Extra Censory Perception

I'm almost certain that if Kristin Ivey's installation at The New Gallery only had a less literal title, it wouldn't attract much more than a snicker from most viewers. As it is, her latest presentation of The Phallus Series - at TNG's current location in a shopping mall on the edge of downtown Calgary - seems to have also awakened the extra censory perception of the building's management.

Just an hour before the exhibition was scheduled to open to the public, TNG staff received a phone call requesting that a curtain be installed at the front of the gallery, essentially obscuring Ivey's collection of metre-high soft sculptural phalli from all pedestrian traffic in the Eau Claire Market. Fearing an escalation that might result in the artist-run centre's sudden eviction, The New Gallery staff agreed to comply immediately, with an understanding that the General, Development & Leasing Manager would visit the Gallery in person as soon as possible the following week to see the works in question for himself and detail the concerns that had prompted the blackout. At the time of this writing, now halfway through the exhibition's one-month run, the building manager has still not met with either The New Gallery staff or board to discuss the decision. Perhaps even more worrisome is the fact that he has apparently still not yet seen the work that he has redacted.

The twenty-five or so sculptures that comprise this installation seem surprisingly innocuous. Last year Ivey was delighted to obtain about a hundred brightly coloured prom dresses in an eBay auction, some dating back to the 1960s. Using a pattern that has been gradually perfected, the fabric from each dress is re-purposed by the artist into a completely new form; the garments are given a second, sculptural life.

Mimicking actual biological processes, the fabric is introverted to form the corona of each sculpture, exposing the original design labels in the process. The evocative names - Steppin' Out, Precious Moments - and sumptuous satin fabrics signify stereotypical femininity. They suggest great expectations for "a night to remember" - which could be seen as antithetical to the work's apparent portrayal of a quintessentially male symbol. This double-entendre immediately catches up the viewer/interpreter of the work. The gradual recognition of a multi-layered visual pun (or perhaps only our own dirty mind?) usually induces the typical human response: laughter.

The scale of the sculptures, while simply determined by the amount of fabric provided by each dress, is somewhat comical as well. Obviously much larger than "life size" their placement on the floor makes them seem diminutive at the same time; as the artist confirms in her own statement on the work, viewers are intentionally made to feel like a "much too tall and alien voyeur in a foreign yet familiar landscape."

All of these contrasts conspire to make this an interesting test case of what contextualizes specific objects as "Art." For instance, it seems unlikely that TNG Programming Committee would have been interested in presenting this work if the phalli were cast in bronze, or constructed by a male artist.

What differentiates Ivey's sculptures is exactly the series of conceptual inversions that the physical material of each dress undergoes to assume a place in the series. Several obvious traditional dichotomies - male/female, hard/soft, inside/outside - are playfully yet flagrantly subsumed in this work. The resulting multifarious ambiguity is perhaps significant.

One defining characteristic of the conservative worldview is a lack of tolerance for ambiguity. So as Calgary is currently considered by many to be Canada's most conservative city, that The Phallus Series would attract a censor's attention here is probably not that surprising. What is, however, in a contemporary metropolitan centre with vocal aspirations to be perceived as "world-class," is that it would happen so rapidly, sight unseen, and without a clear, timely explanation of the criteria for judgment that have been applied.

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Tim Westbury has exhibited his work at artist-run centre's and public galleries across Canada since 1983. He holds an Honours BA in Cultural Studies from Trent University and is a graduate of ACAD. Since March 2008 he has been Programming Director at The New Gallery, Calgary's original artist-run centre.

Chris Cran, Diversions

Lucky you if you happened to wander into Trepanier Baer gallery this April. The walls have been covered with the paintings of a Calgary icon, none other than Chris Cran. Cran has been living in Calgary since the 1970s when he came here to go to Art College. He loves the art community here, he loves to teach (he is a revered painting instructor at the Alberta College of Art and Design, ACAD), and of course, he loves to paint, so why live anywhere else?[1] His now more than three decades in this city have brought him no shortage of success, he is recognized nationally for his painting prowess. Yet despite his impressive achievements, Cran is not resting on his laurels, he maintains a fresh passion and excitement about painting that is clearly visible in his current work.

