Kate Scoones and small truths by Christine Clark

I was reading a blog recently that explained how to be successful in the art world. The primary direction for the ambitiously oriented was to network, and the way to network was to attend as many shows, talks and gatherings as possible. It makes perfect sense and I’m sure it’s perfectly true. Also, I think that for a person writing about art, actually showing up at the event probably indicates a certain self-less interest in the scene. I remember that last year there was quite a kerfuffle when local art writer, Robert Amos, admitted that he prefers to avoid art openings (although I’m not sure if he gave any reasons for that preference). It gave the impression, though, of a person who chooses to be outside of and consequently out of touch with the true spirit of the artists and their work.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy jumping on the bandwagon of this is right and that is wrong just as much as anyone else, but you know, I had such a great experience yesterday looking at some paintings, and what was really great was that I was all alone. I had to be at Xchanges gallery yesterday to drop off some paperwork and while I was there I had a chance to see the newest show, small truths by Kate Scoones. I wasn’t networking (actually I did talk for a few moments with Troi Donnelly about why we make art, like, is it narcissism?), I wasn’t seeing or being seen, I wasn’t advancing my career or even being likeable. There wasn’t nobody there but me. In fact, I had to turn the gallery lights on myself.
And what a lovely little show (and I don’t mean that (little) in the pejorative sense). Turning on the lights and turning my eyes onto those paintings was like turning on some sunshine. I’m serious. I felt pretty warm and cozy in there for a lady all alone in an otherwise dark and deserted institution.
The paintings are of men (just a few men) and women, circa 1950, or thereabouts. Some are just head shots, close ups of faces and hairdos; some are beach scenes, girls and guys in bathing suits; some are of ladies in gardens. They all have the charm of nostalgia, both in content and in form. It seems all the time that a lot of artists are driving to be the avant-garde. Paintings have always got to be extra big or else extremely unusual. Sometimes paintings leave the canvas and are instead dried glue pinned to the wall, and sometimes paintings are literally disemboweled and then strung up from the ceiling. All of this is great and fun and interesting, but it means that when you walk into a gallery and see recognizable paintings of people on relatively small canvasses, you (I) almost immediately assume that the artist is amateurish and probably not very good.
The pictures really are quite small. The largest measure about 61 x 61 cm, but the size has nothing to do with amateur or not very good; they are intimate in a way that transcends mere physicality. The smallness reminds me of the beginning, the beginning of art making when a lot of us inherited or bought something that seemed manageable to paint on, never thinking about the demands of style, just thinking about making a good painting. I love being reminded of that. It was so much fun and so juicy back in the beginning. It was simple (you had the paints and the brushes and the canvas), but it was complicated too. Remember? No matter how simple it seems now, looking back, I remember wanting to be good, and that’s tough, to want; nor is it simple.
But that’s nostalgia. We edit out the difficult bits (we think about the pretty colours and the smiling faces). Conversely it’s (meaning my thoughts about small canvasses) a way of assuming that something is true before we have a chance to know the truth. When I saw that the subject matter was women and girls in perfectly coifed hair and smiles, I immediately started looking for the dark signs of a pre-feminist oppression of house-wives. The truth is that I didn’t see any visible oppression (unless you count coiffed hair as oppression, and some people do), but I know it’s there. I know because I know about the history of women in our culture. The paintings being what they are (flawlessly coloured and delicately textured) keep the viewer (me) right there at the surface. It’s enforced detachment. I think that I know that it’s not alright, but it looks good (Kate Scoones can draw and paint in case I haven’t made that clear) and maybe that’s all I need to know, you know?
Even in the most suggestive of the works, Some things just happen that way, which is a painting of two girls standing in a wave of water, one girl smiling happily, the other looking miserable, I found myself hesitating between interpreting the image and just enjoying the implications of the picture. I think I went with the enjoying part; just letting the picture unfold for me, rather than trying to impose my will onto it. That sounds strange. Let me try to explain.
The expressions on the girls’ faces make it seem immediately that one girl must be prettier and better (more desirable) than the other. This is a satisfying image in some ways; there is angst and sadness to consider and mull over and that goes a long way sometimes. On closer study, though, it’s obvious that both girls are perfectly sweet. So, it seems that the misery comes from some other place that has nothing to do with being inferior (in actuality) to a friend or companion. Maybe that girl really believes she is the lesser of two. Of course she would be wrong, at least as far as outward appearances go. Perhaps instead she looks unhappy because it’s the first day of her period or because her mom is yelling at her from the beach, or maybe it’s just one of those quirks of fate that the shutter was pressed just as she turned her face to the camera and before she had a chance to finish her sentence and start smiling.
So really, I think, the misery comes from me. Without knowing at all what is happening in the broader context of the image, I quickly assume that the unsmiling girl is miserable and that she is so, because she is not as pretty as someone else. It’s interesting isn’t it, what art will tell us about ourselves. In this case I think that perhaps I was unnecessarily miserable as a girl, but retrospect, as they say, is 20/20, and it’s very enjoyable to be looking back on myself (and at that girl in the picture) with amusement; just as enjoyable, I’m sure, as it would have been to have been entirely self assured at the tender age of 13.
And what a lovely gift to receive on a grey day, all alone, in a quiet gallery; a gift of self knowledge. No wonder I felt so sunny and warm there; she’s a kind teacher, she is; Kate Scoones.

Small truths
March 4 to 27, 2011
Sat. & Sun. 12 to 4pm 
2333 Government St. 

http://artinvictoria.com/

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.

