Mother and Child Reunion: Dactylografies

  

     2019-08-08 Dactylografies (Timber Village Museum, Blind River. Until September 3, 2019) Jonathan Brodbeck saw his mother Isabelle Michaud using her typewriter (she likes the tactility of the machine). He decided he wanted to use it too, and began writing notes about his daily life. He’s on the Asperger’s spectrum, and expressing himself was highly unusual. Isabelle, with his permission, began making abstract paintings incorporating his typewritten notes.
     She uses acrylics on 2ftx4ft mahogany plywood intended as floor underlay. She likes the texture created by the interaction between brush, wash, paint, and wood. So do I. Some of her paintings include organic forms based on the typewriter: beasties with scrawny necks and round, blank heads, like typewriter keys transformed and given life. Most of the paintings use colour fields, some randomly shaped, some rectangular, some indefinite, made with wash or paint. The colours somehow relate to Jonathan’s words, an effect I can’t account for.
     I liked the show. We met Jonathan and Isabelle there. They are interesting people. Recommended ****

Mystic Landscapes

[At the Art Gallery of Ontario, extended to February 12 2017]
     An educational show, arranged to lead the viewer through a contemplation of how landscape and landscape painting may satisfy spiritual longings. As such, it works, but I was far more interested in the pictures themselves than in the curator’s notions of mysticism and spirituality. So I did not listen to the audio guide (free), and avoided reading the introductory comments in each room.
     So then, as a collection landscape pictures, how well does it work? Variable. You will see Canadian and other impressionists, Harris of course,  some modern emulators of medieval and renaissance painting, abstract and realistic pictures, expressionists, in short a pretty good survey of styles. I was especially impressed by the large paintings of Eugène Jansson (here’s one), and a dark landscape by Schiele, which was not easy to read, but had a powerful effect on me. The disfigured landscapes painted by war artists also moved me. There were two Monet haystacks, they look like cupcakes.
      Besides Jansson, a number of other painters were new to me. The last room, about “cosmic forces” or something like that, showed brightly lit pictures mounted on dark walls. It felt gimmicky to me, but two small Georgia O’Keeffes and a couple by Arthur Dove (new to me also) were satisfying.
      The show is worth seeing. The thesis of the show is a good excuse to bring together a wide range of styles. The opportunity to see artists that most of us would otherwise ignore, tyrannised as we are by the concept of importance, is a bonus. Some pictures ****, most ** or ***, the show as a whole ***½

Picturing the Americas. At the AGO to September 20th, 2015.

     The AGO co-operated with the Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo and the Terra Foundation for American Art to present a survey of how Europeans saw the Americas. It’s obvious that from the beginning America was seen as an empty wilderness with a handful of salvages (forest dwellers) hunting and foraging, oblivious to the potential wealth of this untouched continent. Most of the early canvases show a vast wilderness, painted in the sublime style fostered by Romanticism, of varying skill and aesthetic appeal. Most of include a group of small figures to make the scale plausible. I noticed a number of them showed the European in the group waving his hand or pointing at whatever had caught his attention. It seemed the European was the guide and explicator of the landscape, not the native who showed him the trails through the bush.
     These paintings foster the myth that justified the European conquest. That there was a full range of cultures, with the majority of Americans living as farmers and townspeople has been more or less forgotten. There were several empires, and a number of federations built around trade and common cultural themes. Most Americans were killed by the diseases that the invaders brought to them. It wasn’t European weapons that defeated the Americans, it was European microbes. The Pilgrims of North America moved onto ready-made farms, left behind by the people who died of smallpox. That’s why American now means a citizen of the USA.
     Once the Europeans had established themselves, their art became a celebration of the new culture, which has adopted and adapted native motifs and stories. The exhibition ends with early to mid-20th century paintings, in which Canadians, Americans, Brazilians, and so on paint the visions of the land as it is, including railways and cities. But images of the wilderness still dominate. Even paintings of farming in the Mid-west emphasise the otherness of the landscape. Although created by humans, the vast fields seem more alien than the sublime wilderness painted a century earlier.
     Two texts that should be read in conjunction with this show: The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King, and What is America by Ronald Wright. Both retell the history of the Americas as one of the destruction of thriving local peoples and nations by the commercial and imperial ambitions of the European powers. Knowing that history, I saw most of the art as misrepresentations. It shows us how Europeans saw their new world. The native version became the stuff of archeology, a pre-historical narrative. Now that Native artists have begun to reclaim their history we see that early picturings of the Americas were an exercise in amnesia.
     A show worth seeing. As art **½ , as cultural commentary ****.

