Zeitgeist on Fort Street by Philip Willey

In his book ‘The $12 million Stuffed Shark’ (a good read but somewhat longer than it needs to be) Don Thompson talks about how dealers and gallery owners don’t like to use words like ‘new’ or ‘unknown’ when talking about artists. They prefer the word ‘emerging’. Like butterflies from chrysalides (plural of chrysalis. I had to look it up).
With that in mind I found myself in the Victoria Emerging Artist Gallery on Fort Street on a dull February day. It’s a small gallery but what it lacks in space is made up for in enthusiasm. Ellen Manning is the driving force behind the gallery and she has put together a stable of artists with bright futures. She’s primarily a curator she says and/or dealer, she doesn’t care much for the word ‘galleryist’. She has gathered together a group of artists, some from the Avenue Gallery, in Oak Bay, and she hopes to replicate the kind of energy she found in Shanghai where she worked for 2 years.
Work on display ranges from photographic to tactile, abstract to landscape. There are some striking forest landscapes by Marilyn Peeters who uses a limited palette to achieve a spiritual quality. Dennis Shields flowers in vases against various backgrounds are decorative without being bland. More flowers by Luis Enrique Oliver (who did the Babies with Guns at Ministry of Casual Living). These are lavishly painted. Oliver is not shy about using luscious tropical colours most welcome at this time of the year. All the work on display has a vitality often missing in more established galleries. It’s an eclectic mix, perhaps with some rough edges here and there but the enjoyment of art-making is evident throughout.
Ellen Manning is also curating a show at Dale’s Gallery (currently pulsating with some exuberant paintings by Marion Evamy) and I was curious about the connection. It’s a collaboration with Allison Rogers apparently. Dale’s functions as a satellite gallery for VEAG. That show opens on February 17^th.
As I was emerging from the gallery who should I meet but Emily Carr’s ghost! The last time I’d seen her she’d been wandering around with a hammer in the Empress Tea Room smashing crockery. I asked her about that. Well, she said, she’d just come back from New York at the time where she’d seen a show by Julian Schnabel. She loved the intensity of his work and thought she’d have a go. Good for you I said. We have to keep up with the times.
I asked her if she felt like getting a coffee. Starbucks? Or something different? So it was we found ourselves in SerSon, a new gallery/café/gift-shop/cabaret run by a friendly Russian lady named Sonia von Walter. Clearly Victoria is going through one of its periodic metamorphoses. Over our lattes we talked about this and that. Emily wasn’t very happy about the new Uptown Mall. It’s an abomination said Emily. Well, I said, some people seem to like it. But Emily was quite upset. Who is running the city these days? Who approved it? They must think you’re just a bunch of shopping units! Hmmm. Emily doesn’t mince words. I managed to turn the conversation back to art. Had she seen Damien Hirst’s skull I asked? Not his actual cranium of course but the diamond encrusted version? Yes indeed she had. She thought it was a rather clever piece. Wealth and death. The ultimate irony. A statement about the way we attach value to art objects. And so on. I had lots of questions for Emily but I guess our time was up because she suddenly said, ‘Later dude, gotta go’ and disappeared. Just like that.
Which left me wandering aimlessly at Fort and Quadra. Fortunately there is a new show at Polychrome. These turned out to be portraits by Ken Banner the artist formerly known as Flag. Raw is the word that describes them I think. Raw and unpolished. Banner lays the paint on fairly thick without much modeling. The subjects are nobody in particular he says, just faces he felt like painting. Some seem happy and well adjusted. Others less so. It’s not Schiele, Munch or Bacon but angst and alienation are alive and well. These people wear their personalities on the outside. There is an element of inner turmoil but it’s muted and witty. The result is edgy but playful, the sort of thing Perez Hilton might approve of.
Which reminds me. Completely by accident I happened to be watching ‘Showbiz Tonight’ (America’s most provocative entertainment news show), and Perez Hilton was on. It seems he has been indulging in some serious introspection lately and he has had a change of heart. He’s decided to be nicer and less snarky he says. Let’s hope so. He’s no Rick Gervais but if anybody knows about Zeitgeists it’s Perez.