Rebekah Johnson -The Hamlet Panels - by John Luna

Choice
Referring to Debora Alanna’s recent piece for Exhibit-V on Rebekah Johnson’s The Hamlet Panels, Christine Clark has commented, “Poor Hamlet.” That seems to be a good place to start. Why? Hamlet is one of those roles that consumes the actor’s personality, or insinuates itself in. Thinking of Daniel Day Lewis on stage frothing & neurotic, or Mel Gibson’s jocular striving to show himself to be both robustly and pragmatically insane, or my old favourite Lawrence Olivier, absorbed, withdrawn, narcissistic but tender (in response to what? To whom? To the form of the play, to the script. His tenderness is almost John Cage-ian in its withdrawn, abstracted amorousness for passage.)
Why this aside? The role is famous for connecting player to part to play to form. It is acting about acting in a play about plays (literally the theatre Hamlet creates within the play but also his own “antic disposition”.) That is important to notice here because the piece that RJ has made references Minimalism, specifically (in the statement) Donald Judd’s ‘specific objects’, for instance. Now the old debate about Minimalism (esp applicable – or at least the fight worth fighting- in the case of Judd), is Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” in which Fried argues that Minimalism engenders a theatre for itself…a theatre of viewer response, self-consciousness and action. This is a problem for Fried, who argues that ‘absorption’(a kind of self-forgetting) is a key experience in western art. Minimalism, with its call to action, its theatre of the literal, disrupts this contemplation, spectacularizing itself in a way that becomes a didactic object lesson. OK.
Now, the problem (meaning the knotty problem, the interest, the tension) in The Hamlet Panels is that it is a theatre itself. A theater about Minimal form and its concomitant action…the surveillance cameras record your responses. A second clue is the floating ‘X’, like a patch of gaffer’s tape marking a spot for an actor in rehearsal, insinuated into the glass sandwich which is the the small zone, the puppet theatre if you like, for real viewer interaction in the piece. Caught between absence-presence-x-marks-the-spot and the cameras trolling, self-consciousness becomes self-surveillance. Obvious enough but keep it in mind.
Now we are quite acclimated to self-surveillance, as it has become pretty much a social form online in ways that pursue the courtly mirror-world of Hamlet. It is an adolescent environment, and Hamlet, though thirty, is an adolescent character, which explains why some playwrights despise him and modernists adore him. Moderns also love him because as a neurotic non-decider, Hamlet’s diffidence between problem and action becomes action itself, an interstitial zone that is rhetorically dynamic but practically static, indicating the importance of the courtly mechanism, the mechanism of the play and Hamlet’s playing as pivotal within it.
I want to argue that self-surveillance inherits this trope, that social networking for instance with its passion for text and mechanism and prurient curiosity for exposure and echo is very much the fit to this glove. It is important that Johnson’s not-quite-Minimalism-as-theatre-of-Minimalism has plenty of open ends when thought of this way…the absolutist qualities of many minimal forms as something we now accept as part of designed environments, both real and virtual for instance, reminding us that the big Hamlet-gambit of ‘specific objects’ (that the Minimal object is non-relational, anti-Cartesian, irrational in its insistence on unity rather than a compromising interplay of parts) has long since been absorbed into the current state of virtual environments as theory, but that as practice, having space ‘to stretch one’s arms again’ (as Rothko, pre-minimalist and dramaturge once said) is very important.
Thus the Fifty-Fifty for this show, thus (though I think it’s a weak point) so much loose swagging of cable around the site. Outside of the institutional habitat of the UVic Visual Arts department where this work was made (itself a nod to Judd, clarified) Johnson has shifted ground to surround her work with cameras and their cordage and the close walls of an artist run centre that has long made a name for itself as an ad-hoc venue. This is an authentic strength of the Fifty-Fifty at times, and a ranklesome irritant at others. Here it works, mostly. Knowing what we know, it would be great to see Johnson work with cameras again, and aim them more directly at the problem of lighting (attention that grants what Fried called presentness, grace) vs. surveillance (attention that implicates and frames), and all this vis a vis the question (thinking of Viola’s Room for St. John of the Cross) of connecting or divorcing the space.

Rebekah Johnson ‘The Hamlet Panels’ by Debora Alanna

['Who is watching who is watching you?' Abstracted from the Shakespeare play, Rebekah Johnson's 'The Hamlet Panels' explores the notion of a private life lived publicly, through the use of Plexiglas, fluorescent lights, and security cameras.] from the invitation to this exhibition on Facebook.
“All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players…” As You Like It Act 2, scene 7. Oops. Wrong play. Rebekah Johnson is watching us watching as we watch each other watch through films of suspension from video input devices. Her ‘Hamlet Panels’ develop shadowing that bares us, with manipulation. Johnson impressively melds her former scenographer interests with her new juncture of sculptural installation work.
Suspending Plexiglas in 3 sets forms corridors where we are able to be staged by her inventive spacial ploy. Banking florescent lights in rhythmic groupings of 3 x 3 a la a Dan Flavin/Donald Judd combo horizon sets our stage. Although seemingly clear, without duplicity, this wily work has the feeling of entrapment. (‘Mousetrap’ is the name of the play within the play within Hamlet). We can see an influence from Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, (“The Sandwich Man") from 1959. In 1600ish circa Shakespeare, Giovan Battista Aleotti (1546-1636) introduces the flat (not angled) wing in Ferrara. Johnson explores a long historical allusion to panels in stagecraft.([1]) Johnson’s work unifies these seemingly divergent traditions.
Between two extensions of suspended translucence in the foremost corridor, Johnson has suspended 3 welded rods, a suspended place marking referring to staging, askew - also demonstrating a conspicuous imbalance that marks challenges resulting from the crossing of lineage/space creating a minimized fused bond, physically impenetrable, viewable from the sides without the frontal and back distortion of tough plastic, secure from our walking into this private space. This sequestering of an ‘Intimacy Gradient’ (“The term 'Intimacy Gradient' has become sociological shorthand for 'improving the emotional usability of a social space', after this key passage in Christopher Alexander's essay.”) ([2]) prevents us from trespassing through this inaccessible, intimate passage. This is the heart of the installation. Johnson presents a traversing intent that navigates us into a dialogue about personal connectivity, protecting this attachment in spite of adversity. Again, a theme in Hamlet.
3 security cameras scrutinize our meanderings through her ruse. 3 screens record? or at least reveal the subterfuge of our saunter through her work in a separate, open alcove. Like Hamlet, there is watching; he watches, he is watched, sends others to watch behind tapestries, curtains and other concealment, and most interesting is Hamlet’s cloak of emotional deception. (Hamlet’s Act 1 alone has 15 references to watching.)
The reference to 3s is a direct relation to Shakespeare’s play. Threes galore, there. 3 spells upon the poison to kill a king, a discussion of 3 parts to thought, three chances to kill Hamlet, to name three.
Johnson’s sculptural installation provokes us to engage with the space, other gallery participants/players, and brings us to an emotional stance by her/our need to observe us observing others. There is no complacency.
The seemingly commonplace horizontal lights, covered by opaque Plexiglas (the suffix plex- of Plexiglas means to stroke or strike) bring us round and round and round our crossing between and around panels, guiding us, encouraging us, and simplifying the idea that we are going somewhere. We are getting there. ‘There’ becomes the moment of realization of cameras on the scene. We are struck by her camera invasion into our private movements, as all movements are when noted, especially demonstratively while in a public place.
Early as 1916, the Futurists began involving technology to create a “synthesizing and technological theatrical form”. ([3]) Johnson succeeds in synthesizing theatre and sculpture, employing technology to variegate notions of space, our formalized assumptions and private ventures hung pithily. The elegance and quiet of this work distracts us from a reveal that queries our existence (“To be, or not to be" is the opening line of a soliloquy by Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1) through impaneling, judged by the screen viewers, at least. Just as Hamlet’s cast is killed off by conjecture, Johnson shows we must not assume that if we can see through something that we see everything.
Fifty-Fifty Arts Collective -13 January  to 4 February 2011-2516 Douglas St-Victoria BC

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[1] Oscar G. Brockett. History of the Theatre. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc. 3rd edition. 1977.
Kenneth Macgowan and William Melnitz. The Living Stage. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pentice-Hall. Inc. 1955

[2] http://www.generalhotel.org/26
[3] Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso (1996) ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ (first published in French, 1909). Trans. R.W. Flint. In The Twentieth Century Performance Reader, edited by Michael Huxley and Noel Witts, pp.289-293. London and New York: Routledge

" Being Provincial " an art review by Philip Willey

Right. I haven’t written anything for a long time. I may be a bit rusty and I’ve been out of touch so don’t expect any juicy art world gossip or controversial statements. I’m not sure why I’m even doing this. Robert Amos gets paid to be a target. But why me? Who am I to write about art in Victoria? Why am I doing it? Some kind of therapeutic exercise probably. Also I wanted to talk to Deborah about something and I owe Efren a favour. That’s the way things work in the art world kids. You have to suck up to people with power and influence. Not that we do that kind of thing in Victoria. Well some might but I certainly never would….never mind…I was 5 chapters into Keith Richards biography, Keith was just starting to get it on with Anita Pallenberg in the back of his Bentley and I needed a break. So out I went.

