Ehren Salazar and GJ Pearson at Dales Gallery

Ehren Salazar and GJ Pearson at Dales gallery

GJ Pearson and Denise Nicholls at Dales Gallery

GJ Pearson interviewed by Philip Willey, April 2013.

 
‘What and who we are today is the reflected, accumulated, and re-reflected summation of our experiences.  The art that I make is not only a recapitulative outpouring of my own past; it is also a retelling and revision of it.  I like to work as a persona, as someone who doesn’t necessarily belong in this time, but with materials that are of this time.  The material itself, being not universally malleable, helps me in my interpretations by influencing the final form of the work.’ Gj Pearson, artist’s statement. 

We sit in GJ Pearson’s studio which is crammed with bizarre and interesting objects, sculptural works and drawings that range from the whimsical to the macabre. We talk about art, life in general, and the difficulties of being an artist in Victoria. Selling art these days is hard we agree but we also note that things could be much worse. Art just isn’t a priority for most people but that’s true pretty much everywhere. Maybe people just don’t have the money these days. Or the ones that do are investing in the Kitimat Refinery.
Still Victoria is a pleasant place to live and things are happening. Not always in an obvious way but artists are surviving if not thriving. Falling back on New Age wisdom we decide that it is what it is. 

We also agree about feeling uncomfortable with video interviews. 

PW. OK…no camera. So what motivates you to make art GJ? 

GJP. I want to create things that don’t exist. Also seeing beautiful things makes me want to be involved. 

PW. There’s a lot of humour in your work. The wings for instance look like brave attempts to get airborne. They seem to fit somewhere between Icarus and the Wright Brothers. 

GJP. The humour is inevitable I think. I can’t get away from the absurdity of life. Also it’s an outlet for my frustration with the world. I’m pushing back at the seriousness everywhere. 

PW. Satirizing? 

GJP. If you like. I’m commenting on the absurdity. So I make elaborate machines that don’t really do anything. Reducing complexity to its simplest form. Life doesn’t need to be so complicated. I like to think the machines are intricate but meditative. I want people to wonder why they were made and feel…..er puzzled by them… 

PW. Disorientated?

GJP. Yes. Like that feeling you get when you go to Tokyo say. Being lost in a strange and 
foreign land. So it's a slow and gradual discovery. By recognizing small elements, a path to
understanding can be found.

PW. What about this one? (GJ’s pieces are made of twisted wire, treated paper, beads, bells etc. often with small motors that create movement. A large assemblage catches my eye….GJ obliges by pulling something…. wheels turn, wings flap, a crucifix rises, a bell rings.) 

PW. A wry comment on transfiguration?

GJP. I suppose. I was working out my feelings about religion. I’ve got it out of my system I think. No that’s not quite right. I feel that I still have a lot to say about religion, but I am not really sure I want to antagonize people anymore.

PW. I can see the influence of da Vinci in your work. How about Arthur Rackham? Or Roland Emett?

GJP. Da Vinci for sure. And Rackham. I love Roland Emett’s contraptions.
PW. Some of your drawings look like mystical lettering. Some kind of arcane alphabet. What do the letters represent?

GJP. They are Sigil drawings. It’s a form of evocation. I see them as a graphic representation of a desire. A statement of language is rendered down to a simplified form, then embellished with decorative elements such as flourishes and gold leaf to create an object which is both beautiful and ambiguous. The meaning is lost in the process.

PW. Would you describe the Sigil drawings as mystical? Arcane? Or just decorative? Or all three?

GJP. All three, they are based on an ancient practice and developed by a modern artist named Austin Osman Spare. He believed that the conscious mind was incapable of working toward manifesting desire, the sigils were a way of burying intention and letting the subconscious do the work. I believe that all art has the ability to affect people in ways they may not be aware of, thereby making all art sigils….and all artists alchemists.

PW. It’s interesting the way you make paper look like parchment.

GJP. I get the paper from Opus. It’s a Japanese rag paper coated with a pva glue and water solution. It’s perfect for doing wings and skin. Similar to the papier mache process or making model airplanes. 

PW. And what about this piece? (GJ has used the hot air from a lamp and wings so that various objects are orbiting a rather timeworn planet.) Does it have a name yet? Does the orb refer to our own sphere or is it just some remote place?

GJP. That piece is called ‘Trip to the Moon’. It’s meant to be a meditative piece. It reflects my desire to return to a simpler time when impossible things seemed to have simple solutions. It may be a romantic notion and perhaps that time never existed, but I still want to live there.

PW. Can you talk a bit about the skull piece, ‘Artifact’?

