Diana Thorneycroft's Group of Seven Awkward Moments

For the past several weeks the walls at Skew Gallery have been home to Diana Thorneycroft's most recent series of works, Group of Seven Awkward Moments. These colour photographs are bright and infectious reconsiderations of the wilderness imagery of the Group of Seven and the ideas of Canadian identity that come with them. A testament to contemporary détournement, the finished pieces take old works in a new direction as they put a new spin on established ideas about Canadiana.

Diana Thorneycroft, Group of Seven Awkward Moments (In Algonquin Park), 2007. Colour photograph, 40x50".

Thorneycroft employs a Camp aesthetic to stage modern day tableaux vivants in the foreground of her photographs. For the background, she has reproduced images from Tom Thomson along with other Group of Seven painters and Emily Carr. These backgrounds are subtly manipulated by the artist with pastels and are blurred to set them off into the distance, leaving the primary focus on the narrative unfolding in front of them. Each narrative has an element of the body in harm's way, a consistent theme in Thorneycroft's work.[1]

Here, Thorneycroft takes seemingly innocent parts of our Canadian identity and exposes their dark underbelly. In the "Algonquin Park" image, an RCMP officer flees the scene as two children are just about to stick their tongues on the flagpole. This pole, already spotted with dismembered tongues, displays a waving Canadian flag. One child lies as if dead, in the snow, another seems to be being taunted by a group of children while bleeding from his mouth, no longer able to speak. A grown man stands by with his dog, watching, but doing nothing. The dog happily has a new toy, a claimed tongue dangling from his mouth.

It is this element of darkness that keeps this particular series firmly out of the realm of true Camp. According to Susan Sontag, "Camp and tragedy are antitheses. There is seriousness in Camp...and, often, pathos...But there is never, never tragedy."[2] Regardless, the artist's use of purchased toys, props and figurines creates a dialogue about this aesthetic that translates in its blatancy to a consideration of the landscapes themselves. The Group of Seven's iconic paintings of windswept lakes and icebergs have become about marketing a Canadian identity. Of all of the people who are familiar with the Group of Seven's art or with Emily Carr, the majority will have never seen an original painting but will have seen numerous posters, greeting cards and copycats. In addition, they may also be familiar with the mythologies of the work: a lost and assumed dead Tom Thomson, a rough and rugged group of men who painted out in the Canadian wilderness, and an eccentric old woman who pushed her pet monkey around in a baby carriage.

Thorneycroft offers no firm answers as to whether these historical paintings should fall in the category of Camp but she certainly toys with this as their ultimate effect. What is more important is how effectively she brings these considerations out of the past. In the world of performance art, the tableau vivant has been popular fodder: the idea of live display providing an opportunity to draw the viewer into the work with a reciprocated gaze.[3] While there are no living beings in Thorneycroft's images, the narratives enacted in her images are brought to life by detailed dioramas that imitate live theatre, taking a different route to achieve this same effect.

With this series, Thorneycroft sparks a subjective, present day re-evaluation of national identity. It is through her use of universal Canadian experiences that she most effectively draws the onlooker into the art, creating a similar accountability as the traditional tableaux vivants. Whether it is memories of a tongue stuck on metal, of camping, of hockey, or of Bob and Doug McKenzie, the viewer is drawn into the scene by its undeniable subjective associations. Once a part of these, they are faced with Thorneycroft's own brand of the humorous grotesque.

1 Sandals, Leah. The National Post,"If It Doesn't Kill You..." Oct 20, 2008.
2 Sontag, Susan. A Susan Sontag Reader. New York: Farrar/Straus/Giroux,1982, p.115.
3 Fisher, Jennifer et al. CounterPoses. Montreal: Display Cult/Oboro, 2002, p.6.

Edward Burtynsky: The Residual Landscapes

In a recent rant taking aim at National Geographic's hypocritical expose of the Albertan oil sands devastation, the CBC's Rex Murphy claims, "Getting oil out of the ground has never been pretty." Apparently Rex has never seen the photographs of Edward Burtynsky. Unlike the competent photojournalism featured in the contested issue, Burtynsky's photos transcend mere documentary, transforming often horrifying scenes of ravaged industrial landscapes into stunning formal objects.

