds of 4 painters and from those, the winners of the 2 various bouts face-off in a final (30 minute) round of live action painting! For the first time in the history of Art Battle (Art Battle 9 which took place November 23, 2010) the winner was awarded a $400.00 prize. The “non-winner” of the final round was awarded $100. A live auction follows each art battle; the minimum bid is $50. If a painting does not receive a minimum bid it is “ceremoniously destroyed” with a chainsaw.

In Art Battle 4, the first one I attended on April 27, 2010 a painting was not bid on, and with cheers from the crowd it was cut apart by the chainsaw’s mighty teeth. It seemed like a primal, blasphemous and sadistic action, however, it reminded me of performance art.

Art Battle calls to mind the 1949 work “Monotone Symphony” by French artist Yves Klein; where he combined music, painting and performance art. Although his concept varies very much from Art Battle (primarily, because the painting is done by the artists in Art Battle and not nude women covered in paint) it seems to have the “wow” factor of the performance. In general, painting is an activity conducted in solitude, and Art Battle takes this solitary activity and makes it a happening. It forces the painter to think quickly, react and create on demand. It makes the imagination respond like a reflex without contemplation. Art Battle takes painting to a different place; it makes the painter create without time for second thoughts and perfectionist barriers. These works of art cannot be classified as gallery style material; they are the evidence left behind by the flow of creativity. They become something new.
Art Battle 9 was video taped for CBC’s “The Steven and Chris Show”. It was the first art battle to offer a winner’s purse, and was held at its traditional location at the Great Hall on Queen Street West and Dovercourt. Art Battle traditionally starts with a speech from Chris Pemberton, welcoming everyone to the great hall. He then chooses four names from a “magic hat” or in this case a lottery style roller with numbered ping-pong balls in it. Artists can sign up at the door to participate. Once the names are picked and the canvases and easels selected, the art battle begins.

For round one, four artists (Ben Soderberg, Tanja Gruber, Spencer Barclay and Jonathan Lau) were selected. Ben Soderberg was the champion of round one; he had to face Jamie Ashforth (multiple Art Battle champion) the winner of round two. Jamie Ashforth faced Tony Smerek, Danielle Cole and Dave Sheppard. Jamie has created some very interesting abstract work, using colour and blending techniques. In the work that won her the second round, she added a boat and a house (seemingly flying), which really made her work feel more developed and solid. The presence of a visible subject matter in her work was a very nice addition. Ben won his first round by painting a portrait of a mysterious face using only dark tones of blue and black and white for very strong highlights.

In the final round of Art Battle 9, Jamie started out with subject matter on her canvas, but buried it beneath layered colours, whereas Ben was very direct in his approach and created a very solid looking robot. At the end of the match, long time champion Jamie was defeated by the newcomer Ben. Other Art Battle champions and participants have been OCAD U’s own Marco Bertuzzo and David MacKenzie.

This strange, staged and colourful event is so successful because it is inclusive of many age groups. It takes the elitist gallery feel, and dismisses it, creating something that is needed: entertainment. Painting is taken off the walls and made into an activity that can be viewed like a sporting event. It has put painting back on the map for a lot of young people, and more traditional art lovers alike.

Vanessa Krause is a second year drawing and painting major at OCAD University.
Instructor: Pete Smith

Scenes From the House Dream: David Hoffos

By Peter Rahul
Instructor: Beth Stuart


David Hoffos has transformed a small room in the Museum of Contemporary Canadian art into a surreal journey through a miniature, perpetually dark world occupied with ghostly, dreamlike characters. The Canadian artist based in Lethbridge, Alberta, has been constructing and showing “Scenes from the House Dream” since 2003. The series consists of nineteen viewing windows isolated from one another in a dark room, through with the viewer is drawn into an imaginary world, each with it’s own minimal soundtrack. Within these hand made dreamscapes, small people are projected using various low-tech set-ups utilizing televisions and mirrors. The projections apparatus’ are visible to the audience, and stir up nostalgic memories of 18th century phantasmagoria shows. The viewer must become conscious of the illusion, which is aided by a peephole near the end of the show which allows the viewer a behind the scenes look at the “magic” that brings the scenes to life. This work is quintessentially postmodern, as “the cultural producer merely creates raw materials (fragments and elements), leaving it open to consumers to recombine those elements in any way they wish. The effect is to break (deconstruct) the power of the author to impose meanings or offer a continuous narrative” (Harvey, 51).

