Projet Pangée
Delphine Hennelly + Mickey Mackenna
June 14-August 25, 2018

In characteristic style, the gallery space in Projet Pangée for this show is filled by a series of paintings complemented by a few sculptures produced by another artist. This time they had a figurative painter who is a formalist in Delphine Hennelly, and an abstract sculptor enamoured with magic and the subconscious in Mickey MacKenna. Both are a little mythical in choice of subject, riffing off of art history (early modernism and minimalism, respectively) and both artists work with line and stylized forms in distinctive ways, possessing also a dynamic, developing practise which is of keen interest.

It is difficult these days to paint something in a style that seems at once innovative and genuine, but Delphine Hennelly has achieved that with these strong paintings. Hennelly’s works are primarily formalist paintings interrupted by figuration, or figurative works interrupted by formalism. This body of work, in which all but one painting consists of figures painted over with mostly horizontal lines, was inspired by tapestries. Hennelly recently obtained her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts in Rutgers, New Jersey, and her BFA in 2002 from Cooper Union. She was born in Vancouver to parents who produced and acted in their own theatre productions and spent her childhood in an artistic milieu surrounded the shapes, forms, and garments of theatre production. It seems apparent that this mixture of creativity with the formal structure of family was formative to her. After that, Hennelly spent some years of her youth in Montreal, and is now residing in the United States.

Delphine Hennelly is a self-professed formalist. She has an interest in colour theory, and her colour choices are unusual, pinks, greens and browns abound, not usually the most compelling when seen together, as the combination is reminiscent of 60s fabrics and decor, but here they work with great luminosity and resonance. The unexpected colour choices and juxtapositions are highly satisfying. Speaking of being sated, the layers of these paintings were referred to on Pangée’s Instagram as “cake” and indeed they do seem moist and edible. Although they are painted without impasto, they are lush and generous and the visual placement does call to mind a multilayered cake. Hennelly cleverly combines her colours, the flavours of various styles, iconic imagery and decorative motifs.

Hennelly is an omnivore artist, gobbling up textiles, ceramics, British political cartoons, the French school of early modernism, and so on. By chance, while looking at another exhibition, she found a way to apply the construction of a tapestry to the construction of a painting. In these works, her competent hand weaves figuration and colour into the warp and woof of the canvas. She begins with the figures, then clean lines, then messes them up, or “wears” them, to capture the look of aged tapestries and their worn out threads. At other times she begins with the structure of the lines. Beyond these line-centric paintings, Hennelly has a strong sense of line in the sense that drawing seems facile to her, and she performs it without much modelling. I was surprised and intrigued to learn about the pace and timing of her process. She takes one to two days to select the colours of her painting, and can take as little as couple of days to a week or two to complete the painting itself.  Many of the images selected to sit behind the lines of these paintings are inspired either formally or thematically by classical drawing and sculpture. Yet, she isn’t afraid to use decorative elements which could adorn plates, children’s books, or fill the comic section of a common newspaper. Also apparent is her interest in feminist theory and the representation of women. Hennelly has spoken about the shift in her work to representing women with a consciousness of equality, rather than as objects to be looked at and desired. By utilizing fine art and the decorative and textile arts with equal focus for her inspiration, Hennelly levels the playing field and seems to take the stance that one is not superior to the other. Her older work explores femininity, what it is to be a woman, sensuality, and the body. Hennelly also deals with motherhood, protection, new life, maturity, different phases of life, and heavy topics such as the suffering of refugees, mass migration and world crises. There aren’t answers being provided here, rather there are questions presented upon which we can ruminate in the form of visual meditation on her canvases. 

The figures which you can see, more or less, by peering through the haze and maze of lines, are mother and child, the child in pink, which appears to be the protagonist of the series. Storytelling takes a backseat in these paintings, which don’t come off very figuratively, and even less autobiographically, rather they are inventive and exploratory. Hennelly is a sensitive artist whose works are often inspired by current events, social justice and the suffering of humanity, and while these themes seem to be part of what gets her in the studio, what keeps her there are the formal problems of painting. She is also interested in what lies behind and ahead in terms of art history and contemporary painting. She is an artist who is always pushing herself, experimenting, questioning, puzzling, exploring.

