Anita Boyd, Jane Michiel, Haren Vakil at Gage Gallery

William Perehudoff and Dorothy Knowles at Winchester Galleries

The Poetics of Photomontage at Slide Room Gallery

James Lindsay - Lance Austin Olsen at Deluge Contemporary Art

James Lindsay

I reviewed a show of James Lindsay and Lance Olsen at Deluge Contemporary Art
in 2016 and managed to upset a few people by mentioning death. There was more than
a whiff of big D in that show to my mind but talking about it was seen for some
reason as negative. In an age when skulls are everywhere, as tattoos, T-shirts,bumper
stickers etc. and we seem to live with constant reminders of the end of times, it's
surprising that it would cause such alarm. Monty Python even made jokes about it.

But we must remind positive and this is Victoria where we need to read gently which
makes art reviewing especially difficult. It's ok for Jonathan Jones in London and
Jerry Saltz in New York to say pretty much whatever comes into their mindsbut 77
years old unpaid provincial dilettantes like myself must choose our words carefully.
You are on safe ground with comments like "Great Show", "Strong work", and "Great use
of colour". But beyond that it's a minefield some thoughts are best kept to ourselves.

Sorry about that. My mind wanders. Fortunately Lindsay and Olsen have done it again
with separate shows at Deluge Contemporary Art so I get a chance to redeem myself.
This time the overall feeling is upbeat without any overt hints of mortality. 'The state
of things (in two parts)" is billed as continuation and evolution of the previous
pairing, 'hide in plain sight' but the shows may just as well be a testament of the
rejuvenating power of art.

Apart for both being UK transplants in their later years with strong personalities
Lindsay and Olsen don't seem to have a lot in common. Perhaps there are faint echoes
of per-conceptualist British art schools in their respective styles but time and distance
have made them difficult to discern.

Lindsay presents a suite of 19 new paintings that "document our contentment with the
unpalatable parts per million in our nature". This paintings are a harmonious fusion of
abstraction and landscape suggesting any conflict between nature and intellect may have
been at least partially resolved. His environmental concerns are obvious and the
paintings clearly represent the increasingly critical relationship between humanity and
the planet we live on. Mountains and forests struggle with the pipelines and oil spills
but the paintings themselves are bright, lively and colourful as if the artist has
succeeded in finding some hope in the precarious state of things.

Olsen's work comes across at first sight as pure abstraction. There are no obvious
figurative reference points, viewers are free to provide their own, and almost seems to
defy any kind of analysis of definition. But, just my opinion of course, there is no escaping
the language of expressionism. It's the compulsion with which Olsen works that tells the
story. The paintings he has chosen to show are mostly monochromatic but highly
emotive and loaded with a finely balanced tension. His output is enormous and what
may seem repetitive is actually in constant state of flux. Each painting is a mark of
passage. The paintings and prints are complemented by "Plato's cave" a sound work
composed of guitar, fields recordings, stones and assorted objects scored from dry-point
plates.

Certainly is continuation here but to what extend has the work evolved ? When in doubt
ask the artist.

James Lindsay: "It all evolved over the last 18 months. Oil spills and pipelines have been
much on my mind.I guess you could say it started with a small leak and spread outwards".

Lance Olsen: "Evolution ? How the **** would I know? I just keep working.There's so
much work to do. I had to sort through 500 paintings to pick out 12. It's always evolving".

We live in interesting times. Missiles are flying over Syria and World War 3 can start at
any minute.Ordinary folk have not a lot of say in the matter. Will Lindsay's warnings
go unheeded or will Kinder Morgan get their new pipeline?
Olsen distrusts words and reduces them to sound and symbols. A lot of physical and mental
energy has gone into these shows."Lindsay and Olsen are both at an age that death is no
longer an abstraction" (their words) and they both agree that careerism is an anathema
to life. Neither artist shows any sign of slowing down however and it will be interesting
to see where they go from here.

Philip Willey

The State of Things (in two parts)
Deluge Contemporary Art
March 17 to May 5, 2018

Lance Olsen

Leah McInnis at Xchanges Gallery and Studios

“The Frog in the Desert at Twilight”
Leah McInnis 

 An exhibition of visual art that considers the multifarious potentials of being slippery in the magical year of 2018

Exhibition runs through Sunday, April 22nd, 2018

Sat. and Sun. only  12 to 4 pm 

Regan Rasmussen at arc.hive Artist Run Centre

Marjorie Allen at Errant ArtSpace

Abstract Artist Marjorie Allen showcases work from her series:
Apollo and Dionysus
April 6th to 15th 2018. 
Curated by Bill Porteous.

Yvonne Owens reviews the Spring 2018 Graduates of the Victoria College of Art

   

Real Tears exhibition reviewed by John Luna

Christine D’Onofrio: “Real Tears” at Deluge Contemporary, curated by Wil Aballe

Real Tears (2018), the work that lends its title to the exhibition, consists of three stands (like music stands), each featuring a hologram projection of the image of a different crumpled tissue. Are the surfaces of the holograms themselves stained with weeping, or is that sheen just fingerprints left by touchy-feely viewers at the opening? I read that they represent tears shed by three living generations of women in the artist’s family, although this story, in tandem with the formality of the stands, could also be taken for pataphysical persona-apocrypha. The aura of subjectivity in the work’s titling-as-testimony is implicit rather than explicit, a history gesturally sketched by proxied proof. The sense is of the subjects’ being worried, pulled, plucked and balled, simultaneously present-tense and remote in rainbow air-quotes, their definition elusive in the translucent capture of the medium’s elision.