So how to write about Mike Andrew McLean’s show at Deluge? First, having decided to write about it, I had to put myself in the position of having to take a position. This is a small town and I don't want to upset anybody. Don’t be silly, said Debby, write what you want. Good advice. But I find it easier to write about painting than anything else. Photography always strikes me as a sort of clean clinical process. I suppose there’s a lot of walking around involved but it ultimately seems to come down to choice of subject matter and technical proficiency. The camera is a tool. The photographer is the one who decides what to photograph and precisely when to click the shutter. The camera captures a moment, perhaps a mood, meaning can be subjective or it can be left to the viewer to supply. I assume the real creative work happens in the dark room. To be honest I actually haven’t been grabbed by any new photographic developments since that collage stuff that David Hockney did with polaroids. And that was quite a while ago. Seemed like a bit of a breakthrough at the time. Recently I see he’s found a way to paint flowers with an iPad….but I digress. Poor Mike must be pacing up and down waiting for me to pass judgment on his work. Hang in there Mike. We’ll get there. The show is called ‘Whites’. Here is part of the artist’s statement…..

“Etymologically, photography means writing or drawing with light, and as such it is a mad-scientific endeavour. Light as a physical phenomenon both reveals our surroundings and obscures our sight, and traditional photographic processes reflect this polarisation. In allowing for correct exposure, light immediately darkens film. Images result from a correlated duel with this immaterial ingredient: measured parts avoidance, allowance and alteration.”

He is exploring how things become white when photographed. A very successful exploration I would say. It made me think about exactly what white is, the effect of light on objects and the way this is transformed by the photographic process. There’s a man/nature dialogue going on with some of the photographs A gentle argument but with no clear winner. The tree by Doug Christie’s old office is spectacular…the blank noticeboard surreal, the antique gas pump stands rusting like a leftover from Star Wars. Some of the smaller photographs looked like filler, but I liked Mike’s work. He has a good eye and a good sense of composition. Some subjects came across better than others I thought but he clearly knows how to use the dark room to advantage. I’m a painter. That’s my excuse. Probably another photographer could come up with something more comprehensive. Everybody should go to Deluge Gallery and see the show. Then everybody should go home and write about it. Preferably with a bottle of Mountgay rum for company.

My second assignment was at Open Space where there is plenty to see. The Show is called ‘Like Some Pool Of Fire’ and it’s all about colour. It includes some well-known artists from across Canada “whose practices are consistently engaged with how colour provides a framework for critical discourse in contemporary art”. Or as Gerry Gauthier explained ‘negotiations that inform the structures of the prism as a fundamental model’. Fair enough, I can decipher art jargon, but I did find myself wondering about the title… ‘Like Some Pool Of Fire’. Why, I wondered, use the currently overused ‘like’ in the title. Wouldn’t ‘Some Pool Of Fire’ work just as well? Or even ‘Pool Of Fire’? It’s like a small matter in the scheme of things but it like niggled me. I’m like so fed up with hearing ‘like’ every second word. And it’s not just like teenagers doing it. It’s like everybody. Can’t we like come up with a new word? Will it like ever stop? So I asked a rather nervous Gerry Gauthier about it and darned if it isn’t a quote from an essay by Walter Benjamin! So that put me in my place.

The theme of the show is colour. My first thought was that colour by itself is a pretty flimsy pretext for a group show. But give it time and it does have a certain cohesion. The pieces didn’t have labels so it wasn’t clear who did what. This may have been intentional. Fortunately several of the artists were there to talk about their work. Michael Morris, the older statesman of the group, seemed to set the tone. His work was on the floor. Computerized folded print outs, prisms really I guess one could call them, formed some beautiful exuberant shapes that would look wonderful on a wall I thought. These pieces were the centerpiece of the show without a doubt. There was a collection of objects wrapped in silver foil by Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Makovsky (I hope) and a brown flag. Brown, explained Kristina Lee Podesva, being a colour much misunderstood. It stands for earth and chocolate, a flag for one neutral nation. And, in a small room off the main gallery, there was nudity. Black and white and coloured nude people projected on a wall. Not sure who was responsible for that. Vincent Trasov? Anyway it was all very wholesome. Healthy looking people not doing anything naughty. The show was varied and interesting and everybody seemed to enjoy the opening.

Next, actually a couple of days earlier, I stopped by the Martin Bachelor Gallery. The first thing that struck me about Kristine Campbell’s paintings is the scale. These are ambitious, life-size figures painted on wood panels using deeply etched lines. The paint has been wiped and sanded to suggest antiquity. In the background are hand written fragments (of letters?) and Sappho’s love poems. They are quite beautiful ...if it’s OK to use that word. They suggest there is still plenty of scope for figurative painting. Maybe not Michelangelo but Campbell can certainly draw. The paintings are skillfully fashioned and quite powerful but they left me curious about the artist’s intent. Are they meant to be erotic or monumental? Was I looking at a paean to love or a homage to Sappho? All of the above? Does it matter? No. The show runs until February 3^rd.

So all in all it was  an enjoyable excursion. I ran into a few familiar faces. There were no sliced up bovines and I didn’t have to wade through anyone’s boring old bed-sheets or trip on any piles of twigs. Yes, I thought to myself, after an uneventful drive home, being provincial isn’t so bad.


Philip Willey was born in Winchester UK 1941. I went to Grammar School in Reigate, Surrey and Hornsey College of Art in London.  - more info: http://exhibit-v.blogspot.com/search/label/philip%20Willey

Luis Enrique Oliver “ Baby Gun “ by Debora Alanna

Luis Enrique Oliver’s iconoclastic paintings reel in starburst explosions of socio-political arrays with overt icons of harmlessness. Oliver adeptly paints outsized, beautified babies over miniaturized piles of societal debris and weapons, where guns and tanks etc become toying. One cannot help thinking of Jiang Jie’s Yellow Head sculpture and Xue Song painting, Old China juxtaposed with an Aston Martin in a promo shot by René Staud ([1] as a contrast to Oliver’s appeal for reconsideration of the disquieting relationships to use, misuse and outcome of combat with consumerism. Oliver’s work depicts warfare as the antitheses of credulous potential.

"....art produced by self-taught individuals, usually without formal training, whose works arise from an innate personal vision that revels foremost in the creative act itself."([2]). Oliver’s autodidactic practice allows explorations of styles and techniques while he evolves his own sensibilities. Votive crowns over protagonists, such as seen in Alex Grey’s Dr. Hofmann first synthesized the compound LSD in 1938, while researching ergot derivatives as a chemist for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel ([3]) are prevalent in these paintings. Mati Klarwein collage techniques are apparent. What is uniquely Oliver is an intense authenticity. Utilizing barbed wire to interplay with embracing Middle East infants on a shard of wood is an arresting image. The paint is unconscientiously applied, and the image cinches and refuses prevarication. Oliver has a drive to respond to confrontational concerns. He has earnest aim towards society’s excessive indulgences, discharges his imagery where complacency is pampered.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/luisenriqueoliver/sets/72157625118182877/

“ Baby Gun “  at the Ministry Of Casual Living - Jan. 3 to 12, 201 - 1442 Haultain St.

