Meghan Hildebrand at Madrona gallery

Nathan Smith at Fortune Gallery

Jesse Campbell at Open Space

Look Over Look and Other Works by Cynthia Minden

Introduction

Cynthia Minden’s first discipline was music. She went far in this professional direction, studying in California, Toronto and Vermont, playing chamber music and founding an arts administration company and arts centre in Toronto. However, in 1987 she was drawn to the Pacific Northwest and found herself far afield of the ‘beaten track,’ many miles and inestimable cultural worlds away from the big city artistic matrix of Toronto. In this new world she began to explore visual art. 

Attending conferences and workshops, studying contemporary form and paper-making with renowned fibre artists, she embarked on a course of creating two and three-dimensional art in her new media, including that of fine art basketry. Applying ancient, traditional materials and skills to creating contemporary sculptural form felt like a translation of her musical journey.

Earlier studies in music continue to shape the tone of her work, “most notably flute study with the eminent Marcel Moyse, theory and composition with the late Dr. Sam Dolan, earning an ARCT in Renaissance Counterpoint and later, music improvisation with Freddie Stone.” According to Minden, these extraordinary mentors still imbue her process with meaning and ideas.

Rhythms, harmonies, ‘musical’ phrasing, cadences and movements resonate throughout Minden’s visual art. She enjoys working with other artists to create cross-genre collaborative pieces, and has used textual elements, calligraphy and musical notation, as meaningful signifiers and emotional ‘keys’ within sculptural installations and constructionist pieces.

Look Over Look

Shadow and movement comprise powerful formal elements in Cynthia Minden’s suspended figures and mobiles, whereby light and lighting dynamics act as core instruments for her overall compositions; voids, spaces and empty volumes act like silences or intervals in pieces of music, affording reflection, perspective and the intimations or sensations of memory. Her primary influences in the realm of visual art include work with Lillian Elliott, Hisako Sekijima, Dorothy Gill Barnes and Dorothy Field. Drawing on a sparkling array of inspiration, mentors and muses, Minden's art skims the edges of traditional techniques, tying together three-dimensional weaving with innovative sculptural form and experimental mixed media. 

Cynthia Minden’s installation piece, Look Over Look, shows keen observation of the figure, of gesture, and of movement. The suspended figures in the series look like joyful trapeze artists or animated puppets that have shucked their strings and turned them into gymnasts’ foils. Minden’s basketry figures are no less gestural and animated. The three-dimensional graphic design of the suspended figures’ arrangements and compositions in relation to each other suggest lines of musical notation or lyrical, cuneiform script. They can also suggest whimsical or mischievous action figures—animated Zen calligraphy characters dropped into three-dimensional, holographic space. Like antic hieroglyphs, the community of figures collectively imply hints of meaning and language through their interactions, cues and symbols, as if you could ‘read’ them and their conjoined communiqué—from left to right, perhaps, like a line of music, or right to left like a sacred text in some ancient forgotten speech—if you only had the key to its esoteric code. In fact, the code is close to hand, resident in the emotional perception of the audience. And, to this internal, essential, human barometer of feeling—collective and universal whilst being uniquely individual and personal to each and every viewer—this installation clearly and eloquently speaks.

The rotund forms also seem to resemble rusticated versions of low-tech scientific instruments. Reminiscent of antiquated navigational tools, spherical astrolabes or armillary spheres, they are like cosmological models of the celestial sphere. The ancient instruments they invoke were actually skeletal celestial globes consisting of spherical frameworks of rings centred on Earth or the Sun, that represented lines of celestial longitude and latitude (and other astronomically important features for astral navigation). Like the meteōroskopion of the Alexandrine Greeks (c. AD 140) or the Ptolemaic astrolabon, the twelfth-century astrolabes of Arabic astronomers in Moorish Spain likely served as the prototypes for all later European armillary spheres. (Elizabeth 1^st wore tiny gold models of them as brooches or embroidered to her gowns and cloaks to advertize the British Navy’s dominance of the seas.)