Chris Cran, Charts, 1985, as reproduced on www.calgary is awesome.com

This show, entitled, Diversions, somewhat of a mini-retrospective, includes works from Cran's various genres of painting; his self-portraits, his stripe paintings and his abstracts. Heavily weighted on the later, it reflects what has been the artist's primary focus for nearly two decades, abstraction. These works pull from the many different directions he has explored during his career, reflecting what he calls his painting vocabulary.[2] Elements of the vocabulary have become distinctly Cran; his use of the sharp taped edge, of metallic paint with a swirling brush stroke and his distinct colour palette.

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to interview the artist and when I commented on the strong aesthetic and sheer beauty of the paintings in Diversions he responded, "Thank you. I want to make them beautiful.... Even the Pop stuff, I still want the painting to look 'zing'. I just want it. So it is worth looking at. These newer ones that don't have the playful content of the more pop paintings, they are just about the pleasure of looking at them. That's it." They are most definitely a pleasure to look at. He revels in the effects he can manufacture in his work, the play with perception.[3] When he saw the show before the opening it was the first time he had seen some of these pieces in a gallery space. He was absolutely elated with the intriguing results in his "X", "Y", and "Z" paintings. It is impossible to tell what sits in front and what is behind. His use of fluorescent stripes and silver metallic brushstrokes in combination manipulate space and perception, they trick the eye.

Cran utilizes layers to achieve the result he wants. Some of the paintings even appear to have a printed background, "Lift Smoke", for example. When I asked Cran about this effect he explained, "What they are... I actually had a bedspread from my Great Grandma. An old ripped bedspread, in sections, all ripped up. And I just had this chunk with a raised pattern on it. I would say it probably came over from England in the early part of the 20th Century. I just take sludge...from my solvent bucket.... I paint it on quite loosely and then take this chunk of bedspread and just lay it down. Press it, lift it off, and there is an imprint of that pattern there." [4] Cran loves to play with paint but denies any nostalgic motivations here, he says any similar fabric would do. I'm not so convinced, but maybe I'm just seeing what I want to see. Not a bad result really, in Cran terms. Diversions will be at Trepanier Baer until May 1,2009.

[1] Cran, Chris. Interview. April 3,2009.
[2] ibid.
[3]Tousely, Nancy. "A Space Filled With Beauty: Abstract Paintings By Chris Cran". Chris Cran Paintings 1993-1996. Art Gallery of Peel: Caber Production Co. p.12.
[4] Cran ibid.

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller's The Murder of Crows

Behind massive red-velvet curtains, nearly a hundred speakers pepper a dimly-lit old train station. I'm in the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin, looking at Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller's largest audio installation to date, The Murder of Crows.

Photo: Roman März © Courtesy the artists, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, Luhring Augustine, New York

Most of the speakers sit on folding wooden chairs that crowd radially toward the epicentre of the cluster, where a dismembered gramophone sits on a flimsy red table. I would be inclined to call the entire setup flimsy, if I couldn't guess at the price of the ninety-eight premium speakers. Periodically, Cardiff's voice recites diaristic confessions and sensual accounts of horrid dream fragments. These interjections punctuate the undulating stereophonic soundscape, a patchwork of music and recorded noises: clanking machinery and Gregorian chants lead into sad-but-triumphant Soviet military songs, cinematic brass-scores follow a solemn baroque chorus, and fall into moody indie-rock rhythms (vocals, I think, by Cardiff herself) - all accompanied by the caws and wingflaps of a murder of crows.

Photo: Roman März © Courtesy the artists, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, Luhring Augustine, New York

The exhibition's title comes from the formal term for a group of crows, and alludes to the curious social ritual that often occurs after a crow dies: seemingly in mourning, its relatives will saunter and caw in apparent unease for over 24 hours.

Cardiff's voice calmly explains her horrific nightmare; "I know something terrible is going to happen." She is the traumatized eyewitness of lurid scenes of slavery and torture, labour and technology, confinement and mutilation. "I've lost my leg! - Where has my leg gone? - Bring back my leg!" - humorous chamber music echoes the dream narrative.