 

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[1] http://www.astonmartinartcollection.com/meets-art/yellow-head.html

[2] http://www.avam.org/stuff-everyone-asks/what-is-visionary-art.shtml

[3] http://fractalenlightenment.com/20/artwork/alex-grey-beyond-art

“Things Persist: In Two Parts” the sculpture of Daniel Laskarin by Christine Clark

Part One:  Art
The first time I went to visit Daniel Laskarin’s show, Agnostic Objects (Things Persist) at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, I felt like a small bewildered animal confronted by the vast expanse of a cold imposing concrete wall.  This concrete wall of my imagination was not just impassively grey and impenetrable, but actually seemed to radiate an aggressively unyielding and repulsing energy.  On the gallery wall (not the concrete wall of my mind) I found a curatorial message and in my initial desperation, I thought, ahh!, this is the opening, this will be the explanation that tells me where to start, but upon reading, the posted writing appeared even more bizarrely obscure and impossible than the art.  I couldn’t really even read it and I stumbled away and back to the art with an unhelpful and ridiculously vague notion of an ultra intellectual hammer banging on metal, a numbingly dry and frigid sound if ever there was one. 
I was in the Centennial Gallery, one of two rooms of agnostic objects, the other being the Kerr Gallery. The lighting was dim.  The work was, on first glance, uniformly grey and the materials, in certain cases, seemed limp and weary; the fibre glassed cardboard ,for instance, struck me at first as rather raw, suggestively swollen and unfinished.  The shapes in general looked strange and blocky, the assemblages appeared weak and haphazard; on the one hand bullying, on the other, easily destroyed.  The noise in the gallery, which (I think) is the sound of the air and the heat and the lights, provided an appropriately booming, droning, institutional sort of backdrop; the concrete wall made real. 
The first piece I was able to focus on enough to see was ‘till I embrace you, which I’d seen and loved once before during the sticks and stones show at Deluge last year.  What I immediately noticed about ‘till I embrace you was that the shiny gold ball which previously topped the work was gone, and that without it, the work seemed to melt away from me, back into some dark crevice in the wall, remote and unknowable.  Yet, I had known this piece, had known what it meant, in the way of inner knowing.  It was shocking to realize how the gift of giving and then the taking away of that gold ball could change the experience, the perception and the understanding of the piece as being something warm, balanced and even romantic, into something other, something cold and inaccessible (something masculine and alone).  (Later, at Daniel’s studio, I saw the gold ball hanging up on the wall, very high and out of reach, near the ceiling, and I asked him, why did you take the gold ball away?  and he said, because I didn’t like it.)
Not far away, in space, from ‘till I embrace you, is Sunday Afternoon, a piece not at all peremptory (and here I’m referring specifically to the removal of the gold ball), but rather heartbreakingly generous and full of a physical longing (I could feel it in my own body).  This work consists of a fibre glassed box, painted blue on the inside, and balanced, but mostly leaning against the gallery wall, opposite a pair of feathers, and all held aloft on an insanely delicate apparatus.  The feathers are at the end of a very long rod, at a great distance from the box, nearly touching the floor.  The box appears to be working very hard at keeping the feathers in place or from touching the floor.  It appears as if the entire structure might fall apart at any moment, but it’s holding.  What at first looks to be balance is no balance at all; it is a struggle, and one wonders why. 

Part Two: Artist
For those of you who like to take it literal, Daniel’s studio is a garage on the outside and a picture perfect shop/studio on the inside.  There is a tool bench and a welder (neatly stored and covered) and a table saw.  There is a false wall that hides one of two garage doors and behind which he keeps plywood and other flat materials.  There is a nice open space (devoid of art work at the moment), gallery style, flanked by two white walls in need of painting for the next round of art making.  There is a little alcove near the door with a  desk and computer and up above of that is a series of old show posters from Deluge and other places.  There is a shelving unit filled with strange and artful objects like lumps of sawdust and glue, and a series of miniature plaster busts (the same man featured in approaching Chartres, DIAN 1865). 
Daniel, himself, is a small but powerful man, quite pale and intense.  He is alert and quick, but, in the most comforting of manners, he occasionally retreats to some place within himself to think.  I felt that there could be a lot left unsaid and that he would still understand; that he, like David Lynch, could and would follow the abstract within the narrative of any conversation.  This is a very good quality.  Aside from the specifics of visiting an artist in his or her studio space (what the space looks like, or how great a host the artist is, and the by the way, Daniel made coffee), it is, I suppose, an opportunity to experience the mind behind the art.  To sit with a person for an hour of two, somewhat quietly, even if you aren’t bombarding one another with piercing questions, is a way of feeling another being in terms of projected energy.  If the work is good, and even if it isn’t actually, it exists entirely independently of the artist once it is completed and installed in a gallery, and theoretically one should not have to visit the artist to understand the art.  But the mind of the artist, even if we’d rather not believe it to be the genesis of the idea, is at least a portal through which the idea has travelled and been shaped, and it’s surprising to me, in my limited experience, to find that the artist and the art often elicit similar responses within me. 
I wanted to ask Daniel personal questions, I wanted to know him emotionally, (I wanted to know if his intentions were the same as my perceptual experience of his work), but there is something behind the helicopter pilot/welder/professor that is undeniably fragile and also, I think, painfully self-aware.  To have pursued a line of questioning beyond “are you married?” would have been obscenely insensitive.  And so we talked about material and space and plans for future material, and in this way, I found myself confronted again with the wall, but this time in the flesh, and it was as nuanced and as complex as it showed itself to be in the gallery. 
He explained to me Barthe’s essay, The Death of the Author, which proposes that in literature, it is the language and the reader’s experience of the language that is of supreme importance; the author being a mere conduit for the language itself.  The writer’s intentions lose shape in the eyes of the reader; the reader is left with the language only.  And obviously this can be true of visual art as well.  In the end, in the gallery, we are left with material, sound and space; this is what speaks to us as we stand gazing, listening, watching.  And so, the artist’s intentions, his emotional being, his philosophical configuring, all of this, diminishes in importance.  It becomes our (the gallery visitor‘s) relationship to the work that matters, and in that there is freedom from doubt (or to freely experience doubt), and further, there is the obliterating force of the wall, behind which the artist can quietly hide. 

christine clark
december 08/10

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http://artinvictoria.com

Shannon Scanlan’s The Blue Room by Debora Alanna

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Shannon Scanlan’s The Blue Room, a sculptural installation at the 50/50 arts collective is not only about the implications of the colour blue. Nor is it only a vacancy, a basic dullish cerulean blue room that we enter. The gallery anteroom or main space becomes the preface to a story, until we chose to cross to the other side. Because Shannon challenges us, creates a narrative with a path to follow, a journey to undertake, a discovery to make.
We need to transverse and duck string strung across the width of the gallery, to follow the prescribed footpath she has demarked. Be in danger of distraction by blatant signage, an Albers-like 2-tone squared centre that encompasses an entire South wall, forcing our diversion from the final destination. If willing, we need to find a channel within the strung string, sectioned for relief or temporary repose. Become frustrated and free when we cross a river of string hung too low for consenting adults to cross without circumventing by stooping, lowering ourselves.
If you remember Antoin Pesvner and those mathematical cohorts of his, we can think of this pink string (pink for contrast in a blue room, the artist says) as a measurement of sorts. Pink is more than a contrast, however. The colour alludes to the pink Pop to come, measuring our tenacity and belief in our (Scanlan’s) narrative. Measuring our willingness to get to the other side. Measuring our compliance to follow a path or forge our own, without breaking the string barrier. Avoiding the trap of staying in the middle reprieve of a wider space between string strung and retreating.
So where are we after our odyssey? Stockholder curtaining brings us into an alcove. Bright with pink lighting and reflective paper cut into rectangular strips splash hot colour and contrast, We are brought to where there is a revelation, a self-discovery of a set of beliefs not quite formed, but felt, a threshold.
Our trek is not quite over. We need to navigate back (yes we must). No longer experiencing an arduous peregrination because we know where we have been, have accomplished tasks to arrive at the consequence of the yarn, we need to leave and reflect on the reflective. Shrewd, The Blue Room is a metaphor for lowered states that will adjunct to another, happier place, with persistence to reroute, even digress. You can see the happy place, but you cannot reach it without belief in your story.