From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia

From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia (Art Gallery of Ontario, to 15 August 2015)
     We’ve always liked Emily Carr’s pictures, but we’ve seen very few of them. So it was a treat to see so many of her paintings and drawings in one place. We went through the show once, then had lunch with Sowtons, then went through the show a second time. That hour or so of percolation through the subconscious helped: I was more sure of what I liked and why.

    Like many artists, Carr was always trying to define her vision, to find ways of expressing and sharing her experience. Every one of her rare meetings with other artists in Canada and Europe prompted her to experiment with composition, brushwork, and colour. She saw movement or life everywhere. It’s hard to realise that the totems and houses that she painted in her early years were in fact derelict and rotting away. In her last paintings she overlays the nearly abstract arrangements of sky, earth, sea, and trees with swirling strokes that express her sense of movement, of intense interaction between these elements. The most effective paintings show trees and earth rising into a blazing whirlpool of light. Lawren Harris gave her the confidence to move towards abstraction. She knew her energetic brushwork looked like van Gogh’s; her comment that van Gogh was crazy but knew about “go” or life shows I think that she was proud of the implied compliment, but characteristically played it down.
     The show also includes drawings and sketchbooks. Carr was trained in water colours, like many young women of her class and time. She clearly had superior talent; her watercolours of totem poles and villages show great technical skill and are more than mere documentation. She made up a lovely little book narrating a tour to Alaska that she took with her sister. Her later sketchbooks show that she tested her visual ideas obsessively, returning again and again to trees, sketching them as flowing forms that become gestures as much as pictures.
     The show included vitrines displaying artworks, masks, and other objects made by West Coat First Nations. These give us a context for Carr’s fascination with First Nations art, but also remind us that for many Europeans their beauty must have been an uncomfortable revelation.
     A good show. Go see it. ****

From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia

     From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia (Art Gallery of Ontario, to 15 August 2015)
We’ve always liked Emily Carr’s pictures, but we’ve seen very few of them. So it was a treat to see so many of her paintings and drawings in one place. We went through the show once, then had lunch with Sowtons, then went through the show a second time. That hour or so of percolation through the subconscious helped: I was more sure of what I liked and why.
     Like many artists, Carr was always trying to define her vision, to find ways of expressing and sharing her experience. Every one of her rare meetings with other artists in Canada and Europe prompted her to experiment with composition, brushwork, and colour. She saw movement or life everywhere. It’s hard to realise that the totems and houses that she painted in her early years were in fact derelict and rotting away. In her last paintings she overlays the nearly abstract arrangements of sky, earth, sea, and trees with swirling strokes that express her sense of movement, of intense interaction between these elements. The most effective paintings show trees and earth rising into a blazing whirlpool of light. Lawren Harris gave her the confidence to move towards abstraction. She knew her energetic brushwork looked like van Gogh’s; her comment that van Gogh was crazy but knew about “go” or life shows I think that she was proud of the implied compliment, but characteristically played it down.
     The show also includes drawings and sketchbooks. Carr was trained in water colours, like many young women of her class and time. She clearly had superior talent; her watercolours of totem poles and villages show great technical skill and are more than mere documentation. She made up a lovely little book narrating a tour to Alaska that she took with her sister. Her later sketchbooks show that she tested her visual ideas obsessively, returning again and again to trees, sketching them as flowing forms that become gestures as much as pictures.
     The show included vitrines displaying artworks, masks, and other objects made by West Coat First Nations. These give us a context for Carr’s fascination with First Nations art, but also remind us that for many Europeans their beauty must have been an uncomfortable revelation.
     A good show. Go see it. ****