The viewer drifts in and out of disjointed narratives, in which nothing really happens; however the subtle loops make it as if the characters within the world are waiting for… something. The voyeuristic viewer is left in suspense, waiting for something terrible to happen. Hoffos’ scenes are always set at night, in solitary situations where “everything bad is merely imminent” (Enright, 24). The scenes are constructed with a sense of anxiety, as if the end of the world is just moments away. There is a sense of impending doom within all the works. In the piece Airstreams (2003), a woman residing in an airstream trailer parked in the woods nervously peers out her front door into the dark forest. What sounds like screams echo in the distance, yet the woman doesn’t see anything. She continues to step nervously in and out of her trailer as the sound as the video loops, yet she never finds the source of her unease. Hoffos has his roots in film, citing Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch as prime inspirations for the House Dream. The miniature sets draw similarities to films like Beetlejuice, Blue Velvet and The Shining, in which “innocence is thrown into a horrible world and there’s a feeling of trying to maintain that innocence when everything is trying to overwhelm and break it” (Enright, 27).

The viewer is compelled to create a narrative of their own, since Hoffos has made loose (if any) ties between characters and scenes. Hoffos himself has admitted that the narrative is not complete, he states “I’m keeping it pretty mysterious, even to myself. I don’t know the whole story. If I did, I don’t think I’d make the work. I’m telling this story to myself” (Hoffos, Tousley, 111) The work can be seen from a deconstructionist point of view, “recognizing that, the deconstructionist impulse is to look inside one text for another, dissolve one text into another, or build one text into another” (Harvey, 51). In this sense, the work mimics that of graphic novels with individual frames that connect to one another through a sequential ordering, in which the viewer relates one frame to the next through imagining the in-between.
In 65 Footers (2003), we peer onto a dock, in which a single boat bobs to and fro. On the dock, a woman paces back and forth, unaware of the menacing shadow fluttering deep within the murky moonlit water. Reminiscent of a horror film, the tension-riddled scene never reaches a conclusion; instead Hoffos utilizes subtle loops to make the scene feel as if it is everlasting. “The collapse of time horizons and the preoccupation with instantaneity have in part arisen through the contemporary emphasis in cultural production on events, spectacles, happenings, and media images” (Harvey, 59). We are forced to peer through a fixed perspective into a scene in which the characters are like actors waiting for their queue. We expect the characters to recognize our presence, and put on a show, however the characters are oblivious to our god-like presence, and merely exist. The work in this sense is postmodern, as it “swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and the chaotic currents of change as if that is all there is” (Harvey, 44). The ephemeral feel of the mundane situations these characters are placed in, “emphasizes the deep chaos of modern life and its intractability before rational thought” (Harvey, 44).

The characters are not only limited to their miniature existence, in three pieces women are projected life sized, strategically placed at various points in the gallery. Mary-Anne (2005) sits against a wall, her foot wagging as though she were waiting for a friend to meet her. In Absinthe Bar (2004), a woman sits at a table running her finger around the rim of her glass, as if she were stood up for a date. These ghost-like figures fool the eye upon first glance, for within the dark gallery space they look like real people. Furthermore, “the reduction of experience to ‘a series of pure and unrelated presents’ further implies that the ‘experience of the present becomes powerfully, overwhelmingly vivid and “material”: the world comes before the schizophrenic with heightened intensity, bearing the mysterious and oppressive charge of affect, glowing with hallucinatory energy” (qtd in Harvey, 54). These figures are “glowing,” both figuratively and literally.

Hoffos’ dream world is accessible, yet still awe-inspiring. Much like slipping into a deep sleep, Scenes from the House Dream invites you into a world of fleeting moments, interlaced with anxiety, despair and loneliness. As nightmarish as this may sound, the work captivates you. Exiting the exhibit is much like being abruptly awakened from a great dream; you wish you could close your eyes and drift back into it.