Review by Debora Alanna   - Photos by  Rory Lambert

THE BLUE ROOM
50/50 Art Collective
2516 Douglas St
Victoria BC
19 November – 8 December 2010

Tara Juneau: the Warrior Princess by Christine Clark

In theory:  a talented realist painter most often encountered winning best in show awards at venues like the Sidney Fine Art Show for what are often self-portraits.
In fact:  Tara Juneau lives in Shawnigan Lake, in a little white house somewhere over there.  It’s always difficult to know exactly where you are when you’re the passenger.  It’s too easy just to sit back and look at the passing country side and at the interior of the car and at the hands of the person driving.  She was wearing gloves, I want to say black gloves, but I think they were some kind of red leather, not bright red, more of a classy toned down red.  And cowboy boots.  Once at her house she told me about other mothers she knows who don’t get dressed all day, they just live out their domestic lives in pajamas, and that she does that sometimes too, but that she got dressed that day for me.  And in fact, on the phone the night before I went over to see her, she asked me if I was going to take pictures of her, because if not then she could use the half an hour required to get dressed on some other necessary project.  I hadn’t really thought about a studio visit as a photo shoot and didn’t really know how to answer her other than to say that I was sure she’d look alright regardless, but it worried me.  For me getting dressed is pretty simple, it usually involves a hot bath, some deodorant, some eyeliner, a few bobby pins and preferably something clean to wear.  I wasn’t sure what kind of woman I was going to meet. 
I thought: maybe she’s vain.  I was already kind of thinking that way, before she mentioned the photo shoot, getting dressed thing.  There was a couple of reasons for that but mostly it was to do with this extended conversation I’ve been having with a man I know, not exactly a friend, but someone I know.  This guy, he works as a gardener, and ever since I met him, about 7 years ago or something, he’s been telling me, consciously or not, I don’t know, about this dichotomous attitude he’s got towards art.  He’s seems to be in a constant state of loving it, admiring it, being interested in it, and following it, while at the same time categorically rejecting and minimizing the theories, the people, the scenes, and the forward motion of art.  He, himself, has won at least one award at a Sidney Fine Art show-like venue, but he’s a complicated guy, so who knows?  Anyways, I told him, several weeks ago, about my upcoming visit with Tara Juneau and I sent him a link to her website.  His comments were interesting because they seemed to imply that realism in painting as a modern pursuit was less about a love of painting and more to do with plain, simple (maybe simpleminded) showboating.  Add to this, the implications continued, that many of her paintings are self portraits and conclude that the woman paints for vanity.  It seemed moderately convincing, in spite of the fact that this is a man who claims to be enraged by the Abstract Expressionists (those stalwart victims of war) and who also pointed out that my weak (weaker) paintings were actually more interesting than Juneau’s by virtue of being painterly.  Vanity and more vanity.
As we sat at her kitchen table together, with a bag of salt and vinegar chips between us (snacks she bought, in case I was hungry), Tara answered all of my questions about the validity of realism (if you can believe it) with a steadiness of purpose and eye a bit disconcerting and totally in discord with her age, her big hair and the domestic chaos of her kitchen.  She has a seven year old, a husband and a nervous little dog named Princess.  The pregnancy was unexpected, she was very young by today’s standards to start a family, and she experienced a profound depression over the loss of her youth, but also the loss of her self-vision; that of the vagabond artist, moving from place to place: working, living, experiencing, and that threat (perceived threat) of loss, drove her to study and to perfect her abilities as a draftsman and a painter.  She said that she always knew what she wanted to do.  She believes she is on this planet to paint.  She feels in colour, she loves beauty, she loves to recreate the beauty she sees.  In response to my suggestion that realism is considered by some to be an out dated form of expression she says that opinions are like assholes.  She says she doesn’t give a fuck what other people think. 
In her studio, she’s different.  More like a girl, a beautiful slender girl with the most amazing and infectious laugh.  The seriousness of the kitchen falls away, the stories about people at life drawing who have scorned her skill, who have dismissed her work and her dedication because it’s boring, are forgotten, and instead I see an artist in full possession of her knowledge and her talent.  She explains in meticulous and serene detail the process behind her current still life, which features one of those little wooden boats that kids can make at the Cowichan Bay Marine Center, a white tack, a blue ball, a length of white string and a dried red rose.  She shows me the brush she uses; a great huge brush for such delicate work! And she describes the secret ingredient in her paint additive, which she magics herself using fire, amber and a dead bee.  She shows me her latest self portrait, an almost life-sized nude in an impossible pose, crouching, with her hands across her chest and her head and neck twisted away from the picture plane.   It was painted using mirrors and a colour sketch and I realize that what I am seeing is not at all vanity, it is instead a blazing ambition and discipline. 
I kind of want to sum this all up with some all encompassing critique of the world, especially with the way so many of us (me particularly) are so prone to a self righteous half assed approach.  But probably what I find more interesting is this idea of disdain in art.  The way the man I know could so easily dismiss art seen briefly on a website without any investigation.  The way those people at Tara’s life drawing sessions could dismiss her drawings because they were too life like.  The way so many parts of the whole of Art (yes, with a capital A) are at odds with every other part.  (In Victoria, just think: Robert Amos, but then think why is Robert Amos the way that he is?  In my opinion, he‘s nothing more than a reactionary) There was a time when art was all about realism and only a certain quality of realism (the colours couldn’t be too bright, the brush strokes couldn’t be too evident, the themes needed to be recognizably classical), when the fore fathers and mothers of modern art had to struggle to be recognized as valuable contributors to the ongoing, ever-evolving pluralogue that is art. 
The problem with Tara’s art is that it’s actually more than art, it’s work.  And not the kind of work that says, look here I’ve taken a year’s worth of  beer cans and I’ve cut them up into little pieces and it’s taken a lot of work, ie. time and repetitive action.  (I know someone who has been doing this).    And it’s not the kind of work that says look here how I’ve collected and sometimes purchased all these Styrofoam drinking cups and then how I crushed each one just a little and then used these twist ties to hold them all together in this teetering white pile that is sort of reminiscent of the way we Westerners like to treat everything like garbage.  That’s not to say that a pile of Styrofoam or a wall’s worth of aluminum pieces isn’t a beautiful thing because often it is, very much so, but it’s more a question of active disdain for learning, studying and practicing a skill.  I mean this is so offhand, it’s just a matter of a thinking as I go kind of opinion, but I know the life drawing group that Tara has attended and a lot of those people are older, retired folk who think that working hard at life drawing means 2 and ½ hours of drawing a week!  That’s not work.  That’s self expression, but barely.  This is the problem, and keep in mind that I’m writing from the perspective of a person who has lived and studied in Victoria for 20 years, so when I‘m thinking about art, I‘m thinking about art in Victoria, but anyways the problem of realism (and that’s a catch all phrase which should probably be more definitive) in painting is that the people making beer can art and Styrofoam art, people who are often very serious about art and about thinking about art, see pursuits like life drawing, which is supposed to be, at least in theory, a way of training the eye and learning to see, as sort of old fashioned and unnecessary, after all there’s digital photography and projectors, while the people who actually see value in the process of drawing and painting from life are too busy going for lunch and potlucks to really take the discipline seriously. 
What I am suggesting is that people like Tara Juneau, and others, like Noah Layne, for instance, who are working in the realist style and who are committed and dedicated to their work, have something to offer to the serious discussion going on in art, on a conceptual level (if that isn’t too archaic a phrase).  The kinds of work I referred to in the last paragraph, work which is using and reusing the refuse of consumerism, obviously relates to questions about us, and how we live and what it means to be a human in terms of  spirituality, economics, and biology.  There is a lot of this kind of work being made right now, maybe not always materially the same, but the questions are similar.  The trend is to use art as a platform from which to explore the social and philosophical issues of the day.  I’m saying that the discipline and the commitment required to skillfully create realist images with paint and brushes is as important a concept as any other.  Discipline and commitment.  Think about what that means, especially in relation to some of the other issues of the day.  I mean, how do we change the world?  How do we resist the powers that be when we need to resist them (and I think we need to resist)?  How do we stop ourselves from buying any plastic piece of shit that we want, how do we limit our oil consumption, how do we live a life without hurting others? 
Tara Juneau is a pretty straight forward person, I think.  She’s passionate about technique and meticulous in her practice, and for her, intelligent conversations about art do not include a whole lot of bullshit. 
So, I’m gonna stop now. 