Dreams and Realities

      Dreams and Realities (Art Gallery of Algoma. Photos by Roberta Bondar and textile pieces by Carole Sabiston. To May 24th, 2015)
     The curator’s ambition was to help us see the connection between place and self, an odd ambition considering that not a single human figure appears in any of the works. But of course there is a human present, the one who looked through the viewfinder, pored over the images, and selected the ones to print. And the one who layered textiles, their shapes and colours and textures, until what she looked at echoed what she saw and expressed what she felt. We take their places, and with luck and empathy, we will engage with the places as they did.
     This engagement is thoroughly Canadian: an awareness, always present, sometimes in the foreground of our selves, sometimes in the background. It’s the knowledge that we are interlopers, that our huddling cities will not protect us, that the land was here before us and will be here after us.
     Colours are lush and subtle, textures are bold and  and faint, composition is clear and intricate. I found every image and textile piece at least interesting. The photo of sheep on a rock face, and the round construction of landscape, sky and clouds were among my favourites. ***

Route 17

      Route 17 (Timber Village Museum, Blind River, Ontario. To June 18th, 2015)
     Dani Lynn  Redgrift is a very good technician. All her images are well composed, her close-ups with a nice contrast between sharply focussed foreground and out-of-focus colour-field background, her wide angle shots ordering the busy detail in carefully arranged blocks of colour and texture. She uses Photoshop mostly to do what in the days of film any printer would do in the darkroom, to dodge and burn in, to control contrast and gamma. She likes to use HDR (high dynamic range) to dramatise skies and water, or to shift reality towards the surreal. She chooses to exhibit images that she knows will appeal to her audience. The result is that I don’t get much of a sense of her vision, of how she sees the world around her.
     With one exception: landscape and waterscape. She sees the wildness, the dark side, the glimpses of inhuman forces at work. Her pictures of forests, sky, and water remind us that no matter how familiar the bush may seem, it’s another reality, one that doesn’t notice us, in which we are merely guests. She uses HDR both to emphasise the inhumanness and to distance us from it, so that we can contemplate it with something close to equanimity.
     Worth a careful look. Matted prints available. **½

Another show at the Algoma Art Gallery

     Cheryl L’Hirondelle’s Why the Caged Bird Sings (to April 26th, 2014) is one of those shows whose significance and import the artist thinks has to be explained. I don’t like that; I think the artist should trust the viewer to make sense of what’s presented. L’Hirondelle is song-writer, which may account for her reliance on words. There’s a large poster with lots of words at the beginning of the installation.  I wish I hadn’t read them. If you intend to visit this show, don’t read the rest of this review.
     A number of iPads connected to telephone handsets are mounted around the room. You listen to people videoed listening to First Nations music  on a public payphone. Apparently, the intention is to help us empathise with people in prison, who communicate with their loved ones mostly by phone. In this limited sense, the works are successful, but the whole thing feels more like an “educational experience” than a work of art. It’s not that art doesn’t educate, but it does so by surprising us with new emotions, and insights. It teaches us to experience our world in ways we never imagined. This installation attempts to do that, but the maker focussed too much on the message and too little on the medium. If the explanation of the work’s intention had been withheld, I think working one’s way from one iPad to the next would have been far more involving. Our experience would have been driven by a mystery which we would have had to solve on our own. As it is, the explanation raises expectations that aren’t met, which is a too common effect of talking too much about one’s intentions. An interesting and thought-provoking show, but not engaging.
       L'Hirondelle's website here. She's made a lot of art and music. *½