Bibliography

Enright, Robert. “Overwhelmer: the Art of David Hoffos.” Border Crossings 99. (2006): 22-37.

Harvey, David. “Postmodernism.” The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford [England]: Basil Blackwell 1990. 38-65.

Tousley, Nancy. “Crossovers: David Hoffos.” Border Crossings 91. (2004): 110-111.

Tousley, Nancy. “David Hoffos: What happens next?” Canadian Art 19.3 (2002): 56-57.

Tousley, Nancy. “Dream Scenes” Canadian Art 16.1 (2009): 72-80.




Peter Rahul is a third-year Drawing and Painting major at OCAD U

Shary Boyle: Flesh and Blood at the AGO

By Brooke Wayne
Instructor: Pete Smith

“Flesh and Blood” is the newest exhibition by Scarborough-born Shary Boyle, also curated and organized by Louise Dery and Galerie de I’UQUAM. This exhibition will be travelling across Canada over the next year. Additionally, Boyle is the recipient of the 2009 Gershon Iskowitz Prize at the AGO for her outstanding contribution to visual arts in Canada. As a result, most of her work on display is entirely new and created explicitly for the show.

As a multidisciplinary artist, Boyle works seamlessly between drawing, painting, sculpture, projection and installations. Her 28 works are dispersed across four large and brightly lit rooms (one being completely dark with blacklighting) in the AGO, four pieces of which are large-scale installations. Flesh and Blood immerses the viewer in Boyle’s dark vision of allegorical myths and childhood fairytales playing out a variety of disturbing emotions. In particular, Boyle fixates on contradictions; life and death, love and pain, vulnerability and loneliness.

A salient portion of her exhibition is comprised of sculptures that range in scale from as tiny as a child’s hand to larger than a basketball player. These works are made in a variety of mediums such as porcelain, enamel, polymer clay, gouache, ink and beads, combining both contemporary and traditional materials. One room displays eight of her sculptures in a circle with one in the middle, surrounded by Old Master paintings along with a few of her own oil paintings. Another room is enveloped in darkness with only spotlights illuminating her smaller sculptures, which stands across from a large one. The results are striking combined with the phosphorous and fluorescent glows from the blacklight. Boyle’s larger-than-life sculptural pieces convey a sense of verisimilitude at first glance, but upon closer inspection, reveal the intricate and painstaking work of the artist’s hand. One of her works, entitled, Virus (White Wedding), 2009, 153 x 153 x 153 cm, combines the use of sculpture, a data projector, acetate paper and ink to create a mesmerizing and whimsical effect that contradicts her dark themes.

Boyle’s selection of Old Master paintings in one of her rooms both oddly conflicts and compliments their symbolic imagery with her own created ones. Relating to both mythological and allegoric roots, Boyle’s use of porcelain, enamel, glaze and luster make the sculptural pieces shine under the wash lighting, emanating some sort of ethereal and universal aura. One in particular example is The Lute Player, 2010, 26 x 24 x 24 cm, which portrays a young woman playing her electric guitar plugged into an amp. What truly makes it unique from other ceramic pieces is the use of beading as the cord connecting the guitar to the amp. The beading is a surprise texture that, combined with the feeling of connectedness, juxtaposes with the nude woman to create a sense of seductive power. It seems as if Boyle is encouraging the audience to become the voyeur in this gaze.

In all of Boyle’s work, I find myself feeling torn between both fascination and utter discomfort with the childlike rendering and fragility of these porcelain sculptures. They depict dangerously dark themes of the human scope of mind, portraying nude bodies of children, men and women in vulnerable states. There is a sense of something slightly off-kilter in all of her works, as if these bodies are not quite as real as we perceive them to be.
Her exquisite detailing in these sculptures play up to her technical and versatile material strengths. She is unafraid to push beyond the mold of traditional sculpture, incorporating beading and contemporary iconography into her works. However, some of her oil paintings on panel do not hold the same sense of curiosity and wonder that her ceramic pieces convey. At worst, they feel unfinished, craving for more of Boyle’s laborious detail.