-- 
http://artinvictoria.com/

Aliza Souleyeva-Alexander by Debora Alanna

Kazakhstan born artist Aliza Souleyeva-Alexander imports alluring colour and direct iconography into lush jewels that delve into personally representative universal icons to feed our hunger for meaning. Her persuasive explorations saturate our senses while touching our deeper longing for connectivity. Introspective insights address our trust in her guides to ancient depths of significance. Souleyeva-Alexander’s captivating work enables us to welcome her pictorial stories as verity.
“Bird’s Tales” Paintings explores narratives of how the artist relates to bird myth and legend (Raven Steals the Light), aphorisms that originate from sincere expectation, like the Russian saying, “Magpie has brought news on its tail.” (Conversation with Flamingo) and develops inspired corollary from experiences with birds (Second Night in Kolkata). Homage to art-historical references is unapologetic. Souleyeva-Alexander embraces ominous Rousseau mysteries and widens colour with Matisse joy. “Bird’s Tales” are allegories of pathos and enchantment, captive natures caught in charming fields.

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"Aliza 2010" New Works, a visual diary of a year in the artist’s life begins with the winter months on Vancouver Island. Strands of greyed pink and blue rain-beads (Conjunction between Dichotomy and Duality) and triangular, redemptive flags flying in a gratuitous space (Liberation from Formality) or contained arrangement of expectant promise (Hidden Possibilities) interrupt murky washes. In March 2010, Souleyeva-Alexander traveled to Kolkata, West Bengal, India for the "AVISKAR - East meets West" exhibition at the Birla Academy of Arts and Culture. Her work continues to be impacted by this cultural immersion, explodes in influence from the sensory deluge and complex Indian street life. The previous wary ruminations look like memorials, comparatively. A resurgence of her powerful, multi-layered colour palate surges capturing disturbing portrayals – child beggars, the drudgery of rural life. Souleyeva-Alexander mesmerizes us with the intoxication of sultry crimsons and lemony ochre, brilliant indigo, enticing us into the dolorous circumstances and contradictions that entirely signify this cultural paradox. (Morning in Calcutta) is a sophisticated layering of paint and pictograph, harkening to Souleyeva-Alexander’s roots in traditional grattography. Scratching paint, she produces edgy drawing. This grattographic convention provokes the surface. Her pictograms fortify the resonance of bazaar life, remarking on how animals, objects, symbols are remote, illusory yet integral to social convention. Integrated surface dances, conversant with ambiguity and mystique of that locale. (Meditation on Geranium) slathers intoxicating purple and alizarin crimson-like hues, while quietly contemplating her musical past, pasted behind the paint, a formidable memory. Through Souleyeva-Alexander’s paintings, we see a sincere understanding of life fabric, painted with an understated force.

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"Bird's Tales" Paintings
Goward House - 2495 Arbutus Road, Victoria, BC (PH: 250.477.4401):
1 Oct - 3 Nov 2010
"Aliza 2010" New Works
Gallery at The Mac - 625 Fisgard Street Victoria, BC:
18 Oct - 22 Nov 2010
Gallery hours: during performances or by appointment (PH: 250.361.0800)
Review by Debora Alanna

Emilio Portal- “Honouring The Spirit” by Christine Clark

It was raining and the cityscape was black and wet and studded with points of light: traffic light, street light, windows. Down below the dull concrete gradually receded to nothing in the night. Only the faint shapes of the white carpet cleaning vans remained visible. Under the yellow security lights of the balcony we were dry and warm. By the time the artist took his place centre stage, there were about 30 people, mostly young and damp, and crowded into an imperfect semi-circle in the narrow confines of the balcony.
The balcony belongs to Xchanges and is not the first place one would think of in regards to an art gallery. It is long and narrow and painted yellow, with faux stone accents. People often show up at opening nights frustrated and sweaty because it’s difficult to find. It doesn’t have any street front; on the Government Street side, it’s behind what used to be a furniture store and on the Douglas Street side it’s behind the DQ, but you have to take the driveway beside the DQ’s driveway to find your way in.
The one thing the balcony does have is a truly incredible view of the city. On a sunny day, the sky is huge and blue and the whole of downtown Victoria is there to see. The Blue Bridge and the Bay centre roof, the Clock Tower, the 7up sign and the hotels over on the Songhees. Some people even claim to see the Empress. Closer in you can see the industrial activity up on Bay Street, the gravel trucks and the bleached out machine shapes. Down below is a concrete courtyard full of cars and busy people coming and going, delivering and cleaning and working. It’s cheerful.
There are a few trees visible, a line of hardwoods living in holes in the sidewalk along Government Street and right now the leaves are in the early stages of turning red. They might be poplars but they’re not the trees that once lived where the city now rules. Mostly it’s all brick and concrete with a few empty wild looking lots. No sign of what used to be before this land became, first, Fort Victoria and then eventually just Victoria, and a victim of dominance.
It is for what used to be (and what is still there) that Emilio Portal made a cajon to play on the balcony last night. A cajon performance to honour the spirit of the forest. Historians believe that the cajon first came into existence in Peru in the 1800’s, made by Spanish owned slaves forbidden to possess musical instruments. The cajon is a box-like instrument and was easily fashioned from discarded shipping crates or ubiquitous household items, like dresser drawers, and could be easily disguised as just more of the same. It is a profoundly poetic act, to play the instrument of the dominated, the enslaved, in honour of a forest, once thick and tall, and ending only at the ocean, now destroyed utterly.
A few months ago, when Emilio’s performance was still in the planning stages, I was invited to visit him in his studio at UVic. The studios are small but private. He had a table in there and a window, two chairs and a wall full of shelving units. We talked about television and the way that TV has made entertainment something to be watched rather than something to be organized and acted. He showed me a photo of an old Indian man in traditional clothes that he’d saturated in beeswax. On the top of the shelves, circling half of the studio, there was a line of flattened pizza boxes, grease side out. It was a slight shock to realize that they were pizza boxes; at first I thought he’d made the grease circles, or that they were a part of his beeswax work.
On one shelf he had stacks of dirty 2x4’s, some of which he’d planed down to reveal beautiful wood. He showed me one piece, he said it was mahogany, that had been used briefly for pallets and then discarded roadside for firewood. It is this reclamation of beauty and also usefulness that seems so essential to Emilio’s work and his thinking. It is not about recycling as in collecting the bright and colourful detritus of the consumer world and imbuing it with artfulness. It is not about reusing earth destroying plastics and polyurethanes; it is about remembering the natural gifts, the wood, the water, the earth and our abilities to use those gifts, our natural talents. It is about reaching out and bringing back to life the ideas, the gentleness, and the spirituality that precede the consumer world as we know it, the dominating world as we know it. It is a show of respect for making and keeping and being.
The drumming began quietly, and unannounced. People stood on the balcony together talking and laughing, in the dark but out of the rain, eating some of the meal prepared by Emilio’s soon-to-be bride, when suddenly he very simply straddled his cajon and began to play. Everyone gathered around, watching and listening and waiting for revelation. And the drumming, although gentle, did take us to a place beyond the city. The yellow security lights became firelight, the darkness breathed of Douglas fir and silence. The drumming turned into a heart beat. A steady strong heart beating, there. When it stopped we were left with silence, the silence of cars passing in the wet night. No one spoke, no one moved. We were quiet together, for a few brief moments, together.
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Closer:Proximities and Perimeters by Sarah Stein, written by Christine Clark

