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.

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 

Pj Kelly exhibit Frontier reviewed by Debora Alanna

PJ KELLY
Frontier
5 -19 March 2015
77-A Fort St
Victoria BC
Polychrome Fine Arts

Review by Debora Alanna
with conversation excerpts between Pj Kelly & Debora Alanna
Full conversation & interview located after the review.

Pj Kelly: Focus? It is poetry. That is how I have been thinking of this.
Rhythmic and systematic structuring emphasises consciousness through intonations of layer placement, colour choices and somewhat edgy, jaunty juxtapositions. Frontier is a collection of terse verses, quick-witted visual poems. Frontier is, by definition and presentation, beyond the commonplace. Kelly describes states of being.
Pj Kelly: The dot is so unthreatening as a little, small unit of mark.
Debora Alanna: There are so many dots.
Pj Kelly: I have a lot to say.
Kelly stacks serious layers of dots, spotted overlays, deposits of thought that contrast and meld. Whirling with thought, sheets of clear or opaque or multiple layers and cropped sheets of medium or acrylic paint stratum elevate layers of her diminutive and larger works.
Her surface creations begin flat as poured acrylic paint and media born textures. Rolled and cut swirls, layers of thick and progressively thicker paint puddles and swatches are interspersed with acrylic medium layers, painted paint - the painted medium.
Continue reading here:
http://embellish4art.blogspot.ca/…/pj-kelly-frontier-5-19-m…

“ Change ” installation by Chris Lindsay reviewed by Jillian Player

Spare, elegant, and intriguing are some of the first impressions that come to mind as one enters Deluge’s bright, clean environment. Chris Lindsay’s site-specific installation hangs over your head, precariously monopolizing most of the room. Evenly spaced and obsessively  executed strands of airplane wire attach to three horizontal wooden beams at one end of the ceiling, and curve gently towards the floor, hanging menacingly just above, before they swoop towards their perch at the other end of the ceiling, where the wires attach to a large, wooden-crossed beam that resembles a telephone pole. The vertical beam is purposely left rough and untouched, since its shedding of bark. It rests on a slight angle with its bottom end tilting off the ground and a tiny piece of wood jammed into the space. Heavy cables hold the upper end of the beam in place, or the whole body would tumble into a sad heap. The sense of gravity in the room is palpable. One can almost smell it. Am I getting a lesson in physics here? As one moves from piece to piece, one never leaves the pressure of the overhead structure.This precarious feeling flows through all of Lindsay’s enigmatic objects in the exhibit.

There is a criss-cross, or spirograph-like pattern that continuously changes as one moves through the room, looking up through the three layers of wire. The same patterns play out in a smaller scale through a row of coloured squares on the floor. From a distance they look like flat plates of coloured glass. But, when observed closely, you see the threaded patterns emerge. Optical illusions of colour, string, and metal: one is mesmerized as one walks around, over and between them. Like a contemporary dance to silent music, observers bend from the waist, bobbing their heads back and forth, and up and down to achieve the full potential of the plates.

Movement continues to a kinetic sculpture of nails, wood, and metal. All resist static quality as the structure gently rocks, swings, and shimmers. All seem perpetually conflicted, yet there is a delicate balance of art and science.

Science finds its way into the exhibit by way of an old slide projector showing two slides, both from the University of Victoria’s Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope (STEHM), the world’s highest-resolution microscope. The projection sits quietly unobtrusive and adjacent to one corner of the room.

There is one piece of sculpture from Chris’s grad show: the keys of two pianos, manipulated to create a grid. It is the most painterly piece in the exhibit as it could easily hang as a piece of art on a wall.  There is a beauty here that suggests entropy. The romantic old stories of fingers caressing the keys of these vintage pianos seem a little out of place with the overall exhibit, yet the missing piano strings are a reminder of the pattern of vibration.

Discrete elements meeting in mutually supportive combinations seem to be the inspiration that drives Lindsay to create ambiguous sculpture. He talks about the fragility of the planet and how we have gone too far with our obsession with destroying our resources. Yet, I find relief in humanity as I watch people getting amusement from these simple methods of illusion in his creations.

Curiosity is what kept Lindsay going as a microbiologist, and it is this same curiosity that propelled him through art school, having completed his MFA two months ago. His work is already in demand—he was asked to exhibit at The Nanaimo Art Gallery in August of this year. It seems Chris Lindsay’s never ending curiosity will be his driving force, and we are so lucky he has chosen art to share his observations.

 
Change
Chris Lindsay http://christopherlindsay.ca/
June 28 - July 27
Deluge Contemporary Art
636 Yates St, Victoria
 
 
Jillian Player is a visual artist that likes to write art reviews . - http://www.jillianplayer.com/

Paul Rode at the Little Fernwood Gallery by Philip Willey.