Retrospectively, Flesh and Blood is not for the weak-hearted, nor for the weak-minded; it is an exhibition that feeds your mind and encourages it to cultivate, link and explore some kind of contrast in play. It is not simply about the flesh and blood of human bodies or the fragility of them; it is about the way these bodies carry themselves. It is how these bodies interact that echoes our deep unconscious desires and inner turmoil. As Boyle puts it succinctly, it is “the ache of our bodies, sweet or painful” and this is essentially the first and last impression Boyle leaves us with. There is no greater and twisted pleasure than experiencing such extreme polarities simultaneously and Shary Boyle’s “Flesh and Blood” is one of them.

Brooke Wayne is a second year drawing and painting major at OCADU.

Evan Lee: Forest Fire Series

By Vivian Peachey
Instructor: Pete Smith

Evan Lee is part of a group show - In Dialogue with Carr at the Vancouver Art Gallery that runs until January 3, 2011. Along with contemporary artists Douglas Coupland, Liz Magor, and Marianne Nicolson, the artists were ‘to draw out a dialogue between Carr’s legacy and the myriad ways in which artists respond to it”.

Of the many themes broached by the artists, and in dialogue with the work of Carr, the making of a national visual identity and new ways of experiencing our vast and wild Canadian landscape factor significantly in all of the artists work. Acting as a backdrop and featured throughout the show are Carr’s paintings of British Columbia’s energized landscapes featuring Carr’s iconic forests and First Nations totem poles.

Vancouver artist Evan Lee’s offering, are a series of manipulated photograph-paintings described as post-photography. Taking images from the British Columbia Forest Service, Lee prints the photographs onto the wrong side of photographic paper. As such, the pre-determined pigment sits on the surface of the paper and is pushed around with brushes, thus creating a painting.

What results is a third-person interpretation of the fires. The first-person was the person experiencing the expanse and heat of the fire, photographing the image while zipping in and out of the smoke while in their helicopter. The second person would have made decisions on the composition and cropping of the photograph in their darkroom. Lee, third in line, was however safe from the heat, chaos and fear, re-envisioning the fire in his home studio. And in using this technique he has been highly successful. While staying true to the colours of the photograph Lee infuses an impressionistic overlay through his painterly brushwork. His paintings appear as an artist’s sketch, fresh and spontaneous and this is absolutely appropriate given that the subject matter would require agile artistic speed should one try to paint an inferno from life. And this is where it becomes confusing, even a deception. The paintings read as authentic, a pochade, but of course we know this is charade. What becomes apparent as we learn more about the artistic process is that the rapidly executed painting with their elegant brushwork is in fact several layers removed from the heat and smoke.

Through this technique, the process details are lost and an abstracted image emerges over residual marks of edges and form. The images are aesthetically beautiful and atmospheric with their semi monochromatic palette of oranges, black and grey, a lapse in time to Whistler’s mega-landscape paintings. Their relatively small size is the one glaring critique of Lee’s paintings as the subject matter is grandiose and mythic and deserves to be monumental. As Lee writes “scale should be dictated by the subject [and w]ith landscape of course, it is impossible to replicate anything 1:1. I did try other sizes and it came down to how comfortably I could handle the brushwork and how it appears”.

Lee revisits the notion of the Canadian wilderness and the imagery that is created feels timeless, as representative and relevant now as it would have been a century or even ten centuries ago. The new ghostly images are a reminder of an event and through their remaking assume a more authentic reality in portraying that moment. They transcend the photographic record of an event and become even more real than the original. In Evan Lee’s paintings, you can feel the smoke stinging your eyes, feel the radiating heat and hear the forest imploding through its combustion.

Lee’s Forest Fire series are laden with complex messaging - poignant imagery symbolizing our world in chaos. His paintings point the accusatory finger straight back at the viewer. As a viewer you just need to link one causal effect back to the other and the truth lands squarely onto the collective we. We are in part responsible for BC burning, for Australia burning and for all other places where heat and energy are rampaging the earth.

And the connections of course are that winters aren’t cold enough to kill the bark beetle that in turn reek havoc in conifer stands, which then jump a mountain or two spreading eastward causing more chaos. When fire does strike, the quantity of fibre from the dead and dying trees create a deep burn that spreads widely, instead of giving a nutrient releasing superficial burn that would otherwise rejuvenate forests. All this is coupled with reduced cyclical rainfall and a historic policy of fire suppression. We have created a tinderbox. And looping back to the first causal effect - warmer and drier winters, we do not have to go far to answer why this is occurring.

