If Women Ruled the World: Judy Chicago in Thread

In the recent history of feminist art in North America, fraught as it is with controversy, tension, and cognizant dissent, artist Judy Chicago has gained a reputation as a maverick. She is represented in the pages of canonical art history largely by her controversial project, The Dinner Party. At the time of its debut in 1979, many critics and even fellow feminist artists objected to the heavy-handed imagery (vaginas on plates) and the universal representation of female experience; critiques that Chicago has received throughout much of her artistic career. This monumental work in ceramic, needlework and other craft celebrates female achievement with decorative place settings around a large triangular banquet table. Now on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, The Dinner Party is a testament to Chicago's controversial contributions to feminist and post-modernist art. If Women Ruled the World: Judy Chicago in Thread is a collaboration between Toronto's Textile Museum of Canada and the Art Gallery of Calgary to bring together the first ever survey of Chicago's needle and textile art. Curated by Toronto-based artist and curator Allyson Mitchell, it is an ambitious attempt to provide a broader perspective on Chicago's life and work and to situate it within the context of second-wave and contemporary feminist art.

The galleries of the Art Gallery of Calgary are well-suited to the display of Chicago's monumental tapestries and textiles works. The large space and open-concept floor plan of the first floor allow her expansive tapestries room to breathe and to be in dialogue with works on the other floors. Characteristic of Chicago's oeuvre, the works gathered in this show are simultaneously celebrations of the joy and lamentations of the agony of femininity and humanity.

Judy Chicago, The Creation, 1984. Collection: Audrey and Robert Cowan. Photo copyright Donald Woodman.

Not skilled in needlework herself, Chicago relies upon groups of hired women to complete many of her projects, not only for their skills but for their personal experiences and knowledge.1 Marianne Elder, Senior Art Curator at The Art Gallery of Calgary states that the show "looks beyond the relationship of these works to Judy Chicago's legacy as a feminist artist...[to] the manner in which her desire to engage viewers in ideas of equality and community have changed and progressed."2 In keeping with this impetus, the Interpretive Centre on the mezzanine level of the gallery focuses on Chicago's technique of collaboration and cooperation. The space displays information about Chicago's desire to foster and sustain a community of women artists and cultural producers. The foundation of these communities is the desire to convey important social messages through images. Together these communities reveal conviction, faith, and sense of purpose in realizing such painstaking and time consuming projects as Chicago's textile works.

Judy Chicago, Earth Birth, 1983. Collection: Through The Flower. Photo copyright Donald Woodman.

Perhaps the most transparent collaborative process is found in the works in the Top Gallery. The labels credit each artist, describing their contribution to the work in detail. All from the late 1990s and 2000, these works address a wide range of themes; racism, religious conflict, globalization, famine, poverty, healthcare, the environment, family. However, the Top Gallery feels like an afterthought; tacked on to the more cohesive display of monumental tapestries downstairs. The works here feel a bit marooned at the top of two flights of stairs, separated from the three open-concept floors below by a closed staircase. As a case in point, I overheard one misled viewer brush them off, commenting to his companion that, "These aren't her works," before heading back downstairs. The Top Gallery also houses the accompanying group exhibition, She Will Always be Younger than Us. This show of new feminist work articulates a dialogue between young female artists and feminist foremothers such as Chicago. It is an appropriate yet underemphasized counterpoint to the monumental solo retrospective. The works that fill the top floor, She Will Always be Younger than Us and Chicago's later works, are somewhat removed from the experience of the works in the three larger galleries below; the overall impression conveyed by these three more prominent spaces is the monumentality of the artist-genius, albeit reworked in vaginal and feminist iconography. The monumentality of the main spaces seems to overpower curatorial intentions -best articulated in the Top Gallery- to provide a broader perspective on Chicago's collaborations and feminist community.

Judy Chicago, Birth Tear, 1982. Collection: The Albuquerque Museum. Photo: Through The Flower Archives.