Minden’s spheres show their bony exoskeletons, made of twigs, inside delicately calligraphy-inscribed waxed paper, stretched around irregular hoops like the astral bands that revolve around an armillary sphere to show the courses of the planets across the sky. Their waxed-paper “skins” are actually made of the very thin and fragile dressmaker’s tissue used in making patterns. Dressed with layers of beeswax (adding the intensely sensual feature of beeswax’s perfumed scent), the “skins” are then inscribed with spidery calligraphy like fading, mummified tattoos. Reflective, metallic pigments spell out a mystical Semitic text on one sphere in a fusion of Arabic and Sanskrit calligraphy. Other stained and painted surfaces are achieved by use of oil-stick pigment. The mixture of graphic, esoteric textual elements with abstract painting, rare, rustic or exotic materials, all incorporated upon monumental sculptural form, makes for complex three-dimensional visual texts. They emerge as textured, tactile objects that demand to be emotionally, sensually and intellectually “read.”

The figurative elements present as individual ‘characters’ like dramatic personae in a ballet, whose combined choreography spells out a plot or theme we can follow with our emotional antennae and our sensual appreciation. There is a subtle tension beneath the apparent careless, dancing sense of joyfulness of some of the figures; they seem to betray a sense of underlying strain, of conflict, or of contortion. There is an open-ended story evident in Look Over Look, for this is essentially a narrative (if highly abstract) piece. Like the libretto to an opera that is also a mystery (Myfanwy Piper’s for the operatic adaptation of Miller’s The Turn of the Screw composed by Benjamin Britten, for instance), its story is to be apprehended, processed and interpreted—differently, deeply, personally—by each audience member. Comprised of human gesture and the abstract visual language of elemental shape and form, the paradox of the piece is that it accomplishes this subtle and profound communication with a visual vocabulary that is accessible, universal, esoteric, private, and essential simultaneously. Look Over Look is fundamentally cross-disciplinary in its many mediations.

Other Works

This artist’s artistic production is sweepingly varied. Her oeuvre has incorporated radically different approaches, materials and moods, but her singular artistic voice is immediately discernable throughout, resonating in expansively shifting media over the years. This voice could be described as reflective and tender, quirky, humorous and whimsical, paradoxically bittersweet and lyrical. It resonates through overall compositions, echoes in volumes or forms, and animates by a sort of dancing rhythmic movement. Subtly resounding through an enormous repertoire of expressions and scores of discrete bodies of works, Minden’s signature style and the aesthetic integrity, the ‘through-design’ of her approach, endows such consistency and coherence across a vast range of works.

In 2012, Minden created an extensive body of works that were part found object, part assemblage, part constructivist canvases. By highlighting and accentuating naturally occurring pigmentation on beach refuse and flotsam, from oxidation, weathering or mineralization, she created highly abstract compositions incorporating meaningful or mysterious objects, like keys or watches, bones or unidentifiable industrial remnants. In one, a piece of tree bark serves as the variegated surface and tactile ground for an azure painterly comment and an old door plate becomes a medley of cobalt and rust. Some pieces seem minimalist in their spare austerity, others baroque. Still other found objects make their aesthetic statement in terms of sheer location, and in relation to the placement of other items. Minden wrote: “I am building a library of artefacts drawn from the landscape, an intermingling of nature and humanity gathered from the margins of wetlands, forest floor and foreshore, intertwined with cast off findings from human civilization. By pairing bone with porcelain, nail with knife and vine, I am looking for multiple meanings, layers of interpretation and a framework for thinking about the relationship between art, society and ecology."

Minden’s simultaneously streaming series of works seem to comprise progressive movements of an integral, essential theme. Uniquely recognizable, Cynthia Minden’s highly personal vision means that her creative peregrinations are all of a piece. All embodying that subtle dancing movement, they dexterously incorporate the harmonies of her Denman Island  studio. Can the works be homed within a larger, regional Voice, one we might call the “Western Islands School,” or the “Vancouver Islands Movement”?  On first sight, any one or all of Minden’s works seem to announce their geographical roots and environmental foundations like a clarion call, to my eyes at least. But then, I am also long resident in these islands, and I recognize Minden’s visual music as profoundly resonant and expressive of this vast, brooding rainforest, these endless shores.