Homesteads No. 27, Coleman, Alberta, 1985

Part of the Exposure 2009 Calgary-Banff Photography Festival, Edward Burtynsky: The Residual Landscapes at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies features 39 works by the celebrated Canadian photographer more familiarly known as Ed. The human impact on the land in its various manifestations is Burtynsky's métier. Previously the landscapes were "manufactured," as in the award-winning documentary that follows the photographer to China, where he shoots massive factory sites and abject villages replete with e-waste. Here they are "residual," referencing both the accumulated byproduct of so much industrial undertaking around the world, as well as the collection of photographs included in the exhibition, which date back to the early 1980s and function as a visual archive for these volatile sites.

Spanning a period of more than two decades, the series of glossy large-scale prints reveals Burtynsky's experimentation over time, in both subject matter and approach. From the slice-of-life quaintness in his early shots of lonely British Columbia farmlands dissected by road and rail, to the ghastly beauty of Ontario uranium and nickel mine tailings in photos from the mid nineties, the artist adjusts his gaze from the intimate to the omniscient, capturing scenes that are more or less otherworldly. Burtynsky reaches the penultimate in post-industrial sublime with images of ship breaking in Bangladesh and Chinese stone quarries, which introduce the human presence to underscore the scale and the horror of these endeavours. In his most recent series on the Fort McMurray oil sands, he fully exploits his trademark aerial perspective to capture intersecting geometric and "organic" patterns that appear in these scenes of desolation. Contrary to Rex Murphy's statement, they are very, very pretty, albeit alarmingly so.

Uranium Tailings No. 12, Elliot Lake, Ontario, 1995

This exhibition of contemporary photography is unusual, yet highly auspicious for the Whyte Museum - Burtynsky donated 22 of the prints on exhibition to the collection. The symbolism of this gesture is immediate: to maintain a significant collection of Burtynskys in a museum that represents one of the most beautiful natural landscapes in Canada if not the world, and which is located smack dab in the middle of the protected heritage site of Banff National Park, provides a fitting context for images that warn of the immense perils of industry to vulnerable land.

But is this really what these photographs do? Burtynsky speaks of the uneasy contradiction his photographs represent between our fear of environmental ruin and the desires that lead to such atrocity. In essence, the seductive nature of the prints - many of which almost appear as abstracts and all of which can be viewed primarily for their striking compositions, rich yet nuanced colour, and meticulous technique - acts as a metaphor for the seductiveness of the modern consumer lifestyle. The gloss and glamour of the illusion too often override the irreparable consequences, and Burtynsky astutely points out that the scenes he shoots represent "places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis." The landscapes refer to a dominant out of sight/out of mind mentality in capitalism that is mimicked by the sheer beauty of the photographs.

Shipbreaking No. 12, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000

It is my suspicion, however, that Burtynsky's role as an activist is too frequently overstated. The Whyte's programming emphasized this theme with an artist's talk and panel discussion focusing on environmentalism and the social role of artists. This angle on the work suits the museum's mandate and demographic, which is by and large more concerned with the surrounding natural scenery and threats thereto than with contemporary art discourse. Yet to equate Burtynsky's practice with an environmental goal is problematic in that it elides the reality of his enterprise. Though ostensibly the photos promote awareness of the issues at hand, they are equally open to criticism for aestheticizing environmental atrocity. Furthermore, any photographer will admit that their craft is far from ecologically sound, and Burtynsky's practice in particular is quite the undertaking. The disconnect between the ominous slickness of the prints hanging in the gallery and the reality for the workers behind the images becomes acutely unsettling in Jennifer Baichwal's documentary on the artist: the lone figure atop a crane stands in stark contrast against the thousands of Chinese labourers below. The (white, male, North American) artist-hero in this depiction harks back to a nineteenth-century bourgeois Utopianism, while the omniscient gaze of his camera evades the cultural reflexivity necessary to address such issues in this globalized age.

Alberta Oil Sands # 6, Fort McMurray, Alberta, 2007. Images copyright Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Paul Kuhn Gallery, Calgary.

At best, I think Burtynsky very smartly occupies a precarious place between artist and activist, in which his breathtakingly poignant photographs always escape preachiness, while of course remaining highly saleable. At worst, the distinction between artmaking and activism is glossed over by agents who equate Burtynsky's primary role as an artist with his works' alarming subject matter, in a McLuhanesque flip that mistakes the message for the medium.

Edward Burtynsky: The Residual Landscapes runs February 7 - April 26, 2009.

Making Always War

Walking into Stride Gallery I was suddenly silenced by a large pillar that stoically filled my field of vision and cast a large ominous shadow on the floor. Making Always War is an installation by internationally renowned multidisciplinary artist Rebecca Belmore. The installation documents a performance she did during a residency at the University of British Columbia in March 2008. As I crept past the pillar it began to take on a tombstone-like feel. The pillar is not actually a tombstone, but several army shirts wrapped around a large block of wood with obvious intention. The shirts are held in place with nails that have aged and rusted. At the far end of the room, suspended in mid-air is a small screen with the video documentation of the performance projected onto it.