Lee’s emblematic forest fire series are a re-envisioning and reconstruction of BC’s forests and they cleverly replicate the complex synchronic side step that is playing out on a national and global level by individuals and politicians. Lee’s paintings symbolize our new reality where collectively we are wiping out the complexities and re-articulating our path forward. Through pairing contradictory realities – destruction vs. beauty; authenticity vs. reality; original vs. borrowed; analog vs. digital; handmade vs. mechanically reproduced; and singularity vs. multiplicity, Lee has provided a space for us to engage in an honest discussion.

Vivian Peachey has worked in the field of forest certification for the past 13 years and is a part-time drawing and painting major in her second year at OCADU.

Kim Adams: New Old Works at Diaz Contemporary

By Sarah Bonell
Instructor: Pete Smith

Walking up to Diaz Contemporary, it was quite a surprise to find a familiar piece from this year’s Nuit Blanche parked right outside of the gallery. Kim Adams’s Auto Lamp was displayed on a spinning platform from sunset October 2 to sunrise October 3 at the corner of Queen Street and Yonge Street steps away from the Eaton Centre. The 1996 Dodge Ram van had thousands of punctured holes in a whirling abstract pattern. A powerful light was placed inside the van to illuminate the intricate design and to create elaborate dancing shadows on the surrounding buildings.

The works inside the building were of a similar nature. After walking into the gallery, the viewer is met by two large abstract sculptures comprised of deconstructed car parts taken from a couple Ford Ecoline vans. The wheeled sculpture on the left is mostly built from colourful hoods, doors and windshields with side-view and rear-view mirrors decoratively perched on top. Cocooned in the middle of the sculpture at eye level, visible through the glass are numerous multi-coloured light bulbs. Also on wheels, the sculpture on the right is built from silver parts to form a tall cylinder. The metal tube is perforated similar to the Dodge Ram van and the structure is topped with a peaked metal cap. Love Birds implies a heterosexual couple, compelling the viewer to apply gender to these abstracted, mechanical forms. The left sculpture is portrayed as “female”, which then leads to the question: is she pregnant? Are the colourful lights representative of a new baby safely protected by the strong material surrounding it? This piece is playful and like all of Adams’ works on display here, quite a bit of fun.

Adams is often referred to as a kit-basher – he buys kits to build himself. Clearly he doesn’t read the instructions. Both Love Birds and Auto Lamp are examples of this process replicated with life-size automobiles. Adams has been working with life-size cars for about a decade and has been working with miniature cars for over two decades.

Across the room from the two sculptures are numerous toy cars perforated in a similar style to Auto Lamp. The multi-coloured toy cars are displayed on simple, individual white shelves against a white wall, which really help them stand out. They are all pierced with complex swirling designs. The cars are diverse in their makes: trucks, cars, vans. Although the miniature cars do not have the same initial impact as the life-size car, they are impressive nonetheless. The level of detail put into these small objects is very impressive. All these works are fascinating variations on everyday things, forcing the viewer to reconsider their relationship to these objects. The perforated cars have an interesting sense of fragility about them which seems in conflict with the nature of the car. A car is supposed to be strong and protective, whereas these artworks look more like lace than armour. The life-size perforated cars appear to still be driveable, but they have lost the sense of security automobiles generally have. The reconstructed cars go one step further to alter them so far as to make them unusable. The cars thus become objects purely of aesthetic value and loose all practicality.

Adams’ work causes us to reflect upon our society’s values. When purchasing a car, the buyer does not only think of its use value (getting them from point A to point B), but also its aesthetic and cultural value. Cars are not merely a convenient mode of transportation, but a reflection of the buyer’s wealth and status. Owning a car, as compared to taking public transit, brings some social status, but owning the right car results in a further elevated prestige. Kim Adams’s work pushes these ideas of beauty over practicality further than they occur in life, but remains rooted in a sort of social truth. He has managed to create a beautiful body of work that playfully comments on mass consumerism in our society.

Sarah Bonell is a second year drawing and painting major at the OCAD University.