Yvonne Owens

Victoria, September 2018

Gillian Redwood - Pop Up show at Xchanges Gallery and Studios

Lori Lalli at Fortune gallery

Bill Bartlett at Xchanges Gallery and Studios

I have just come from Xchanges Gallery and Studios where I do most of my figurative sketching. I spent the morning assisting Bill Bartlett, gallery coordinator with his show that opens this Friday, November 23, 7Pm. This is some show like nothing I have seen in a long time, figurative works, a whimsical female gang of characters, dozens of them strewn across the gallery walls expressing great joy in just being women. And so well done in graphite, ink and watercolour. I've known Bill for over 40 years and it is so good to see him a master of his work. And he is. He is now up there with the likes of Gustaf Klimt and Egon Schiele. Today it was a privilege working with him. The show is a pop up show that only lasts for 3 days. his 2 studios will be open where you can wander through his interesting life. So go to the gallery behind the Dairy Queen on Douglas and Bay Streets and see this man's great work.

 

Rick Thomas

Rootless: A Review by Tamara Yewchuk

Lichen wig: These two words made me curious about the show Rootless by Natasha Lavdovsky at the Xchanges gallery.   

I arrived to find everyone on the balcony just outside the door enjoying the Vickers-esque sunset. They seemed to know one another, adding to the celebratory vibe for this opening. Ambient music with the echoes of birds in a wind rustling forest played for white plaster heads and torsos adorned only with lichen wigs and merkins while I browsed the gallery alone.   

Immediately I was drawn in by the cultural significance of hair and thought of the many merkin jokes my sister and I shared.  Merkins were first used in the 15^th century after pubic hair was removed to combat lice; later on in films to make them less sexual and later for theatrical purposes. I mulled over the option to interact and spray the merkins with water but instead moved onto inspecting other pieces. 

On a projector screen, mesmerizing images of rapidly moving lichen alternated with the image of a young woman wearing a long lichen wig covering part of her breasts. The nudity evoked Eden and sin and our relationship to sexuality. The video showed us just how one would look in a lichen wig. Would our understanding change if we could see the wig in different settings such as a bus, café or street?

The artist statement discussed the desire and obstacles to create art with minimal environmental impact. I learned that many lichens are endangered and the artist harvested these specimens that had fallen to the ground that might otherwise perish if not rescued. Scientific descriptions and samples of various lichen reminds us the materials are living things thereby blurring the line between objects and nature. The tension between the artist’s intent to cultivate an identity as one appreciative of nature, yet faced with a disconnection or rootlessness to the land as a white settler is apparent. This desire to create a new identity with a wig, an object most often used to play with other identities is clever. Lichen is simultaneously exalted but also used as a camouflage. The artist sought to protect nature while also using it as a protective veil. 

Although it was a soothing space it felt limited. While the sameness of the pieces provided continuity it also created monotony.  Everything was either white or green and did not promise further epiphanies. The wigs and merkins were quite conservative, the wildness of nature neatly trimmed to mirror contemporary fashion.

As the party outside moved in, I commented in the book that the show resonates on many levels: ecology, the body, sexuality and history. As I walked into the humid evening I realized that yes the artist was successful in eliciting a desire for a lichen wig; I would just prefer a wilder, bouffant, eccentric style that resists the constraints of civilized society. Why stop at lichens: throw an entire forest in there. The difficult part is keeping such wigs intact, perhaps why this show only lasted for three days from September 28-30.

Martin Honisch at Fortune Gallery

Robert Amos talks about new book: E. J. Hughes Paints Vancouver Island

Jason Stovall at Xchanges Gallery and Studios

Bowker Creek Brush Up 2018

Irma Soltonovich at The Gallery @ Mattick's Farm - 2018

Laura Feeleus at arc.hive - 2018

Jane Coombe at Stairwell Gallery