FIAML group hike, Mount Yamnuska. Image courtesy of Jewel Shaw.
FIAML was also a painting residency, in that all participants founded their practice in this medium on their applications - a priori intentions, possibly based on their pre-conceptions of the tradition of landscape art. The majority of the participating artists did paint, although many ended up with work that was much more multi-media and multi-disciplinary by the end of the six weeks. This shift occurs regularly at the Centre and is indicative of these residents being located in an institution that can accommodate sculpture, print-making, ceramics, metal casting, and anything else their hearts desire. Because of this, artists either broaden or dilute, to both successful and, well, diluted ends. After talking to many artists within this residency and in others residencies, their initial, pre-proposals were often something distant from what they ended up accomplishing during their weeks at the Centre.
What FIAML concluded for me is that the participating artists within the residency were supporting the Centre's legacy by following institutionally prompted interests in nature, landscape, a concept of 'place' as far as urban vs. rural, the emboldening of landscape art, and the dis/replacement of the figure in art. The Banff Centre's visual arts' legacy, since its foundation in 1933, is tied to its facilitation of artist practices that are invested in representing the grandeur of nature and our relationship with it. Within an institution that has built its identity in direct connection to its contextual environment, visual arts residencies that are associated and premised on a 'return to nature' will inevitably continue to be supported, despite some deviations. Everyone comes from both rural and urban communities at any given time during their travels, and not to give concession to the urban over the local or vice versa, but what can one expect from an arts centre located deep within a Canadian national park, except this exact ideological privilege?
My consideration of landscape painting as anachronistic is based in undergraduate Canadian art history courses where I was beaten over the head with the long standing tradition of landscape painting. Since European contact in the 15th century, we can trace the development from map making, to territory marking, to recording Westward pioneer progress, to the Group of Seven as the pinnacle of many people's understanding of Canadian art. Although rather dull and normalized, is not something to be easily dismissed. Recently, I was reading a catalogue essay on the work of Iain Baxter&, Products, Place & Phenomenon, where his work is compared to that of Gerard Richter in relation to both artists' approaches to landscape as a critical foundation to modernity. Curator Robert McKaskell quotes Richter in defence of his landscape work, saying "...though these pictures are motivated by the dream of a classical order and a pristine world - by nostalgia, in other words - the anachronism in them takes on a subversive and contemporary quality." This makes sense when considering a re-evaluation of landscape painting in a contemporary art context, which is possibly the goal of The Banff Centre by continuing to host a painting and landscape residency; nostalgia mixed with the establishment of a subversive turn through maintaining a vice grip on a tradition that is essentially being yawned at. Within the same breathe, McKaskell quotes critic Nancy Shaw who describes Baxter&'s work as "reflecting the industry of landscape." A consideration of landscape painting as a significant component of Canadian cultural economy explains its persistence at the Centre: beating a dead horse that continues to bleed money.
FIAML group hike, Stanley Glacier in Kootenay National Park. Image courtesy of Jewel Shaw.
This art residency theme persists because of its cachet and because of its employ of subversiveness grown out of its inability to quit, despite shifts in outside opinions and trajectories. This can be compared with a belief in the nobility of painters who continue in a medium that has been considered deceased at one point or another. These artists are participating in a longstanding and agreeable theme that at the same time must be defended. Nature means being somewhere different than you are normally, recalling opposition and otherness. This comes out of the Romanticist period when artists depicted nature as sublime, spiritual and pure in order to counter the burgeoning industrialization and hustle and bustle of cities. For artists nowadays, particularly younger artists, they are required to work in a city and be connected to a community - dealers, shows, curators, other artists - in order to establish themselves by continuing to exhibit and make additions to their resumes. The Banff Centre, promoted as an escape to nature, is a break from the standard/urbanized art world. Truth is, people consider it as a break from the other aspects of their lives too, taking the opportunity to indulge in drinking, drugs and sex, which could also be considered as a sort of return to primal or natural behaviour. Often considered as a subversive lifestyle (the artist vs. the conservative), it has now become also a bit outdated. The residencies are not retreats, but continuations of other predictable traditions.
FIAML group hike, Stanley Glacier in Kootenay National Park. Image courtesy of Jewel Shaw.
From these conditions, assuming one is relieved from normal responsibilities during one's time at The Banff Centre, I believe that the resident artists (me included) have a perverted conception of what this form of nature and isolation is supposed to mean. What can nature mean to people who are trapped in perpetual and overpowering urban existences? Because our contemporary sense of irony trumps our feelings of nostalgia, observed from my own experience and from others', the continuation of residencies on the themes of a nature retreat and landscape art have to be re-evaluated. Although landscape art has a legacy of being the normalized popular theme in Canadian art history, it is now something that can be considered as politically oppositional to the mainstream. I don't think that landscape painting is the new radical, but that it requires continued focus through a method that doesn't continue to consider it as a staple of Canadian art practice; retreat or no retreat.
Reference: McKaskell, Robert. Iain Baxter: Products, Place, Phenomenon. Art Gallery of Windsor, 1998.]]>
Tricia Middleton's installation Midnight Gallery Rambles seemed to exist in a state of simultaneous sedimentation and erosion. Where the boundaries of these forces divided was virtually indistinguishable. In this sense her work took on a generative quality, but one inflected by a wry between-ness. Perhaps this coy wink developed from the question of whether destruction is its own kind of becoming.