Many of us sit with our eyes closed to take in the atmosphere. We sit in the dark, sometimes looking up at each other across the ersatz rows of chairs. Some talk to each other, or on phones. Two people in front of me are making out. Some pace the space. A guy to my right flips through Monopol (oh right, Art Cologne is soon). Some of us hold pens. We sometimes look up, still intently listening, to make fixed eye-contact - the type that might happen when bad news comes in on the radio - the type that might have happened in 1938 when listeners apparently accepted the staged news-report of space invaders in the voice of Orson Welles. In moments of silence we look down, or at the architecture, or at ourselves - blackties and bohemians. The laminated didactic handout is being passed around.

Photo: Roman März © Courtesy the artists, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, Luhring Augustine, New York

I discover here that a "core reference point" for the work is Francisco de Goya's 1799 etching, "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters," from his "Caprichos" series. The image depicts a collapsed Goya, head-down in his drawing desk - owls and bats apparently flying from his subconscious. The work was created outside of his royal position as Carlos IV's court portraitist, and has been typically read as an Enlightenment critique of a corrupt Spanish society. Further, it was created in a period where Goya's increasing deafness left him disturbed and isolated. It is the image of an anguished man, obscurely injecting a voice of doubt into a valueless and overconfident society.

Where Goya's unease produced a quiet and reserved image of a tormented and buckled man, Cardiff and Bures Miller's anxiety results in the externalization of private fears and doubts into a 3D radio-play that takes on an operatic magnitude: there is a transformation from the realm of the personal to that of historical, social, and institutional proportions.

Despite my slight discontent with the apparent lack of architectural consideration, I cannot help but be drawn to the overall here-ness and now-ness demanded by the commanding audio experience: it is one that insists upon a sculptural awareness of the space, and truly transforms it into a redolent place. The artists' sculptural and psychological awareness of place, I infer, corresponds to the social rituals surrounding mourning.

The first places, philologist RP Harrison suggests, were gravesites. [1] That is, the first specific natural spaces that humans designated as significant were the sites of ancestral burial: the "here" in "here lies." Harrison contends that we bury our dead to humanize the lands where we build our present and imagine our future - that the dead indwell the living through our relation to heritage and place. The gravemarker, apparently, places a distinct formal connection between the living and the dead. And the social ritual that induces this connection: mourning.

Harrison offers Ernesto De Martino's research on mourning and ritualized objectification: he reveals its cathartic purpose of "depersonaliz(ing) the condition of grief by submitting it to a set of public, traditionally transmitted codes" - mourning becomes a measure to prevent going crazy. [2] De Martino's work considers mourning practices across the planet, and continuously unearths the vocal elements of grief. He suggests that mourning takes form primarily through anguished cries. "Indeed," Harrison adds, "it was perhaps through grief that the human voice gained its first articulations." [3]

Replacing the crude utterances of traditional mourning, Cardiff and Bures Miller's vociferations eloquently lament the loss of values in a globalized and technologically-advanced superculture. We, the audience, are cast into the role of the mourning crows - enacting our museological rituals and banding together with the woeful voice of Cardiff, in this study of death and human gathering. Like Goya's retreat into the recesses of his own mind, Cardiff and Bures Miller bring us to the aesthetic stages of psychic turmoil where we face our own mortality.

--
[1] Harrison, RP. The Dominion of the Dead. Chicago University Press, 2005, p.18.
[2] Ibid. p. 56-57
[3] Ibid. p. 62

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller's The Murder of Crows runs at the Hamburger Bahnhof 14 March - 17 May 2009.

Mikhel Proulx is an artist and cultural worker living in Berlin. He holds a BFA in drawing from the Alberta College of Art + Design.

Welcome to new Shotgunners!

Shotgun-Review.ca WELCOMES NEW WRITERS FROM CALGARY, BANFF, RED DEER and EDMONTON!

* * *

Hello gang,

On behalf of myself and my collaborative Co-editor, Nicole Burisch, I would like to extend a warm welcome to our new readers and to several new writers who have joined our team in 2009. Thank you for reading, writing and subscribing!

