In ‘Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic’ ([1]) Kenneth Olwig says, “our environment, conceived of as landscape scenery, is fundamentally linked to our political landscape.” Killer Paintings is a deliberate, terrifyingly calm discourse about James Lindsay’s absorption and response to our collective environmental and socio-political experiences. Lindsay’s recent expansive vistas with confounding demarcations delineate earthly boundaries with bright and enlivening shapes and symbols that detonate with each denotation. (Political Landscape) Ever changing political borders are marked to resonate bizarrely expedient environmentally horrific realities. Indignantly facetious, Lindsay’s palate articulates the baffling environmental destruction that political gain produces. As the current series progresses, sorrow and distain simplify to austerity, futuristic projections of a forsaken earth.
Adverse events propel Lindsay to remark on the unthinkable. In March 2006, journalist and Seaforth Highlander Lieut. Trevor Green, a former navy officer from Vancouver was assaulted with an axe to his head when attending a routine shuras, or meeting with Afghan village elders. ([2]) Lindsay depicted the ambush with a Munch-like visage, reminding the viewer of stunned meanderers in The Freeze of Life, only this impaled disembodied head (and subsequent version) drips blood: Hatchet. The quietude screams, brooding over the faith in communication, revealing a corporeal alarm.
New Arctic Landscape 1 and 11 are comprehensive investigations, addressing the ruin of our North. Sordid plunder shrouds the once pristine beauty, melting and evacuating wildness. Lindsay paints the understated rape with washes of paleness, memorializing past beauty. He shows us how our festering land scowls.
Trophy, versions 1, 11 and 111 utilize the deer symbol or abundance. Lindsay’s whimsy is at play here. A reclined head swallows the forefeet of the animal, a determination of our gluttony.
08-08-08 is elegant and striking. This is a one brush-stroke Zen painting, declaring how Lindsay’s contemplation and intuitive wisdom is at work in his art.
This exhibition displays Encryptomatons, seen at Open Space in ‘The Hidden is Hard to Come By’, a show with James Lindsay and David Gifford. This series of paintings references the 2003 atrocity when over 600 illegal combatants from the Afghanistan war were held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and the alleged genetic manipulations of prisoners in various wars. In his curatorial essay about Lindsay’s paintings, Roy Green wrote:
“These forms function as individual portraits of the genetically captured detainees, and appear as micro-cosmic slices of flesh exhumed from a Francis Bacon Painting, or perhaps digital cocoons, whirling bivalves of nano-technology gone horribly awry, floating in the dense blackness of metaphysical oil- meaning and identity encrypted within.”
“The dense blackness is analogous to the alchemist’s Nigredo state: the black that absorbs all colours, the vortex of silence releasing the dark night of the soul, the limitless void that holds these detainees in the deranged matrix of their digital cocoons.”
James Lindsay's work is monumental in its dauntless confrontation of his subjects, intrinsically painted. His show encompasses a life's work - 2 buildings and several floors. In this retrospective, Lindsay’s oeuvre is as intensely alluring as it is prophetic. Killer Paintings ensures we notice and gather insight. His compassionate portrayals are benevolently vengeful. Lindsay is our alerting guide through his deliberated, intuitive panoramas exposing the maliciousness that destroys where we live – environmentally profane and socio-politically saturated destruction. Killer Paintings is sagacious work; Lindsay refutes complacency. Lindsay augurs beyond transient, oneiric imagery. “An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.” ([3]) Literal and linear views will not sustain Lindsay’s significant descriptions. Thankfully, Lindsay presents a gift of stratified vision that layers time, showing diverse contexts. He shows us all, at once, so we do not forget to remember.
[1] Olwig, Kenneth. Landscape, nature, and the body politic: from Britain's renaissance to America's new world. Univ of Wisconsin Press, 2002
[2] http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2006/03/04/canada-afghanistan060304.html#ixzz0uG92shYo
[3] George Santayana (Spanish born American Philosopher, Poet and 1863-1952)
James Lindsay “Killer Paintings“
17- 25 July 2010
Open Saturday & Sunday
Weekdays by appointment:
jameslindsayart@yahoo.ca
250.380.7687
549½ & 553½ Fisgard Street
Victoria BC
I forgot that I wrote that about Jim's work..in retrospect I think it's poetically accurate
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