Memories of a Haecceity, shown in the gallery space literally in opposition to all her other works, is an example of her previous style before being intercepted by the lines and geometric forms which the viewer is compelled to see through, but sort of denied. We see a mother and child in simplified, stylized forms with shades of the classical and the illustrative. The mother holds a shaft of wheat and the pair seem to be climbing over a pile of boulders in a desert landscape with a sunny, partly cloudy sky. Haecceity is from the Latin haecceitas, a term from medieval scholastic philosophy. Haecceity is a person’s or object’s thisness, or particularity. The choice in titles is unusual since the imagery chosen doesn’t have a particularity, or a “thisness”, but the paintings do.

The Infant Praxiteles again shows a mother and child, and this one very tapestry-like as the lines are horizontal and not interrupted with other patterns. Praxiteles was a Greek sculptor who was credited with being the first person to sculpt a life-sized statue of a nude woman.  With its classical theme, strictly horizontal structure, and the title, I think of lineage, artistic and human. I think of how we pass down images throughout history, of influencers and influenced. I think of how objects like tapestries are passed down, and how we pass down our genetics, our ideas.

There is an intense repetition of motifs and even very particular images throughout Hennelly’s oeuvre. There is a sense of annihilation of meaning in this aggressive repetition, which could almost be likened to the practice of psychotherapy where one becomes desensitized to difficult topics by constant exposure.  The overarching theme of the exhibition is that of the mother and child. There is a sense of idealizing this familial relationship through classical, pagan means, and Hennelly has spoken about trying to get away from Christian ideology and imagery when painting such subjects. She often uses repetition in her work as a way of breaking down and exhausting an image.  Her tendency to over-produce one motif over and over recalls the mass production of advertising and posters, cue Andy Warhol. She destroys the image until all meaning is almost stripped away and we are left with the forms. 

The Matrix paintings I found almost impossible to decipher. With some difficulty I could make out the pink of a baby’s legs and some foliage at the top of the painting, perhaps a maternal figure sheltering the child, and some rocks. The composition vaguely recalls Renaissance art. The etymology of the word matrix is complex and fascinating. Stemming from mater, or mother, matrix literally means “breeding female” in Latin. It came to mean “womb” in late Middle English as well. The word effectively plays off its mathematical or formal meanings in modern use, where a matrix is “a rectangular array of quantities or expressions in rows and columns that is treated as a single entity and manipulated according to particular rules”, or structurally: “an organizational structure in which two or more lines of command, responsibility, or communication may run through the same individual”, according to the Oxford English dictionary. Perhaps the structure, the DNA foundation, the whole becomes more important than the individual here.

The typically horizontal lines that we view the figures through in these paintings call to mind digitization, as when looking through fuzzy, moving lines at a channel you aren’t subscribed to, giving the viewer a voyeuristic sensation as we struggle with our perception and desire to recognize forms. There’s a sense of the figures being imprisoned too, and bound to the surface. There’s a flatness to Delphine Hennelly’s work which lends it a perhaps stronger relationship to the abstract than one would assume, certainly more so than in her previous work. Her older work, lovely formally, is quite flat, very posterized in appearance with its uniform colours reminiscent of old advertisements in their simplicity. I like that she is engaged in a dynamic exploration, not keeping all the lines horizontal, experimenting with adding shapes as in The Matrix 1, Untitled and The Matrix 2, with their circles and triangles and squares further thwarting a figurative read. I particularly enjoyed Venus and Cupid for, admittedly, the easier interpretation of  the scene behind the jittering lines of the bars of paint, and how the pink eye of Cupid peers through, as if between apartment blinds. All in all, Delphine Hennelly is a challenging, inventive artist who is well-deserving of the mounting attention being paid to her work.