GJP. I’ve always been inspired by Renaissance painting and sculpture, and ‘Artifact’ came from wanting to create a beautiful object which was from my time, using materials which are familiar to me. I hope to lead the viewer to a place of questioning. What is it? Why is it? The addition of motion should only serve to reinforce this uncertainty.

PW. OK. One last question. Would you call your approach intuitive?

GJP. I generally won't work on a piece unless I feel inspired to do so, and sometimes that inspiration feels like it takes me out of myself, so I guess that my work is in a way intuitive.

PW. That’s great. Thanks a lot GJ.

GJP. Well thank you Philip and Efren.

You can see the work of GJ Pearson and other artists at Arrogant Pirate, 12-532 Fisgard Street, Victoria.

GJ Pearson - Artist of the month – June 2012

See The World Without Leaving Home

Little Sister

What and who we are today is the reflected, accumulated, and re-reflected summation of our experiences.  The art that I make is not only a recapitulative outpouring of my own past; it is also a retelling and revision of it.  I like to work as a persona, as someone who doesn’t necessarily belong in this time, but with materials that are of this time. 
The material itself, being not universally malleable, helps me in my interpretations by influencing the final form of the work.

My grandmother was a devout Anglican, and I remember I went to church with her every Sunday as far back as I can remember what Sunday was.  Without realizing it, each week I was exposed to an aesthetic regime within four circumscribed walls, watching and participating in verbal, visual, and physical ceremonies that formed a narrative both hermetic and hermeneutic.  As I grew older, I stopped going every week, and I began to realize that a lot had been omitted from the story as too complicated, too frightening, too ambiguous – too Manichean.

My art is what got left off the walls of the church of my childhood, and so I’m redecorating.


http://gjpearson.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/garyjohnpearson
- See The World Without Leaving Home is hanging at Dales Gallery right now until the end of June.

Politics, sex and a few stops in between by Philip Willey

Sandra Doore

GJ Pearson

Heather Keenan

Luis Merino

Tim Schumm

Government Street was occupied by the People’s Assembly of Victoria on Saturday and I had to pass through protestors to get to Madrona Gallery. Perhaps bankers are worried… as well they should be….but it’s hard to tell how the protests were resonating with the mainstream. The general public appeared sympathetic but it will take more than that for numbers to grow. Most people just seemed mildly curious.Inside the gallery no politics were in evidence. Michael Warren has mounted a show of young artists from Cape Dorset…..but it isn’t quite what you’d expect. Times have changed. The community still makes beautiful carvings and stone-block prints but younger Inuit artists are dealing with modern reality in their own unique way. They may be remote but they are far from unconnected. This is a chance to see fascinating work by a new generation. The challenge for them will be in preserving the mystique.

There is lots of interesting art at View Art Gallery. G.J. Pearson’s whimsical creations are the main feature but there’s work by other gallery artists and guests. It’s called the Toy show and it deserves a long review. I did make a few notes but with so many artists in the show I just didn’t feel up to it.

Then outside Winchester Galleries on Humbolt I spotted somebody who looked just like Luis Merino! Yep it was him alright…..same bushy hair and beard, same twinkle in the eye. I can report that he looks well and so does his recent work, mostly painted in Baja. Anyone familiar with Merino will recognize the elements immediately. There are no great artistic breakthroughs here…the chess pieces are new to me but the women, guitars, bottles are all reassuringly Merino. The colour and vitality are as strong as ever.

And up at the other Winchester Gallery are some dynamic landscapes by Tim Schumm. Dramatic composition and the way he balances light areas with dark give Schumm’s paintings a visual strength not often seen in the landscape genre.

Heather Keenan’s new work at Martin Bachelor Gallery is impressionistic at first sight but she also seems to be searching for the essence of things. In her statement she talks about ‘erasing and building until a storyline emerges’ as if allowing a subconscious almost metaphysical process to take over. There is clearly a debt to Turner here and French Symbolists like Redon and Moreau though Keenan is generally less specific in her subject matter, perhaps wanting to isolate the precise point where the impression becomes abstract much as Monet did in his later work. In one group of paintings, which reminded me of Dore’s illustrations for Dante, figures migrate and gather across the canvas against ethereal backgrounds reflecting what Keenan calls her ‘sense of the universal collective. Ultimately mysterious and unknowable.’ With these new paintings Keenan certainly seems to have struck a rich vein.

Lastly, suffering somewhat from art overload, I found my way into Xchanges where I was confronted by some distorted torsos impaled on chrome poles. A sort of Francis Bacon strip joint you could say. Definite sexual connotations here I thought…but it was probably just my dirty mind (smiley). Fortunately Sandra Doore was there to put me straight. Sandra is very articulate. She didn’t deny the sexuality of the work but that was by no means the whole story. She described the forms as props she uses to illustrate a concept.
Actually several concepts. The title of the show, Horizontal Desires, is inspired by tango dancing. The desire to free oneself from feelings of repression. She sees society as supine, horizontal, easily manipulated by the vertical i.e. the media. Then there’s the consumerism element and the way human sexuality is used to make people buy things. Sex sells. It can also bring down governments.

