Dropped into Polychrome and found Shawn Shepherd looking
happy. So he should. He’s been dealing with some healthy sales. Not a huge
amount of money by Gagosian standards perhaps but a ringing endorsement of
Polychrome and the Kelly Green Collective show ‘100 @ 100’.
The gallery is packed full of life and energy. A vibrant
mix of collage and paint.The worksthemselves range from casual and sketchy to
heavily worked and give an overall impression of spontaneous unbridled
creation. Clearly a lot of quick decision making was involved and the result is
averitable cornucopia of striking paintings.
There’s a lot going on here. Wry comments on art
history Picasso, Gertrude Stein and our
own Emily Carr, there are references to pop stars and writers and I think I
spotted a few digs at popular culture, hipsters and vegans, drum circles,
beards, perhaps evendistressed jeans and Kardashians wearing nude body suits in
there too. Or did I imagine some of those things? No matter. There’s certainly
a lot of imagery that stays in the mind after leaving the gallery. Green and
Kelly obviously had fun making these paintings and it shows.Some of the best
pieces haven’t been sold btw.
I stopped in at Xchanges on the way home and I was
delighted to find the building as ugly and strange as ever. It hasn’t yet been
torn down to build condos. Inside I was met by Sandra Doore who was happy to
show me her work mostly based onhandwritten text. I remember another show
Sandra had at Xchanges. I may even have
written about it. Amorphous shapes impaled on chrome poles? Some kind of sexual
statement? It created quite a stir at the time.
Anyway Sandra bounced back from that and her current show
deals with ‘texting and the effect
it has on the human psyche’. She tells me how the show came about. It began she
says when she was sending text messages to her son and he kept misunderstanding
her. It’s because the tone was missing she thinks. She found she needed to fall
back on emojis to show that she meant well. Hence the title of the show
‘Untitled - Lost in Translation III’.
But there’s more to it than that. Sandra
finds beauty in being lost. In writing lists of acronyms she found that the
words took on their own aesthetic possibilities. So in a sense her work is an
exploration of the need to create and the compulsion to communicate ones
findings. This of course relates to the times we live in and our dependence on
technological means for immediate connection.
Textese, txt-speak and all the platforms that make a
whole new language possible; hashtags Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp have all evolvedby
and for compulsive communicators and those among us who feel the need to
broadcast a running commentary of our lives. Much like what I’m doing now in
fact, but I’ve got a good excuse.
What is texting doing to us? Well apparently we talk less. Parents talk
less to their children and texting has caused quite a few traffic accidents.
But we can’t uninvent it so it’s here to stay. Maybe the novelty is wearing off
for some people but there is always another generation coming along who have
grown up with digital devices. For them cellphones and ipads are perfectly
normal,even indispensable, equipment. It will be hard to wean them and harder
still to invent a replacement. Anything short of extrasensory perception won’t
cut it.
Ever the gadfly I ask Sandra if she uses these tools herself.
She admits that she does. In fact she feels she is just beginning her
exploration.She is aware of the irony but not of any conflict. Sure a lot of it
may be useless babble but these are the times we live in, she says,
communicating and belonging are part of being alive. She has a point.
It was an interesting afternoon. Worth fighting my way
through the traffic.Roy Green, PJ Kelly and Sandra Doore certainly provided plenty of
food for thought. But that’s enough art for today. It’s stopped raining. Time
to do some gardening. B4N
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