Best,
Anthea Black

* * *

CALGARY:
Carly Slade - Carly comes to us from ACAD's practicum program, to work "behind the scenes" at Shotgun-Review.ca and cut her teeth as a contemporary art writer. Welcome!
Jeremy Jeresky - Be sure to check out Jeremy's first Shotgun review just out this week! Welcome!
Viviane Mehr - Viviane is a student at ACAD with a keen interest in curatorial practices and contemporary art writing. Welcome!

BANFF:
Pandora Syperek - Lucky Alberta! Pandora relocated here after an MA at York University and has taken up shop in the Curatorial department at the Banff Centre. Welcome to Alberta and Shotgun too!

RED DEER:
Jasia Stuart - Welcome to our first correspondent from Red Deer! Shotgun-Review.ca is pleased to be able to slowly creep around the province in our ongoing bid to review as many shows as possible every month.

EDMONTON:
Sarah Hamilton - We managed to steal Sarah away from Edmonton's well-loved Vue Weekly for a few Shotgun-Review.ca columns here and there. Her first piece seems to have sparked a bit of debate about Edmonton's fave dead horse: Modernism! Thank you for that, and welcome Sarah!

Shotgun-Review.ca wishes to acknowledge Calgary Arts Development and The Canada Council for the Arts for their generous support.

How to Read A Painting?

Artwork can be passively looked at or actively read.
Christopher Willard's recent exhibition It isn't What You Think typifies his continued exploration into the space between visual and verbal language. His paintings, seen at Herringer Kiss Gallery utilize a vocabulary of optical pattern play and illusively structured color schemes. An enigmatic, yet eerily thematic sentence punctuates each paintings surface with mechanical precision. I felt that the combination of these elements confronted my initial read and compelled me to search for possible connections.

Willard's work prominently features an idiosyncratic use of grids, which allows him to articulate his interest in illusion and color contrast. This is known in optical studies as the scintillating grid. Willard's variety uses hand painted white dots on intersections of orthogonal bars against a black background. These dots successively disappear and flicker at random. Willard further pushes this as each grid features orthogonal bars in either warmer or cooler hues. This causes the white dots to appear teal or orange until closely looked at again. I could sense a theme of close examination and re-viewing coming into sight with this motif.

Larger squares and rectangles reside directly below, reinforcing and adding variety to Willard's geometric language. Resembling palettes in color theory manuals, these remind me of color studies, suggesting an inside look into his process. It looks as though Willard is trying to work out a system for his geometric arrangements. Although they effectively suggest an optical movement and contrast, they also look plotted out in a seemingly arbitrary fashion. Ultimately, I can't really tell if these compositions are highly planned or completely intuitive. Yet, the color and size of these shapes reoccur often, generating a sense of cohesion between each painting within the series.

Willard's practice is split between that of artist and writer. This is made apparent by a discreet textual line, meticulously etched onto a fragment of each painting. These sentences not only act as the title, but also serve as a compositional linchpin and intellectual take off point. "Let This Be A Lesson" and "Not An Afterthought But A Before Thought" give a further look into his process. They seem to imply that Willard is in fact trying to work out a system for placing his squares and rectangles. The line "Not A Lot But More Than Enough" acts in much the same way but is more vague. These sentences seem to come across as literal statements, setting me up to view his paintings. Conversely, they also come across as curious quips, creating a layer of ambiguity to digest.

Willard points out that these one-liners allow him to "define a space not fully articulated by the visual or textual". Undoubtedly, the combination of these visual and verbal semantics allow me to read his paintings in an undefined way. Sentences such as "Impossible to Overlook" and "Something to Look Into" obviously refer to the simple act of looking at his paintings. But upon closer examination, these texts act more like a cheeky didactic, prodding me to look at images that are not easy to look at or are not there at all. Before I knew it I was forced to ask just how far to look into? And what is overlooked?

Willard's paintings ultimately function between a duality of looking and reading; of seen and implied. Interestingly, particular elements within this duality seem to reinforce and disconnect at the same time. The space Willard defines is both linear and non linear and is, I feel, a natural consequence to the combination of visual and verbal word play. A space true to Willard's sensibility that, isn't what you think.