Carollyne Yardley at Deluge Contemporary Art

Jennet Thomas at Deluge Contemporary Art

James Lindsay - Lance Austin Olsen at Deluge Contemporary Art

James Lindsay

I reviewed a show of James Lindsay and Lance Olsen at Deluge Contemporary Art
in 2016 and managed to upset a few people by mentioning death. There was more than
a whiff of big D in that show to my mind but talking about it was seen for some
reason as negative. In an age when skulls are everywhere, as tattoos, T-shirts,bumper
stickers etc. and we seem to live with constant reminders of the end of times, it's
surprising that it would cause such alarm. Monty Python even made jokes about it.

But we must remind positive and this is Victoria where we need to read gently which
makes art reviewing especially difficult. It's ok for Jonathan Jones in London and
Jerry Saltz in New York to say pretty much whatever comes into their mindsbut 77
years old unpaid provincial dilettantes like myself must choose our words carefully.
You are on safe ground with comments like "Great Show", "Strong work", and "Great use
of colour". But beyond that it's a minefield some thoughts are best kept to ourselves.

Sorry about that. My mind wanders. Fortunately Lindsay and Olsen have done it again
with separate shows at Deluge Contemporary Art so I get a chance to redeem myself.
This time the overall feeling is upbeat without any overt hints of mortality. 'The state
of things (in two parts)" is billed as continuation and evolution of the previous
pairing, 'hide in plain sight' but the shows may just as well be a testament of the
rejuvenating power of art.

Apart for both being UK transplants in their later years with strong personalities
Lindsay and Olsen don't seem to have a lot in common. Perhaps there are faint echoes
of per-conceptualist British art schools in their respective styles but time and distance
have made them difficult to discern.

Lindsay presents a suite of 19 new paintings that "document our contentment with the
unpalatable parts per million in our nature". This paintings are a harmonious fusion of
abstraction and landscape suggesting any conflict between nature and intellect may have
been at least partially resolved. His environmental concerns are obvious and the
paintings clearly represent the increasingly critical relationship between humanity and
the planet we live on. Mountains and forests struggle with the pipelines and oil spills
but the paintings themselves are bright, lively and colourful as if the artist has
succeeded in finding some hope in the precarious state of things.

Olsen's work comes across at first sight as pure abstraction. There are no obvious
figurative reference points, viewers are free to provide their own, and almost seems to
defy any kind of analysis of definition. But, just my opinion of course, there is no escaping
the language of expressionism. It's the compulsion with which Olsen works that tells the
story. The paintings he has chosen to show are mostly monochromatic but highly
emotive and loaded with a finely balanced tension. His output is enormous and what
may seem repetitive is actually in constant state of flux. Each painting is a mark of
passage. The paintings and prints are complemented by "Plato's cave" a sound work
composed of guitar, fields recordings, stones and assorted objects scored from dry-point
plates.

Certainly is continuation here but to what extend has the work evolved ? When in doubt
ask the artist.

James Lindsay: "It all evolved over the last 18 months. Oil spills and pipelines have been
much on my mind.I guess you could say it started with a small leak and spread outwards".

Lance Olsen: "Evolution ? How the **** would I know? I just keep working.There's so
much work to do. I had to sort through 500 paintings to pick out 12. It's always evolving".

We live in interesting times. Missiles are flying over Syria and World War 3 can start at
any minute.Ordinary folk have not a lot of say in the matter. Will Lindsay's warnings
go unheeded or will Kinder Morgan get their new pipeline?
Olsen distrusts words and reduces them to sound and symbols. A lot of physical and mental
energy has gone into these shows."Lindsay and Olsen are both at an age that death is no
longer an abstraction" (their words) and they both agree that careerism is an anathema
to life. Neither artist shows any sign of slowing down however and it will be interesting
to see where they go from here.

Philip Willey

The State of Things (in two parts)
Deluge Contemporary Art
March 17 to May 5, 2018

Lance Olsen

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 

Neil McClelland at Deluge Contemporary Art

Neil McClelland at Deluge Contemporary Art. Feb 3rd – Mar 4th. 2017 by Philip Willey

Neil McClelland is originally from Quebec and he graduated with an MFA from Victoria University where he now teaches sessionally. He also teaches at the Vancouver Island School of Art. 

I first saw his paintings at Open space in a show called ‘Realities, Follies’ curated by Lynda Gammon and Wendy Welch and remember being impressed. In that show McClelland took the opportunity to explore the historical relationship of Cezanne’s bathers to the kind of snapshots people like to take on beaches. There was nothing irreverent about the paintings but it was obvious that Cezanne was getting updated. 