Rebecca Belmore, Making Always War at Stride Gallery, 2009.

The pillar was slightly taller than me and about my width, but its visual weight filled the room. My silence was suddenly broken by the sound of a drum beat soon followed by aboriginal pow-wow singing coming from the video projection at the far end of the room. The video begins with Belmore and a partner unloading supplies from the back of a small red truck in a park area on campus. Belmore first empties a bag of sand onto a shallow concrete base which she carefully smooths and levels. Next she pours out a bag of nails into 2 piles and casually tosses a hammer between them. It feels almost like she is just off to another day at work, as though this act is simply one of many. The fact that she doesn't ever acknowledge the audience, and travels to and from the site in the truck leads me feel like it was just luck that I happened to witness the event.

The Puppet Collective

Trépanier Baer Gallery in Calgary was recently home to Graeme Patterson's first show in a commercial space, The Puppet Collective. When Patterson's multimedia installation Woodrow was installed for the Montreal Biennial in 2007, Kevin Baer approached the artist and expressed interest in doing a show with him. The Puppet Collective is Patterson's response, and it is an ingenious endeavour for marrying his practice with the commercial side of art making. His stop-action animation films employ similar puppets as their star characters and his interest in the miniature is clearly evident in Woodrow. The less obvious tie with his past work has more to do with narrative. The Puppet Collective uses the puppet and the miniature to continue a theme that was manifest in Woodrow: a consideration of the cycling of history and the circularity of life; in this case the collecting of collectors.

Graeme Patterson, The Puppet Collective 2008, Class photo as reproduced in Canadian Art.

In the opening paragraph of his book Inside the White Cube, Brian O'Doherty talks about the view of earth from a withdrawing spacecraft, a frequent image in sci-fi movies. This scaling-down allows for an alteration in our perspective: "...responses slide from the particular to the general. The individual is replaced by the race...from a certain height people are generally good."[1] Somehow this scaling-down facilitates a removal of threat, and Patterson plays with scale in the fashioning of the fifty-two puppets in The Puppet Collective. The power of the miniature lies in its apparent impotence and it is easy to forget that these seven-inch puppets are based on actual people. If those fifty-two individuals were to come and stand around the walls of the gallery it would have a very different effect. Patterson's figures are approachable and invite an intimate observation. What is more, because these are pose-able dolls, they allow a power imbalance beyond their scale. "Puppetry, according to Scott C. Shershow, finds its roots in 'theological theatre,' where 'player puppets are seen to embody the sovereign intentions of an author-creator.'"[2] While the puppets that the artist employs in his films have an illusionary self-sufficiency, this collective relies entirely on connectedness, on the aspirations and wishes of their maker or potential future owner.[3]

Patterson's use of the puppet and the miniature is a considered strategy, a way to allow for a subjectivity twice removed. The viewer of Woodrow does not have an immediate sense that this work is about their own personal experience, but the artist surfaces a consideration that is universal, extending beyond the small prairie town. Woodrow is about collective memory, the passage of time and life's circularity.[4] It is a recreation in miniature of the town where the artist's grandfather lived for the entirety of his life. Within some of the buildings are screenings of his stop-action animation films. Patterson creates yet smaller versions of his miniatures and places them within the miniature of his grandfather's workshop, "...creating a layered mirror-like circularity that suspends reality."[5] He also uses the buildings he has recreated as props within his films, further reinforcing this circularity. The overall effect is unsettling: a double mirror whereby the viewer sees back into the past and forward into the future in one glance.[6]