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Today I was invited to visit an artist, and a student, who has just finished her summer residency at Camosun College.  Her name is Sarah Stein.   Her work, created over the course of the last 3 months in Camosun's sculpture studio, has been available for viewing, as they say, for the past 3 days.  Tonight is the official celebration party, an opening and closing all in one.   Later, in October, a part or parts of the whole will be reinstalled in the school's  library.
Although it seems most vile to write about the machinations of the artistically studious variety, it appears that Sarah Stein has something special about her.  She is interesting to certain people in Victoria who consider themselves to be in the know.  The invitation to see her work did not come from Sarah herself, but from a rather well known personality in the art scene, a personality who seems to harbour an artful snobbery in regards to the makers of art.  Or perhaps it's more accurate to say the makers of art that this individual considers to be beneath contempt, unworthy of attention, and utterly despicable.  Sarah Stein appears to be none of these things.
In all fairness, I would never, in a million years ever write that Sarah's work was beneath contempt, unworthy of attention or utterly despicable, even, if, indeed, it was.  No, no.  What I will say is that I've seen very similar looking work created by other artists.  There was a strong sense of the familiar about the installation, but that is not uncommon, I think, especially among students who are generally in the process of learning, exploring, testing, pushing, and reworking.  And, although the conceptual angle seemed to swirl around some particularly typical concerns, (love & loss, surrender & control) I was struck by a certain complex and alluring thoughtfulness, especially in relation to a series of ready made cardboard houses.
My physical experience, in brief, was that, on entering the dimly lit gallery space the first object in view was a small glowing tv sitting on a chair (possibly the tv could have been a different size and perhaps the chair could have been more or less domestic, who knows?).  A little ways away was a paper rainbow road leading to and continuing around the corner of a wall.  By following the road, I found a well-ordered and perfectly uniform neighbourhood of cardboard houses, in miniature. By turning the corner, I passed in front of a sensor, which activated a double, outdoor, security- style light fixture.  This in turn activated a digi-cam duct taped to the wall, at which point, the image of the neighbourhood could be seen on that small glowing tv, but the neighbourhood and the tv could not be viewed at the same time by the same person.
Essentially, the neighbourhood does not exist unless it is under scrutiny via security cameras, lights and tv's.  Otherwise, it sits quietly in its little alcove, in the dark, unvisited and unknown.  It suggests all kinds of ideas about the secret lives of people living in the neat, conformity driven suburbs that our friends the developers are always building for us.  Yes, everyone has a pink house and a lawn and a single flowering plum tree, but are we all the same inside?  Can we, the people, be made as neat and tidy as a freshly seeded, freshly paved housing development?
And what is the role of tv?  Tv for watching, and for watching the people.  The dream of security is keeping everything neat and tidy just like a brand new subdivision where all the blackberries and the little stands of woods and the bushy ditches have been plowed away.  If everyone is watched, if all the action is lighted up, if all the confusion is cleared away, then everyone will be accountable, everyone will think twice, everyone will behave.  But not inside of the houses.  Security hasn't found its way in there yet.  The secrets are still there, in there.   Except that the tvs are in there too.  The dual purpose of tv; to watch and to watch.  But also to subdue and to control.  People who are busy sitting and watching the glowing tv are neat and tidy, they are in one place.  Subversions and diversions don't come from them, they don't create entertainment; they are entertained.  They are disempowered and sitting in front of the tv, watching.  As long as no one really cares what happens in the houses, the people don't really need to be watched at all.  They are under control.
It's funny that I started off this post, thinking not so much about Sarah's work, as about Sarah's burgeoning success as a young artist.  Many years ago, I read a book about women in arts, I think it was called Mistress, and I will never forget reading in that book a theory about the ways in which women are awarded success in the arts.  The theory stated that women most adept at being easily guided, taught and controlled were most likely to be encouraged by teachers and other people in positions of authority.  In other words, talent and brilliance and vision in women was not as important in the arts as a woman's malleability.  I have seen evidence of this in my own roamings, although I won't, for the sake of tact, name any names, and so I must admit that I went to see this young woman's work, this student's work, with some suspicion, a feeling which deepened immeasurably when I saw that  a small poster advertising her show featured, not an image of her art work, but a photograph of her pretty face.
After some consideration, however, I have come to the conclusion that the near thoughtless fawning of self-appointed authority over someone young and sweet-tempered should not be a hindrance to my enjoyment of the careful talent on display.  Nor should it turn me away from encouraging another woman to stay an ambitious path.  I think, though, that self -appointed authority will reward and encourage any moderately capable girl with talent and intelligence just as long as she smiles sweetly and keeps her mouth relatively silent.   So my advice is:  Be careful of the approval.  I suspect it could become sticky like a trap.  Women and art need freedom to thrive.  So stay free.

http://artinvictoria.com/

Helen Rogak by Christine Clark

The lady pictured above is Helen Rogak.  Helen just recently had a show of paintings at the Community Arts Council.  I went to see her show with Brian Grison, formerly of Focus magazine.  Why formerly is anyone's guess because Victoria needs Brian Grison.  Without him, it's just Robert Amos and Amanda Farrell and me.  Unfortunately a lot of us are pretty conventional and still believe that a writer has got to be in the pocket of Black Press or some other conglomerate to be legit.  So, that leaves me out.  But Brian shouldn't be out.  He's knowlegeable about art and he's well known at all the galleries.  These are good qualities, especially the part about being well known.   Also he introduced me to Helen.  Actually he tried to organize a group meet at the CACGV, but because of Mercury and Mars or some such configuration, there was a problem with communication and travel and the end result was that Helen and Brian met and talked for several hours about Helen's paintings.
About a week later, I was invited to visit Helen at her home studio.  And I went.  And it wasn't at all scary or nerve wracking or uncomfortable or awkwardly silent.  It's difficult though to remark on my experience because it was so different from what I suppose I had expected.  I definitely had some preconceived notions about a lady painter living and working out in North Saanich.  First off, the very concept of painter is so old fashioned and useless.  I don't know why this is exactly, but it seems that most of the hip galleries in Victoria almost never show paintings.  Everything is installation and experiential.  When they do show painting it's a kind of anti-painting.  The problem maybe is the sheer numbers of lady and gentlemen painters working in home studios in places like North Saanich.  There is a lack of discernment about what it means to be a painter.  Anyone who can struggle for two weeks to almost accurately portray a rowboat on a beach can and does claim the right to call him or herself a painter.
Second, I think that I have what is a stupid and ingrained contempt for women in art.  There's a name for that; it happens to gay people too.  Or so I've read.  In my case, it would be internalized misogyny.  As I grow older, nearly 40, I notice that in fact men are often preferred to women, and not for any reason that I can tell.  This is true in art.  I've noticed it, nothing scientific of course, but I've noticed that men's art seems to be better represented and more likely to be praised and written about than women's art.  And it's true on a larger social scale as well.  Women in politics for instance.  The things that people say about Elizabeth May for instance.  She's ugly, or she's fat or she' s a know-it-all, or she's in it for the money.  All the while she's probably one of the most brilliantly strategic and self sacrificing people in Canadian history.  She takes the train across the country for Christ sake.  On a regular basis.   But the point is that when we live in the firing line of disdain, we are bound to absorb some of that poison and we are certain to begin to think, maybe just a little, that yeah women artists are a bore.
So with all that insidiousness in my brain I was reluctant and uncertain about what I would find in the company of Helen Rogak.  I thought maybe dog portraits or soft renderings, but that was foolish because the reality that is Helen is a complex and intelligent human being,  and also very funny and earnest and sweet.  She told me that over the years she has become unafraid of eyes seeing her work or of tongues commenting on her decisions.  She said that through painting she has explored every part of herself, that she knows herself completely.  She has come to accept herself and most interesting she has come in part to bear herself.   To bear the parts of herself she can not like.
I've never heard anyone say anything like that.
http://artinvictoria.com