On the facing wall of the gallery are two iterations of Unfinished Jokes (Feminist, 2012/2017 & Male, 2017), in the form of openers without punchlines, printed on posters arranged in stacks, recalling the ‘endless supply’ prints of Félix González-Torres. The stack on the left reads, “A feminist, a lesbian, and a nun walk into a bar”, while the one on the right asks the question, “What did one male artist say to the other male artist?” That the jokes are posed sans answers (the reverse sides are blank), adds tart gravitas to their endless-ness. This comes to mean more as I move to consider the adjacent piece, a shelf on which sits Feminist Joke Book (Lightbulb) (2011) its accordion-fold-format presenting most all of the answers one might ever expect to encounter to the question, “How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?”

The dialogic provocation inherent in the structure of these kinds of classic, ‘question-(repetition)-reply-reaction’ jokes has been explored before, by for instance, Richard Prince’s recycling of Borscht-belt groaners on the surfaces of expansive canvasses. Prince’s work is characteristically passive aggressive, using pictorial hauteur to leverage cliché, and in so doing revealing a pathos of defeatist tact latent in both the joke’s origin and the phenomenon of its ever-increasing fatigue. I think of the refrain in the maudlin denouement of the Smiths’ song, “That Joke isn’t Funny Anymore”:

     I've seen this happen in other people's
     Lives
     And now it's happening in mine

Of course, the absence of answers to a question asked repeatedly might function as an answer in itself, either as a pointed demonstration to a non responsive audience, or, more interestingly, a theoretical echo-chamber towards posterity and possibility. Asking what one male artist said to the other (forever) might be regarded as an address to art history’s often airless (but never heirless) dialogue, while a, “feminist, a lesbian and a nun,” are the usual suspects when it comes to woman intellectuals in the history of modernity – what schemes might they come up with together in that theoretical bar? The lightbulb joke features answers both nervily absurd and bitterly clipped (“none: feminists can’t change anything”.) Actually, while trying to recall more of the answers, I ended up searching the joke online (the first hit was Reddit, which was, as they say, a huge mistake – those comment threads! I can’t help but feel that this choice, pitfalls and all, is part & parcel of the will of the piece.)

Playing D’Onofrio’s accordion of answers reminds me of all of the times I’ve heard myself add that sibilant terminal consonant to adjust my phrasing of, “feminism” to “feminisms”, the dilemma of its being subject to multiple interventions and judgements (a kind of liberation too, a freefall through interpretive hells or heavens…) That these options or alternatives appear in the format of a single text (sheet of paper) whose action (unfolding) is presumptively interactive, makes their deadpan delivery more acidly lucid. Like the light-emitting diode delivery of some of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms, Feminist Joke Book is a text-as-visual-object-as-object-lesson whose dissolution into a social space of uncertain status quo as to for-or-against inclines towards some future resolution (when, for instance, the lightbulb is finally changed). As such, it becomes a critical counterbalance to the operation of the hankies with their amorphous physicality-cum-crypto-biographical currency. To bring the two together into a common subjectivity is to imagine an inquisition in the form of a pageant, something like the oratorio Anne Carson wrote for Gertrude Stein, with its sweeping gestures and halting pauses:

Your veto is unreasonable.
Your reason is a mystery.
Your mystery is way of lying.
This concept is no longer in use.

Between these works (and, indeed, between a votive evocation and theatricalized inquisition) is a video piece, Falling Woman (2008), projected onto the gallery wall opposite the entrance. It features the image of a figure in freefall through a blue sky filled with clouds. The figure wears a dress, the skirt of which is blown up over its face by the air current (only in brief glimpses to we spy fingertips or a flash of hair), exposing a naked stomach, pelvis and legs, with feet clad in streamlined flats. It’s odd how in describing this figure, I find myself avoiding gendering the (clearly female) body – why is that? It seems really strange that what amounts to legs and a vagina plummeting through space should evoke this response from me. It may be because if I write, ‘she’, I feel as if I am encroaching on some assurance of personhood ahead of gender, and to assume the agency of knowing anything for sure about this female who is falling, her face cloaked, even smothered, by the rippling fabric, I am assuming a familiarity, a confidence of outcome that I don’t possess. As if to reinforce this point, the falling narrative, with its stock audio whistling whoosh, is routinely interrupted by an almost blank, still shot, in which only a tiny cluster of specs in the center of the screen indicate some far-off action. One might suppose that this is a distant view of the descent, so remote as to promise no impending development. Perhaps this is what it is to be outside of the space of the blinded/obscured falling figure, a contemplative but wholly uninformative point of view. Between these intervals, she-just-keeps-falling, at closer or farther distances, the softly modeled relief of dress-over-the-face becoming something consolidated as a fetish, as in the non-finito narrative of Michelangelo’s Awakening Slave, or the ambiguous cruelty (either sadistic and masochistic, depending on whether you regard or relate) of Magritte’s hooded Lovers.