Two shows at the Algoma Art Gallery

     1. Tom Benner is a graduate of Beal Tech in London Ontario, and it shows. There are strong hints of the London School, both in the materials and the contents of his art works, and in the blandly surrealistic contrasts of its subject matter. He likes assemblages of graphics and sculpture using a variety of materials. This show is labelled Call of the Wild (to May 31st, 2014). I especially liked his group of fibreglass African Asses, and his group of a large copper moon (about 8ft in diameter), a copper pine tree (about 8ft tall), and a small wolf. But every work is at least interesting.
     The overall effect is the artist’s obsessiveness on the one hand, and a paradoxical calm and quiet on the other. I mean, imagine building a copper sphere 8ft in diameter, or casting and painting 16 fibreglass beavers. Even apparently more conventional works contain evidence of Benner’s obsession with getting it right: there are three prints of pine trees accompanying the copper canoe, each print has a dozen or so small flying crows cut from black paper glued to them. I liked Benner’s work; it’s public art, in the sense that it would look best in large spaces such as high-rise building lobbies or atria, or even food courts in malls. Tom has a website. ***

     2. Gabriela Benitez (to May 25th 2014) likes to paint in the outdoors, not because she wants to make pictures of trees and rocks and water, but because she feels freer to lay down the paint in grand and eloquent gestures. The results are mixed. Most of the pieces on show here clearly have significance for the artist, but not necessarily for the viewer. She has a good colour sense. I liked a couple of canvases on which Benitez has layered paint and cloth and other materials in a palette of off whites, greys, and blues, with a glaze that adds shine and glitter, making vaguely figurative images. The others were interesting, but did not move me. Her website is here. **½

Linda Finn. War Letters Project

     Linda Finn. War Letters Project (At the Timber Village Museum, Blind River, 2 November 2013 to 20 January 2014.)
     Linda Finn’s grandmother Essie Sann wrote letters to soldiers during World War One, and again during World War Two. She saved many of the letters written back to her. Linda Finn has created a number of pieces using scans of some of these letters along with found objects, parts of uniforms, scans of photographs, and abstract and realistic images. These items are layered onto painted or monoprinted backgrounds, some have translucent layers of paint added, and Finn incorporates one of her favourite media, hand-cast paper layers or pieces into several of the pieces. Finn is nothing if not inventive in her use and melding of media.
     She also has a gift for design, and knows how to use limited palettes. Visually, all these pieces are interesting, most are engaging, and a few are stunning. I especially liked Requiem and When Words Are Not Enough. Requiem shows the life-size outline of a dead soldier over blotches of red, ochre, and mud, with the pieces of a uniform glued onto the base of raw canvas. I don’t know why this picture is so powerful, perhaps it’s the dead soldier, whose image hovers at the edge of visual awareness while we focus on the details of the background and overlays. Words consists of digital images of dozens of letters glued onto the canvas, with a life-size soldier overlaid on it. The letters are almost all legible, here and there the smudge of the soldier’s figure hides the words like a scorch mark.
      Also impressive is War Marked the Landscape Like Language, in which Finn has placed twigs painted black onto small wooden plaques arranged on short ledges. Anyone who has seen images of the World War battlefields will recognise the allusions. Seeing so many miniature trees shattered by shellfire lined up in rows and columns emphasises their calligraphic qualities. The title is apt; the language of war is destruction and death.
     A very moving exhibit is a suitcase containing stories and reminiscences told by the relatives of the dead, along with some photos and drawings, which the viewer is invited to pick up and read. I had time to read only one, a daughter’s account of how she yearned to have known her father, who died when she was three, and who knew her only as a two month-old baby. She keeps his portrait on her bedside table still.
     These are art works with intended meanings and significance. The fashion for many decades has been for supposedly pure art, which at most expressed the maker’s individual responses to the world, or recorded the artist’s exploration of his or her visual dialect. But even these meanings were politely ignored: what was supposed to matter was the design, the palette, the dialogue with similar and contrary styles, the demonstration of how the new visual dialect could be used.
     But the making of artworks that made a public statement never went away. In the second half of the 20th century, the comment was as often as not satirical, ironic, or self-deprecating; or too solemnly serious to be taken seriously. The work of people like General Idea almost apologises for having ideas, and ideas about politics and culture at that. Their in-your-face commentary made them seem somewhat indecent.
     The kind of comment Finn offers, straightforward invitations to think and feel about what it means to know about and be linked with people in the viewer’s personal and collective past, that was largely left to the makers of greeting-card verse and calendar art. Linda Finn shows us that questions raised by memory are serious, not only for the viewer’s sense of his or her own past, but also for our collective understanding of our shared history. Memories are too important for sentimentality. Her work is about war, and the sacrifices that we offer to the god of war; but it is not a glorification of war. In this, it is a welcome counter to the current jingoism. Highly recommended. ****
     Disclosure: we own one of the works in this series, it is part of this exhibition.
Read the report in Standard, or go to the Museum's Facebook page.