Granted, as curator Allyson Mitchell points out, needlework is traditionally used to teach girls to think small, "Chicago's work turns this sentiment on its head, reorienting craft as a means to imagine other worlds, to foster dialogue and to engender community among its practitioners."3 Although daunting, perhaps it is not too much to ask of viewers to explore the quiet corners and nuances of Chicago's monumental vaginas and goddesses; and the initimacy of the Top Gallery. The feminists of the 1970's took the credo of core femininity as a reaction against a history of male iconography. While such universalizing has since come under attack in favour of more carefully nuanced understandings of the body and sexuality, as I sat in a quiet, meditative corner of the gallery contemplating Chicago's "Birth Tear/Tear" (1985) I began to see the power of starting from personal experience and trauma as a means to reach out to all those who are suffering; to be a voice for all those who have been silenced. It is in such quiet corners, including the documentaries on Chicago's life and work, that the show succeeds in deconstructing the conception of Chicago's work as essentializing. Such spaces cast light on her life and worldview and trace the evolution of Chicago's vision over a 40-year career that is well worth celebrating.

1. Allyson Mitchell, "A Call to Arms," In Exh Cat. When Women Rule The World: Judy Chicago in Thread, Toronto, Textile Museum of Canada; Calgary, Art Gallery of Calgary. 2009: 16.
2. Marianne Elder, Senior Art Curator, The Art Gallery of Calgary, "If Women Ruled the World: Judy Chicago in Thread," Exhibition Catalogue insert, When Women Rule The World: Judy Chicago in Thread, Toronto, Textile Museum of Canada; Calgary, Art Gallery of Calgary: 2009.
3. Mitchell, 2009: 18.

Canadian Content

Toronto painter Kim Dorland recently showed Calgary viewers his latest paintings from a residency in Emma Lake, Saskatchewan. The glowing paintings showed off well in the natural light of Skew Gallery. Canadian Content is Dorland's third solo exhibition at Skew, where he was first introduced to Calgary in 2005. Dorland's paintings are well known in Canada and abroad for their push and pull between representation and abstraction using a bright palette and thick paint, and for their melancholic yet mundane subject matter.

With past series like Over the Fence from 2007, Dorland worked from photographs of suburban life from around Alberta and Saskatchewan, where he grew up. At the Emma Lake Workshop, Dorland found he enjoyed working directly from nature: "The challenge was to make paintings that weren't too beautiful. Working with nature - especially in such an amazing and pretty place like Emma Lake can be very awe inspiring and I had to force myself to avoid being seduced by beauty and make works with a certain kind of psychology to change the tone of the works."

Dorland imbued these plein air studies and larger landscapes with a narrative about Tom Thomson, arguably Canada's most famous painter. With the addition of scenes from the painter's mythical life and mysterious death, the paintings begin to take on a darker tone.

He speculates in the paintings "Seconds Before" and "July 8, 1917" what really happened the day of the painter's death at a lake in Algonquin Park. In "Seconds Before" Thomson's tiny silhouette emits a stream of pee off a boat in the middle of the lake. The painting's apparent humor is nuanced by sympathy when taking into account Dorland's respect for Thomson. Says Dorland, "He should have lived longer so he could make more paintings - his death was a tragic loss for this country."

Dorland pays homage to Thomson by emphasizing techniques common to both artists such as the thick painting technique and the red or high chrome under-painting, as well as representing subject matter such as pines, canoes and lakes from Thomson's well-known oeuvre. However in classic Dorland style (not seeing the forest for the trees), we find graffiti on tree bark and bottles on the ground leftover from bush parties.