Some variations of the fall feel almost easeful and others very hapless-seeming, less a dread, dead drop than a soft panic of awkwardness blossoming into the headlong rush of having no tools whatsoever to address the situation; a kind of social/vestibular horror combo one would feel in media res of a falling dream combined with an at-work-with-no-pants-dream. So very odd and suspenseful and titillating and funny are these sequences, that I am loath to find evidence of a loop. But there is a moment when the pelvis twists in a baroque diagonal from vertical to near-horizontal, as if momentarily miming that familial mascot of the male gaze, Courbet’s Origin of the World, and a little passage of music appears, like a sentimental leitmotif that I am not sure one should take at its word. Is it a moment of poignant comfort or nostalgic trance? Is the body partaking of its space in a way that reorients falling through to falling into? Does the fragmented descent from from towards towards contain an attitude of plateau, whose momentary horizon orients lyrical transit within the contour of its unending conundrum?

The space of the fall is really well crafted, technically speaking. I am reminded of the way the term, “holding space” is used as a signal of non-judgmental support, here dramatized into a fiction of radical commitment: just how much space can you hold, when a true crisis arrives, or when you realize that your idea of “holding” something is, from a different perspective, the madly willful insistence on an intersubjective state of grace? This notion of falling, stripped of the sidebars of memory or taxonomy that form the video’s altarpiece wings, becomes paradoxically heavier in recollection, as if the suspense of that figure was becoming more urgent now with myself as witness partaking in its pilgrim plight, an unknown unknown.

A statement on D’Onofrio’s website concludes, “As feminism asks for a liberation of identity, liberation only exists when it does not know its end.” There is, in the moment of the loop’s catch, a question that might arise as to whether the moment of horizontal ease or invitation the body provides is a kind of narcissistic fishing or a reflection of liberation; that only in this moment of staging the end in terms of a terminal velocity, ambivalent or hysterical, self-obsessed or authentically invested, does the potential of the figure as affect become a subject and not an object. I feel that my own staging of uncertainty as a passionate brink is a bit of moral cowardice on my part, but I’m infatuated by the dilemma of the image and its drama and their seamlessness. It’s a credit to the work that this marriage, so compelling in itself, suggests at once an opaque, figural placeholder for two words I am in palpable, culpable and wholly regrettable flight from defining: art and feminism.

  

John Luna 

Donovan Rose at arc hive Artists Run Centre

Kyle Labinsky at Xchanges gallery and Studios

Michael Hermesh at The Avenue Gallery

Vortex to Eden by MOPE Collective at the Fifty Fifty Arts Collective

Mary Babineau at Xchanges Gallery and Studios

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas at Madrona Gallery by Philip Willey - Dec. 2017.

Alchetron 

A solo show by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas in Victoria is long overdue. Michael Warren of Madrona Gallery agrees but the problem he says is getting a body of work together. Yahgulanaas’ work is in much demand all over the world and Madrona are lucky to have at least one painting and some drawings to show. They are also lucky to have Ottilie Short, a student of Yahgulanaas at UVic, behind the desk to talk about him.

Yahgulanaas is a very active artist. He has had numerous travelling exhibitions and his work can be seen in public spaces, museums, galleries and private collections across North America, Europe, Asia, Australia and the Middle East. He works in a variety of forms and media. He also teaches, gives talks, writes books, sits on the board of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC and manages various trusts. His illustrated books include ‘Flight of the Humming Bird’ and ‘RED: A Haida Manga’.

With his prodigious energy and output he is actively expanding the audience for First Nations art. He achieves this by fusing traditional elements with contemporary phenomena, intricate paintings for instance that combine Japanese Manga comics with Chinese brushwork that he learned from Cantonese master Cai Ben Kwon, and Haida motifs.

It’s a hybrid art form that reflects his own background, Yahgulanaas has both Haida and European heritage and is descended from Isabella and Charles Edenshaw. He was born in Prince Rupert and grew up on Haida Gwaii where he was involved in community service for many years before finding time for art.

A series called ‘Coppers from the Hood’ perfectly demonstrates the artists’ cross-cultural interests and sense of fun. One piece in particular, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York is actually a Haida motif painted on a Tercel hood. One might think that such blatant cultural appropriation would be a little controversial. Not so.  Aparently Haida Gwai locals found it quite amusing. As Yahgulanaas explains ‘car hoods are a traditional way of transporting canoes to water’.

As traditional native art becomes more experimental this kind of cultural fusion is gradually becoming the norm. The broader question of course is the extent to which indigenous people adapt to the dominant culture. Or even if they should. As Bill Reid asked in a discussion with Yahgulanaas ….is this work art or ethnicity?  It’s a serious question and the debate is ongoing. Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas seems to have found a light-hearted way of dealing with it.

Ocean Bird

Bone Box

Yelthadaas