A Book of Courtly Cats (1986)

A Gentleman A Book of Courtly Cats (1986) Excerpts from Shakespeare’s plays and poems paired with portraits of cats in the style of Elizabethan miniatures. Not a book so much as an extended greeting card. I think Mum gave this to Marie. It’s a charming object. I recognised most of the quotations; the one I liked best is:
       If I could write the beauty of your eyes
      And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
      The age to come would say, ‘This poet lies;
      Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.’
      So should my papers, yellow’d with their age,
      Be scorn’d, like old men of less truth than tongue.
     And your true rights be term’d a poet’s rage
     And stretched metre of an antique song.
However, I don’t know which sonnet it’s from, so I shall have to read them all over again. Unrated (not a book). But lovely to look at and read. (2002)

Nouvelle Vague (Art Review)

Nouvelle Vague: The New French Domestic Landscape (Art Review) At the Harbourfront Centre, September 29-December 23 2012. Admission free. A collection of furniture from France, where it appears that a generation of new designers has accomplished the kind of critical mass that leads to radical innovation. The pieces are elegant, beautifully crafted or manufactured, and certainly display new thinking and imagining. But, as always, my first question about useful objects no matter how beautiful, is, Do they work? The answer here is, some do, and some don’t.
     Item: a group of what appear to be intended as low chunky stools would I think be unstable, as the lower third forms a cone.
     Item: a couple of billowy, vaguely cloud-like organic shapes of Tyvek over a wire frame mounted on short legs, lit from within, would work well in a large room with minimal furniture. They are lovely, and shed sufficient light to live by.
     Item: a small desk whose legs at one end extend above the writing surface, with a horizontal lamp mounted at the top. This would work very well even in a small apartment. The matching chair uses the same materials and engineering. Unassuming in style, the ensemble would look good anywhere. About the only thing missing is a shallow drawer in which to store a few writing materials. And stamps. The desk begs to be used for written correspondence.
     Item: a coffee table that looks like a melding of two stools of different heights. My first reaction was, Neat idea for a plant stand. I didn’t know it was a coffee table until I read the show brochure.
     Item: a resin chair with cutouts in the back making it look like a skull. Cute idea. Would I buy one? No.
     In general, most of the lamps were successful, the other pieces not so much. I’m sure we’ll see many of the concepts adapted to more functional forms. Overall, worth seeing. **-½

The Clock by Chris Marclay (Review)

     Chris Marclay The Clock (2010). At the Power Plant, Toronto, until November 25, 2012. Free admission in celebration of the Power Plant's 25th year.

      Marclay spliced together thousands of movie clips, timing them to create a 24-hour movie showing clocks synchronised to running time. You start watching it at 3:15pm, that's the time you'll see on wall clocks, wristwatches, spoken, etc. Clearly the result of obsessive persistence, but worth no more than an hour of one's time, if that. [Update 2012-10-08: Marclay hired a slew of researchers to view and scavenge the movie clips. One is a Paul Smith from Toronto (Canadian Art, Fall 2012, p.192). So a good deal of the credit for the grunge work of making this movie goes to other people.]