A similar attitude towards history was evident in a series of paintings shown at Vernon Gallery in 2014. In this show McClelland dealt with the way we perceive art works in a gallery setting “….exploring connections and disconnections between the art historical tradition and contemporary, digitally-mediated visual culture”. ‘Approaching Rembrandt’ seems to encapsulate his intentions i.e. it’s not the actual painting that is central but the approach. In conversation he talks a lot about perception…..or how the way we see works of art defines who we are.

Being confronted by McClelland’s work in his Fisgard Street studio I was struck by the unreality. There’s an elusive strangeness that made me think of Peter Doig. The work is figurative but other-worldly. It’s a distortion of reality but not without an underlying meaning, familiar but remote.  Like Doig, McClelland takes a painterly approach. Take ‘The Ancient Sickness of Dreams’ for instance, a tropical setting clearly but where? For some reason it reminds me of a scene from Paul Theroux’s ‘Mosquito Coast’. ‘In the West the Sky Contracted’ shows a burning building, horses, a truck, that evoke ‘Black Beauty’ by Anna Sewell.

These are personal memories of course. Our minds are full of them waiting to be triggered. In fact the horses are a truckload of statues the artist saw during the fire in Edmonton. He uses photographs but photographic reality is superseded by the painting process. But what to make of ‘The Wild State of Freedom’ where we see some sort of oneiric procession, suited figures bearing a panoply around an arena that could be BC Place, ….  what does it mean? Or ‘The Beneficent Net’ with semi-nude people surrounding some kind of fishing net? What strange catch have they made? ‘Everything is Being Perfected’ shows humans interacting with nature, young men amusing themselves with turtles (though the turtles don’t seem to be having much fun).These are symbols beneath which we sense, but can’t quite pinpoint, some universal absolutes. 

There is a consistency to these paintings. They are intriguing precisely because they aren’t explicit and the political references aren’t overstated. Aesthetics and dialectics are finely balanced. In conversation McClelland talks about Utopia and Dystopia, philosophical issues that lie beneath our everyday concerns, as being inherently political. He sees the act of imagining futures as a political act. The paintings engage with the problems of our times and our hopes for the future but in a subtle way. Something is wrong in paradise. There’s a rift between culture and nature. An ominous crack in the earth is forming next to what appears to be a tranquil painting of a swimming pool.

It’s the possibility of human perfectibility that interests him he says, optimism and pessimism being two sides of the same coin, which prompts me to ask if he is optimistic. Well he isn’t gloomy he says though the omens aren’t great. Global warming, pollution, competition for resources, super-power rivalry, a general feeling of malaise. These are anxious times and we certainly have a way to go before we reach Utopia. Dystopia is much more likely. Nevertheless there is always the possibility of new beginnings.

Time, existence, human survival, these are major themes and most of the works are correspondingly large in scale. There’s nothing timid about them. These aren’t paintings that were made for quick sale. McClelland is aiming higher than that. But the paintings at Deluge aren’t just physically large they are large in scope. Perhaps even museum caliber. It would be interesting to see how they measure up to broader exposure. Neil McClelland is energetic and ambitious so hopefully one day we will find out.

Neil McClelland at Deluge Contemporary Art

Everything is Being Perfected
Neil McClelland

Opening Friday, February 3, 7pm @
Deluge Contemporary Art

My current body of paintings explores tensions between utopic and dystopic visions. I inquire into notions of human happiness and perfectibility, the creation of Edenic paradises, disruption and dissolution of society, alienation and consumption, nature and culture, the monstrous and the beautiful, myth-making and storytelling. I am especially drawn to the title of Paul Gauguin’s painting "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" as evoking crucial questions for contemporary examination. I take imagery and inspiration from literature and film, along with art historical, historical, contemporary and personal sources. Drawing on an array of source material, I create combinations and layers of digitally edited compositions that form the basis for beginning a painting in oil.

Rachel Vanderzwet at Deluge Contemporary Art

Jutai Toonoo at Madrona Gallery

Jutai Toonoo
November 5 - 18, 2016 

Deluge Contemporary Art 

Rachel Vanderzwet at Deluge Contemporary Art - 2016

Rachel Bangels

Rachel Vanderzwet
Nov. 11 to Dec.10, 2016 




Approaching her practice with curiosity and a desire to explore the complexity and allure of contemporary visual culture, Vanderzwet is drawn to source imagery often fraught with what she terms “bubble gum” qualities. Her work is bright and cheeky, loud and alluring, energetic and humorous, but it never loses touch with the the quotidian and familiar. The surfaces of her paintings and large scale mediated collages flirt with the edges of recognition, engaging in a playful negotiation of material, composition and subject matter which is sometimes fully realized and at other times falls into abstraction. Vanderzwet’s layered compositions offer the viewer the possibility of untangling her unabashed and engaging surfaces while simultaneously creating further intrigue through her sure-handed manipulation of colour, material and form.