Doore likes juxtaposing opposites…the serious versus the ridiculous, ugliness versus beauty, pleasure versus pain. She also likes to make people think. From the manipulation of primal instincts to the stitching of weather-proof fabrics….there’s a lot going on here….far more than I can do justice to in a couple of paragraphs.

Nov. 2011

Serendipity by Philip Willey - May 2011.

Chiarina Loggia ‘December’.

I stopped in at the Collective Gallery in Fernwood where Chiarina Loggia has a show. Chiarina was there and happy to explain her methods and motivations. She talked about reaching out to others, sharing feelings and experiences, creating images that others can relate to.

“The artist in me never sleeps. She peers through my eyes at the shifting forms and flowing colors of my world. She listens to my heart and hears the echoes of my desires. She swims inside my stomach and churns up waves of emotion. She wanders around my mind unlocking treasure chests of ideas. She takes me in hand and weaves her magic with brush and brayer. She is my muse and inspiration.”

Clearly art is a major part of her life. The work on display consists of intaglio prints, based on photographs. After the etching and printing process they take on their own characteristics and become removed from the photographic. The smaller prints appear personal; they seem to represent friends, family, intimate moments that most people would find familiar. In the larger pieces, titled ‘Body of Work’ 1 & 2 (the double-entendre is intentional), she has combined all these elements, incorporating images from previous shows, first by collage, then by distorting the images on a computer, modern communications being another of her interests. The effect is of a walk through a gallery, lingering afterimages, memories. These works refer to the importance Loggia attaches to the body and body language. I sensed a muted eroticism in several of the pieces. A kind of wistful physical yearning. To me Loggia’s works speak of the passage of time. They appear as fleeting episodes, reminders of the transience of life, as if the only real permanence exists in art objects [1].
I liked the work. The photopolymer gravure technique is ideally suited to the subject matter. I made a few notes but I wasn’t entirely happy with what I’d written. The editors at exhibit-v can be tough. Two paragraphs probably wouldn’t satisfy them. For this to be a proper article I needed more.

Louise Harding ‘The Way Forward’

Then in Chinatown I got lucky. Call it serendipity, or synchronicity, one of those mysterious words, I don’t know how or why, but everything just seemed to fall into place. I looked into Dale’s Gallery hoping to find something to write about and who should be there but Rachel Berman. She’d dropped off a couple of small paintings of the kind which are becoming all too rare in Victoria these days, most of her work goes to the Ingram Gallery in Toronto. She was looking at some charcoal drawings by Louise Harding. Striking work we both agreed, skillfully drawn. Harding uses professional models, perhaps they aren’t beautiful in the classical sense but she treats them respectfully and endows them with a kind of down-to-earth beauty. She ‘exaggerates the part of the pose she finds most interesting’ and she isn’t afraid to leave tentative working marks among the firmer more confident lines. Studied tones, thoughtful placement of the figures and fearless cropping make for a virtuoso performance.

While I was making notes Rachel was telling Alison about a show she’d just seen over on Herald Street at G.J. Pearson’s studio. I vaguely remembered G.J. Pearson from Fran Willis’ gallery so over I went to Herald Street. There I found him in his studio/ living space surrounded by his creations. I got an impression of orderly clutter, like being in an artist’s head. Quite a lot to absorb in one session [2]. In fact it would probably take several sessions but I was worried about the 2 hour parking limit on Discovery so I had to make do with the quick tour. G.J works in different ways….everything from da Vinci-like constructions to Daliesque drawings. Then there’s the vandalized giftware (disfigurines), part-human, part machine conglomerations, irreverently altered classical paintings and Gollumish clay figures in bunny suits. I need a bit of time to think about this I said. So do I he said. 

G.J. is a man of many parts. He certainly doesn’t make things easy for art writers. Amanda Farrell had a crack at it in Monday Magazine [3]. Whimsical was the word she used. I can’t improve on that. Loggia, Berman, Harding, Pearson…it all fits together…I think.


1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yshEkRpRQY
2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTU7gs39S9g
3] http://mondaymag.com/articles/entry/knaves-in-toyland/

gj pearson & denise nicholls at Spring Studio Social

GJ Pearson on Somewhere,Somehow,Somewhen at Dales Gallery

GJ Pearson, Rachael Berman and Denise Nicholls at Dales Gallery

Opening Reception:  Thurs.Nov.25 @ 7pm,