One imagines Paul Rode living in a Gothic mansion in darkest Broadmead emerging periodically to freak people out at openings. Just kidding. Rode doesn’t show his work often but here he is at the Little Fernwood Gallery with some recent work. It’s an awkward space with a large street-side window but his big impressive paintings fit the space surprisingly well.

I first met Paul Rode in 1985 when he was living in a condemned house on Blanshard Street, which later became the parking lot of Save On Foods. He’d covered the house with murals prior to its destruction. I remember being struck by the epic scale. Anne Swannell wrote about it in Monday Magazine along with some photographs. This was in pre-digital days so unfortunately there’s no link.

Lighthearted and playful are not words that come to mind when talking about Rode’s work. It’s heavy. I don’t find them particularly scary. Turning the oceans into plastic soup, being force-fed genetically modified food, thousands of faceless computer geeks rummaging through our email….that’s a little scary. Or maybe I’m just oversensitive.

There I go again. I must fight this tendency to talk about myself. Don’t you just hate post-Modernism? Not you. You. Art writers shouldn’t be flaunting their literary dexterity; they should concentrate on the art.

So ‘Blame and Punishment’. A male figure is spanking another male figure in a De Chirico landscape under an apocalyptic sky. Are they father and son? Why are they watched by a female figure?

‘The Blinding of Paul’ …the title suggests some kind of epiphany and there is Saul of Tarsus naked on the ground being struck by a bolt of light. This is Rode’s variation on a major theme.

In ‘Fallen…Re-erected.’ a colossal head rests on a line of Grecian pillars that seem to bear the full weight of history.

On one level Rode’s work is political but it isn’t so much the conflict between political parties that concerns him as historical inequality and man’s inhumanity to man. This concern for social justice is most obvious in ‘Was it worth it?...Yes it was worth it.’ (Madeleine Albright’s famous statement about the death of Iraqi children). A large figure is reaching for an apple using an arm taken from a smaller figure. It’s a soft subtle painting but the message is strong.

A smaller painting about torture, ‘The Promised Land’, is even stronger and difficult to look at. Rode seems to be saying ‘this is what we do to each other’. Some will find these paintings a little, how to put this? ‘in your face’? Perhaps even didactic but Rode doesn’t have much patience with blandness.
He doesn’t go in for bright colours much either. The works are mostly rendered in ochres and greys….almost monochrome. Which adds to the brooding intensity. Life, death, action and retribution are all fused in these multi-layered works. It’s like a stroll through the mind of Ivan Ilyich.

Religious and historical connotations are unfashionable …unless they are ironic. I don’t sense any deliberate irony in Paul Rode’s work. He has consistently charted his own course. He’s aware of art history but seems oblivious to trends fashions and Zeitgeists. No pickled sharks or inflatable icons for him. His work doesn’t seem to belong to any particular period. That said his interest in myth may be bang up to the minute. Paul McCarthy has just filled the New York Armories with his take on ‘Snow White’. 85 tractor trailer loads of it.

All this makes Rode’s work difficult to categorize. And difficult to write about. His work has the same kind of visual strength as painters like Schnabel, Baselitz and Chia and his timeless themes are similar but his imagery is more primordial. Robert Amos likens his subject matter to a bad dream of The Brothers Grimm. I asked Rode how he feels about that.

He says he thinks Robert may have missed the point. ‘Nightmares? We all have this stuff buried inside ourselves. Sure it’s Freudian. Why deny it?’

That wasn’t exactly the definitive statement I was looking for so I decide to ask some other people who know Rode and his work. It’s always good to spread your bets….

James Lindsay: "it's the poetic painted polemics before colour and whimsy".

Manuel Martinez-Polo sees it in ‘Hegelian terms of power, pleasure and pain.’


And Robert Kidd: “I met Paul about thirty years ago when he came to see a show at Stones Gallery of work by Martin Honisch, I've been a fan ever since.

The depth of his inquiry through his paintings into the meaning of being, the insights to be found in the past works of mankind and with an acute awareness of the present, the inquiry being worked out with amazing visual imagery on his canvases.

To put my feelings for Paul's work in simple terms ‘they give me goose bumps’”.

Dark stuff is hot these days but will Rode’s paintings resonate with the Living Dead? Young people seem to like noir, they can’t get enough blood and skulls but Rode’s sources may be a little too obscure for them and his classical references tend to tax the brain cells. He deals in major themes and metaphysics. Would his imagery make cool tattoos? Hard to say. Deep-rooted Teutonic myths aren’t easily related to contemporary issues and interpretation requires a lot of thought. Intrepid gallery goers will find it well worth the effort. Paul Rode reveals the undercurrents beneath reality.

 

The Blindness of Paul 

Paintings by Paul Rode

Little Fernwood Gallery

July 4 to 24, 2013

- Philip Willey is a visual artist and writer living in Victoria, BC
http://www.philipwilley.com/