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