Video 

John Luna & Tyler Hodgins –The Storage Room and The Corridor by Debora Alanna

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Tyler Hodgins and John Luna collaboratively manoeuvre us into The Storage Room & The Corridor.
In the front alcove of the gallery, Hodgins fills the space with fresh, factory new square boxes, compiled into various heights, substantially 8 x 8 feet, building towers of possibility. He structures a convenient, operative corridor surround that allows us to peek into the stacks of his deliberate, interconnected modules.
Presented mostly hanging on a wall we meet as we enter the gallery, some in verso and Corridor, suspended without a wall in the adjacent fore space, Luna’s fervent apertures rede delineation. His paintings consume the picture plane with demonstrative sculptural enquiry. Intensity stored, Luna develops a repository of vigilance and poetry, a passageway to disorienting eruptions of entrenched, rasping colour and paroxysmal form.
Hodgins’ work exudes purity and sanguine optimism. Fresh cardboard smells generate cheerful hope with pervasive buoyancy. The boxes are open and await the containment of apposite venture. Sturdily housing the unknown, Hodgins projects alternative echelons of endeavour, intuitively mounted. A companion drawing with the structure inverted is a reflection of his anticipated vision. Hodgins’ converse stance is a playful Gaudi – like preconstruction edifice that cantilevers above to readdress our perspective – transposes the cloistered storeroom to the spiritual attic where prodigious heights amplify qualified space.
Hodgins system of organization and structure can be envisioned using the Bachelard sensibility in the Poetics of Space: “Bachelard uses the physical characteristics of the house in his phenomenological "topoanalysis" to show the house as metaphor for the self...” ([1]) Reflecting on the storeroom in a house, Hodgins Storeroom as self is a system of harmonious, methodical interactions. References and comparisons to artists with cube discovery, like Sol Lewitt - “The system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the system. The visual aspect can't be understood without understanding the system. It isn't what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance.” ([2]) or Rachel Whiteread’s appreciation through the "universal quality of the box" ([3]), we find that Hodgins is in good company. He projects his ‘self’ through a configuration of boxes that are patient, unperturbed, and rhythmic. His unhurried composition generates reassuring repose. The luxury of choice (varying heights of box towers) inspires and relieves. Hodgins’ site-specific work acquaints us with the present, imparting a sense of freedom, existing at least for the duration of this exhibition.
Luna provides means of access to what we struggle to know. Intrepid poetry, each work gnaws and squeezes, crushes and substantiates with colour, paper, canvas, wax, wire. He encloses and reframes, edging toward pugnacious rebellion. Sometimes we see the abstracted picture plane; and unpredictably, the ‘verso’. The face copes, allowing the verso to exist in raw aggression and aversion or painful beauty and mystic ardour (Lakeshore). With subverted grays drawing a reluctant closure or finality (Window) and marked scoring, with the eclipse of overpowering vision (Corridor), Luna penetrates fear. Incisions haemorrhage on the reverse (1000 Hrs Later [The Pulmonary Artery - Verso]), ruminating and rebelling; he aligns with disruptive banality (Sign – Verso). “To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!” ([4]) Luna’s forthright, rousing accounts consistently assert intense orchestral passion.
Luna’s deference to Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns leads us to understand a history of material manipulation, a Combine. ([5]) However, there is more intuitive handling by Luna, more reverberation tempered by arch vigour. “...allow that the instances of so many things coming together in so rough a way generates its own patina, one that retroactively, inexplicably, forms its own history, legend of beginning, and underlying yield of truth.” ([6]) This quote from Luna’s essay, Pedestrian Colour strategizes one of his working premises. We are permitted long looks into his rationale; his candour supersedes legend of beginning, as his accession to truth is the result of years of investigation, creating an ominous pathos as patina.
Each composition converges and evolves. Suspended thoughts strain and progress, disconnect and refine, elegantly and unpredictably touch and alight significance. “It is true, sometimes the genius loves the strange shapes, but the thinker can read in its arcane figures, discern and know the emphasis of the verse that creates fantastic lightning from a sublime idea.” ([7]) Luna’s work embodies obdurate, audacious perseverance, tenacious investigative prowess, sometimes taking years to perfect the work. He undertakes the protracted risk we impatiently dread and shows us the results that coursing time allows. Luna supplants with cumulative abandon.
Hodgins amassed congress provides furtive circumnavigation where the surrounding corridor keeps activity around the work undisclosed. Privacy, cornering secrecy prevails. Hodgins storeroom monolith creates a welcome isolation. Trusting in the liberating cache, a consequence of his spatial construct, Hodgins affords participants a contracted, reliable retreat.
Luna’s mindscapes are extroverted sanctuaries where he harbours and dissuades, considers and demarcates consuming provocation and impulsion, proliferates in the privacy of introspection. "While working I have never thought of the theme of solitude. I have absolutely no intention of being an artist of solitude. Moreover, I must add that as a citizen and a thinking being I believe that all life is the opposite of solitude, for life consists of a fabric of relations with others...” ([8]) We can consider Luna in relation to Giacometti’s riposte regarding Existentialist readings of his work. Luna has the propensity to exude his acute discernment of life’s interactions and we benefit from his sincerity.
The Storage Room & The Corridor is a concerted endeavor. Concurrently, two distinct views of space and time cohesively thrive to showcase concord. The unrelenting, askew squares of painted planar distortions echo unruffled cubed boxes. We see the void of unknown prospects residing along vistas of confrontation. Both artists exhibit authenticity, which binds them. Veracity accumulates and disclosures of new conduits of understanding merge. Hodgins and Luna work in paradoxical alliance.
Tyler Hodgins & John Luna
The Storage Room & The Corridor
16 July - 14 August 2010
Deluge Art Gallery - Victoria BC

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[1] Joan Ockman reviews The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard via http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/back/6books_ockman.html [Feb 2005]
[2] http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/archived/2010/kaldor_projects/projects/1977_sol_lewitt
[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4326462.stm
[4] Louis Ferdinand Celine (French writer and physician, 1894-1961)
[5] http://www.lightmillennium.org/2006_17th/rrauschenberg_met.html
[6] John Luna. Pedestrian Colour: http://www.slideroomgallery.com/PEDESTRIAN%20COLOUR%20Essay.pdf
[7] Poesie e novelle in versi, by Ferdinando Fontana, 1877: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/9642
[8] P. Selz, New Images of Man, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959, p. 11