Patterson carries this same circularity into The Puppet Collective. The original fifty-two puppets are a collection of random individuals constructed from memory, people the artist encountered over the past year, one per week. They line the gallery walls in Barbie-type boxes constructed from wood and Plexiglas (pronouncing themselves quite clearly as commodities), and are documented in the form of a class photo that was unfortunately missing from the gallery show. Patterson replaces each of these original puppets as they are purchased with a new puppet of the purchaser, creating a new, less random collective of fifty-two art collectors from across Canada. The purchaser becomes commodity; the collector becomes collected; repeating the circular structure of Woodrow. While this has an element of lighthearted slapstick humour, within the joke lays a power shift that has something to say about the business of art. In his article, "Collecting-So Normal, So Paradoxical," Matthias Winzen writes: "in a way, all collecting can be seen as an ongoing attempt to cope with the fact that time goes by."[7] He believes that the collection acts "...as a lasting mirror of the person who built it."[8] Collecting then is a means to create an immortal reflection of the self, and collectors have been known to have their own likeness painted or sculpted as the masterpiece. In The Puppet Collective Patterson is reviving this practice, he is playing to the collector's desire to be recognized, noticed and remembered. Yet, Winzen warns of paradoxes in collecting, one of which is of particular interest here: "similar dissimilarity."[9] In essence, when individual, unique things are brought together in a collection, they become part of a group; they lose whatever it was that made them unique. So, does the collector run the risk of being typecast as a part of this collective? In being miniaturized in the form of a puppet, and ultimately, possibly part of someone else's collection, the collector forfeits some of their own control. This is not unlike the dynamic that exists for the artist when they sell their work in a commercial venue. Woodrow has been described as "...ironic, humorous, slapstick, and irreverent."[10] The Puppet Collective similarly employs playful devices to draw attention to the complex relationship between artist and collector. Here again Patterson creates the effect of a double mirror, the experience of the artist and the collector reflecting one upon the other.  

--
[1] O'Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube. The Lapis Press, San Francisco: 1986, p. 13.
[2] Halkes,Petra. Parachute. "Phantom Strings and Airless Breaths. The Puppet in Modern and Postmodern Art". 92(1998), p. 14.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ring, Dan. Woodrow: A Multimedia Installation by Graeme Patterson. Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and Mendel Art Gallery: 2006, p. 10.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid. p. 14.
[7] Winzen, Matthias. Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing and Archiving in Art. Prestel, Munich and New York: 1998, p. 22.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid. p. 23.
[10] Ring, Dan. p.14. 

Bruce Dunbar: Eye Candy

I can't imagine how difficult it would be to walk away from your creative practice, to never write, paint, sculpt, or craft again. In 1988, Edmonton artist Bruce Dunbar put his art practice on indefinite hiatus. He was tired of the politics of the art scene and saw art going a direction he was no longer interested in. Last year, Dunbar returned to painting. In his new show, Eye Candy, at Common Sense Gallery in Edmonton, Dunbar shows that his time away from art-making has brought new perspective to his painting.

Though Edmonton is regarded as one of the last bastions of modernism, and frequently chided for being staid in this regard, Dunbar's work is fresh and vibrant. Dunbar has remained a modernist in style, but his time away has disposed of some of the more conservative modernist tendencies, such as a limited colour palate, and a rigid sense of geometry. His new works are pop and luscious; he layers candy-coloured paint on black Styrofoam and mixes in metallic colours and acrylic gel. The combination of those two textures gives the paint a perceived and actual depth that draws me in and captivates me.

"fifteen," Bruce Dunbar, 2008

Dunbar's work is numbered chronologically; his practice started off somewhat conservatively, with minimal paint and less aggressive sculpting. As he progresses in the series, the more expressive and curious his works become. The paint folds over itself and drips off the canvas; I found myself peering under, above, and through his works, compelled to see all the elements that brought each one together and looking for the longest acrylic stalactite in the exhibition.The serial nature of his titling as well as the repetition of his design gives the impression that these works are studies, but they seem more like experiments, with each work building upon the last, pushing the artist's relationship to the medium further and further. I want to see how lush Dunbar can make his work; how thick he can make the paint before it slides off the canvas; how much colour he's willing to incorporate and how sculptural he can make his paint.

"twenty six" (detail), Bruce Dunbar, 2008

In "twenty-two", the deep eggplant paint froths across the pink canvas. Dunbar cuts down the work with a red line, and accents the focus on the corners with a thick layer of paint that resembles the finish of a well-iced cake. "fifteen" is a good example of Dunbar's more sculptural works; his colour bars stretch across the black plane, bookended by smooth coats of thick, glossy paint.There is a lot of room to wander through Dunbar's works, and his consistent use of black anchors the eye, allowing it to focus on the work rather than becoming overwhelmed.

"twenty two," Bruce Dunbar, 2008

I'm not anticipating the return of modernism, but Dunbar's enthusiasm for the medium is contagious and refreshing. He's not going through the motions just to create an end product. Instead, he opens his palate and invites the viewer to follow along within his process, returning with work that is full of playfulness and electricity. Painting doesn't often instill an elementary sense of delight and curiosity within me, but the energy in Dunbar's work is infectious; and I find myself charmed by Dunbar's confectious offerings.

Eye Candy runs from February 21 - March 21, 2009.