The Canadian Content paintings resemble Anselm Keifer's or Eugene Leroy's paintings in their sculptural dimension although they retain a clear cut representational quality through contrast and decisive strokes. Masses of paint made from scrunched up layers of thin acrylic paint or globs of oil are fixed or nailed to earlier layers. It's not unusual for Dorland to find the paint fallen off the canvas onto the floor in his studio. Dorland has always used excessive paint to confront the viewer with the reality of the medium. He says, "The vocabulary of paint is always in my work - I'm always looking to push the material in new, interesting and often extreme ways. It's the most challenging and interesting part of what I do - How to make the material define subject, create narrative, and also open up its own discourse all at the same time."

Looking at how material defines subject in this body of work, there's a connection between the mounds of thick black oils and fluorescent strokes or backgrounds, and a chemically devastated or "psychically charged" landscape. But there is also a distinctly Canadian heritage of landscape painting that the artist wants to explore: "We love thick paint. Lots of paint piled up on little wood panels depicting heroic landscapes cover our national museum walls. I wanted to find a way to use this regional dialect in my work because it's problematic and beautiful at the same time." Dorland's twist on the heroic landscape tradition is the inclusion of people and their mark on an otherwise beautiful thing.

Fictitious Device

Draw softly and carry a big brush. In Mark Mullin's current solo show, Fictitious Device, the artist puts a new spin on Theodore Roosevelt`s Big Stick Ideology. Mullin`s diplomatic wanderings are into unknown places, unrecognizable worlds. His arsenal is limited only by what appears to be an endless creative imagination. As artist and instructor at the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD), Mullin has established himself as a formidable presence. These latest works are engaging meanderings into a fictitious space of Mullin's making. The artist himself speaks of abstract art as a form of visual fiction.[1] In these paintings and drawings he succeeds in creating a captivating visual narrative that poses more questions than it answers.

The main floor of the gallery houses five new paintings. "Gadgetry" (78"x66"), has a strong connection with Mullin's earlier works sharing their ultra bright palette and thickly applied paint. The snail trail squiggles, the woven brush strokes, the bold solid shapes are all here but the large circles are making an exit, visible only in part at the bottom of the canvas. There is an aura, a blurring that is something new for Mullin. "Gadgetry" is a transitional piece with flavours of both his old and new work. In a broader sense all of these paintings are about transition, transformation, evolution, morphology; this is the central character in the artist's narrative. It is exciting work to see and equally exciting to see Mullin stir his own pot, so to speak, despite his undeniable successes.

The remainder of the paintings fully embrace his new direction. "Loomings" (78"x66") is a case in point. Here Mullin shifts his palette, mixing greyed down colours that create a more ominous effect. These smoky, subdued choices are laid down in loose, thin strokes. The result though still bold, is more of a smoulder than a chemical explosion. There is a romantic bravado in these images, something important is happening but its identity is beyond recognition.

The lower floor of the gallery houses Mullins drawings. Descending the stairs is like entering a sanctuary. These are delicate works. Drawn with a light hand they are almost invisible from across the room. For the artist they were akin to creative foreplay. Mullin took his work out of the studio and into the clean environment of his home to make these drawings. There, with pen, pencil crayon and water colour he created these delicate worlds. Though they preceded the paintings, for him they are documents that record the conclusion, the finished forms at the end of the transformation.[2] Like the paintings, they are fictional musings, composed of billowing piles of ovals with random distortions. Looking at "A Gentle Architecture" (32"x47") the viewer becomes involuntarily engaged in a veritable where's Waldo, seeking out the whimsical variations. Is that a cow's udder? As the title implies there is the suggestion of architecture here, a detailed diligence, a slow building up but biomorphic branches attach the ovals in a manner evoking something more organic, spaces that have been formed rather than constructed.

Together with Mullin's paintings, these drawings create a narrative that questions what is real, that pushes the limits of what is known and familiar. If visual abstraction is a fictitious device, it would appear that Mullin has managed to grasp it even more successfully than he did before.

All images courtesy of the artist.

[1] Mullin,Mark. University Art Asscociations Conference in Montreal, Quebec. "Imaging Risk". October 2001.
[2] Mullin,Mark. Interview. 01 Oct.09.