      The Power Plant's blurb says that the work ”ruptur[es] any sense of narrative sequence”. Nonsense. As far back as I can remember, movies have used multiple narrative sequences, switching from one to another, most often to create suspense. Will the hero arrive in time to save the heroine as water rises inexorably towards drowning depth? Of course he will. More complex movies show us multiple stories unfolding at the same time, converging, intersecting, diverging again. We are so used to reading movies this way that we automatically read Marclay's movie this way, too. Well, I do. How about you?

     The fact is that narrative sequence is built into our brains; we can't avoid it. So this movie also creates narrative sequences. Marclay can't prevent this effect. In fact his method encourages it, because he has to use clips that themselves are parts of narrative sequences, simply to provide us with the images of clock faces showing us the current time frame. The stories are incomplete, is all, because Marclay wants us to note times, not plots. But time and plot are inextricably linked. Cause and effect may be an illusion, so the philosophers and quantum physicists tell us, but we can't avoid creating the illusion when we watch multiple series of movie clips.

      I don't know what Marclay wanted this work to demonstrate or show. It's a concept work, one presumably designed to present a thesis of some sort. The artist statements I've read in the past usually endeavour to assert that the work will disrupt our normal ways of seeing the world around us. Trouble is, most such attempts have failed: artists are no better than the rest of us in framing a disruptive thesis. In my experience, it takes a heap of scholarship and a weird imagination to see new patterns in the data. There aren't many people who have both a deep knowledge of some aspect of the world and the ability to change their points of view.

      Trouble is, the medium Marclay chose doesn't disrupt our normal way of decoding a movie: it emphasises it. That's probably why I was bored very quickly. I was able to maintain some interest in the clips themselves, playing a game of recognising movies, actors, and genres. As you might expect, action movies predominate.

      Marclay has an impressive c.v. He has been nothing if not busy. Despite the plethora of exhibitions, shows, and prizes won, this is the first time I've heard of him or seen his work. There are just too many artists out there, I guess. And I stopped following artistic fashion a long time ago. Is this show worth seeing? At the price, yes. It's interesting. It may engage you beyond mere interest. It did not do so for me. *

Van Gogh Up Close (Art Review)

Van Gogh Up Close (National Art Gallery, 30th August 2012)
     The show did not live up to its hype, but what show ever does? It depicts Van Gogh's time in France, when he was working towards his final artistic vision. Seeing early, mid and (too few) late pieces from this time was interesting in an art-historical way, but few of the pictures moved me. Most of them looked like what they were: experiments. Van Gogh was a very self-conscious artist, who spent his life trying to find out where he wanted to go and how to get there. It took him a long time to develop his visual language. Oddly enough (or maybe not), the earlier paintings I liked were the ones that reminded me of Klimt (eg Trees and Undergrowth 1887) and Monet (eg Undergrowth 1887, Rain 1889). These were all landscapes, most showed forests. The intermediate ones, in which he mostly experimented with Japanese composition and close-up subjects, showed that he was moving towards the astonishing last paintings in composition and content, but he was still trying to minimise the brushwork. A couple of the later paintings, in which he laid on the paint thick and largely unmixed, were worth a second or third look (eg Wheatfield behind St Paul Hospital 1889). The ones I wanted to see, all from his last few months of life, were not available.
     Most pictures looked faded and wan. Reproductions on postcards and posters are generally brighter and more intense. Perhaps a combination of new paint technology and cheap paint (Van Gogh often couldn’t afford the expensive ones) is the cause. It’s known for sure that some of his sunflower paintings turned brown because of a chemical reaction in the white paint that he’d added to the yellow. Or more likely I’ve come to expect originals to be even more brilliant than reproductions. Whatever, I was disappointed in the look of the show. The room of Japanese woodcuts, shown to illuminate Van Gogh’s composition experiments, was a delight. Looking at them, it occurred to me how much these pictures, with their unusual points of view, contrasts between foreground detail and mid- and background subjects, stylised drawing and colouring, resemble comic book art.
   Rating for the show: **½
   Updated 2012-08-06