Midnight Gallery Rambles was an environment and an exhibition, and it addressed the gallery as both a set and a venue. A series of sculptures and video installations and architectural structures cohabited together, staking territories for their own crumbly activities. The temporary space of SAAG was coloured by red and blue lights, but remained dark and theatrical. Spray foam, bed sheets, drywall, glitter, and latex paint roiled in various stages of growth, collapse, and re-growth. Projections and monitors animated false walls and swaddling piles with the documents of their own making. The accoutrements, tools and packing material of the gallery were implicated in the formation of these caddywompus creations. Yet many of the works were discrete and self-contained, seemingly sufficient in themselves. The result was an exhibition that intertwined the history of its own materials and forms with the architectural space, the artist-as-performer, and the audience.
As I rambled my way through the Rambles I considered that this exhibition did not exist as static and complete at any one moment. The large scaffold structure in the centre of the gallery was a particularly good example of this quality. I thought it might droop and bend while I watched; its own unstable materiality implicated in its demise. It was this sense of slow collapse that somehow prolonged the experience of the exhibition itself. In this way the installation existed in a register of geologic time as well as immediate presence. Like a glacier that gradually calves ice, the scaffold was destined to soon crumble: a building site serac that would inevitably melt and disperse and become some other thing again. Through this realization gallery visitors were confronted by each work's own duration, experiencing the exhibition as an ensemble of others with life-spans all their own.
An invasion of multicolored rectangles, cubes, and triangles, along with pseudo shapes of various sizes enliven the white vitrine as they appear to ascend outwards from the cube; gravitating into empty space in a diagonal trajectory. Although a devised hanging system for the suspended objects is inevitably present, it is not blatantly visible, or easy to detect. Rather, these blocks of color sit transfixed; suspended in open air like the shards of glass in a freeze frame of a vase being struck by a bullet.
Upon entering the Prairie Art Gallery, I see three Uncertainty Makers, which Quebec-born artist Jean-Pierre Gauthier has become quite well known for. Next to them is a geometric network of metal tubes suspended just above the floor from a system of mechanized pulleys at the ceiling of the exhibition space. Moving across the gallery, I trigger the motion sensor attached to the controls of the machine, causing the tubes to undulate randomly. The tubes clank and rattle.
Convening together at FAB Gallery with each artist putting forward their works and aesthetics to share with their new artistic communities, the show was organized by department Chair Betsy Boone, who is obviously trying to steer the department forward and emphasizing the artistic activity of her new hires.
Glenn Ligon
Death of Tom
2008
Photo: M.N. Hutchinson, Courtesy Illingworth Kerr Gallery
Exhibited at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Death of Tom had a distinctly different feel than the MOCCA version I saw in 2008. Dominating the entrance of the IKG space stood an enormous black box clad in tar paper, with an elusive, melancholy piano tune emanating from its innards. Through heavy black curtains one entered the box, encountering the dim, spare interior. The floor was carpeted with soft, dark pile. The walls were painted black plywood, the ceiling a drooping shadowy fabric. This temporary cinema/shack formed the container for a single-channel projected video (transferred from 16mm to DVD) scored by acclaimed pianist Jason Moran. The video consists of the remaining visual signature of a film (shot previously by Ligon) that intended to recreate a scene from an early twentieth century 'Tom Show' film by Edwin S. Porter. A 'Tom Show', for those who are unaware, was a form of popular stage play performed in the United States from the 1850's to the early 1900's based on the book Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Importantly, 'Tom Shows' were performed by white actors who played African-American characters while wearing blackface makeup.
For Ligon, the 'Tom Show' clearly presented an opportunity to interrogate and potentially reclaim racist representations of African-American culture. But by chance, the results of Ligon's re-creation were almost entirely lost in the development process. Thankfully, rather than scrap the film, Ligon saw an opportunity to expand the connotative possibilities of the project by presenting the film in its inchoate state. In Death of Tom this failure of representation suggests that the film itself is trying to come to grips with it's own controversial past, tentative and reluctant to coalesce into distinguishable forms. The result was a complex and mesmerizing installation. Where once a re-created scene of a racial insensitivity appeared, now only remained a subtle palimpsest. At times the distorted suggestion of a human body entered the frame, or the title sequence emerged from a cloud of grey. The piano melody waltzed and drifted, seeming to seduce and mourn the celluloid fog of almost-becoming or approaching rigor mortis. The audience became witnesses and voyeurs to this non-spectacle, straining to see through the mists, while collected together as an arbitrary community within the black box.
Photo Courtesy of TrepanierBaer Gallery, John Dean
Even though I was essentially a giant looking in on the house/factory, I couldn't observe the whole picture. The culture on the hovercraft was too complex for my ad hoc anthropological skills. I think this is what makes BDFPSFG so grand of an art experience. Even though the clues are all laid out in immaculate plastic detail, you could probably look at it forever.
That said, when I talked to Chris and he (or his finger) walked me through the rooms of the factory, I couldn't believe that I didn't get the story myself. The factory is an organic entity that processes sheets of plastic into flat templates that are folded into skulls, decorated, packaged and dropped down to earth. Each stage in the process has its own station or room, and there are also living spaces for the end of the workday or breaks. It's easy to see once he points it out, how this factory works. It's funny that this mini scheme looks functional, even the infinite staircase seems structurally believable.