Although Mickey MacKenna, when first encountering her sculptures, seems to work exclusively formally, her pieces are self-portraits. Her process is poetic, imaginative and exploratory. She is a young Toronto artist who recently graduated from OCAD University with a BFA in sculpture, and she commences her MFA at the Royal College of Art in London this year; her career is taking early traction.

In Last You Saw Me, the perpendicular assembly of this wall piece is striking with its combination of a thin horizontal steel bar and soft organic material to be found in the sea sponge at each end, reminiscent of a crucifixion. By their placement and shape, the sponges are like helpless hands, waiting to receive, to soak, to grab. They are held mercilessly apart by the bar of steel, while the body (or twine with its clinging chamomile flowers from the tower of Bollingen of Jung) dangles down in resignation. The sponge absorbs what it can, what it must, in this case, the gutter water of Toronto. We are met with the high and low here, the delicate and the relentless, the natural and the man-made. As earthly beings we take in everything from our environment, from the base pollution of our corrupt surroundings to the flowers which bloom perennially, reminding us those who inspire and motivate us.

I was told by the director of Projet Pangée that the tall yellow standing piece, entitled Favia Blumen—made of wood, specifically plywood and driftwood, along with a wasp nest, chamomile flowers, sage and thyme from the tower of Bollingen of Jung, crushed seashells, and acrylic paint and varnish—represents the artist’s ego when feeling confident. I love the mix of playfulness and seriousness that is apparent upon delving in MacKenna’s work. Yellow is the colour of the solar plexus, the seat of the ego-self. The egg yolk yellow piece stands like a cartoon cutout, or one of those two-dimensional representations made out of cardboard of celebrities. A splat-shaped stand supports the piece which rises like a stem and then splits off in two stamens, topped at the throat of the taller section by the wasp nest which is dotted with herbs. It could be a parent and child, or a figure divided in two, or a plant reaching for the sun and reflecting that radiance in its own yolky glow. The imagined buzzing of the wasp nest suggests voice and even aggression, and the shorter protrusion, if seen as part of a singular figure, could be a little phallic. Thus, this sculpture does give a successful impression of self-satisfaction and happy egotism along with a bit of cockiness. Of course, once you know the title it sort of gives it away in that favia is a kind of coral and Blumen is German for flowers. It definitely looks like it could be part of a coral reef but knowing this piece is autobiographical is certainly more evocative.

MacKenna’s more low-sitting floor piece which could be mistaken for an end stand; The Fish that Caught the Hague is a piece of alabaster resting on a small table of lovely burned ash wood. I enjoyed the seemingly worn-down lines of wood, the way it looked gently and carefully burnt, the contrast of the moon-like alabaster, the richness of the wood-brown, and the way the edges of the alabaster were softened to suggest a skull. The title seems absurdist, a bit Dada, I couldn’t draw much in way of an analogy, but it sparked some curiosity and played up the absurdist quality of the piece itself, in that it was presented as an ordinary object or something that may be around the house, but it certainly isn’t. 

Nights with the Wild Boar is a standing, or rather, walking, sculpture made of driftwood, plywood and acrylic paint. It was motivated by MacKenna’s trip to the Black Forest. 

This gumby-legged piece in a sort of olive-ochre has a head that bites from its foot like a snapping turtle, and a hollow inner core, like a Dali figure. As in Favia Blumen, this figure is narrow and flat when seen from one perspective, and then comes to life when seen from the other perspective, much like a streamlined, less human Giacometti. Just going by the appearance of this sculpture and the title, you can sense its menace, mystery and determination. MacKenna constructs her sculptures as self-portraits and has an interest in Jung; we can read her works as pieces of herself, fragments which comprise a whole. It would be interesting one day to see many of them gathered together in a retrospective, forming a unity of Self in projection. In her solitary travels to the Black Forest, MacKenna had some profound experiences which she shared with me. I think it would be most fruitful to hear it in her own words: 

“My time in the Black Forest was an important part of a trip I took alone through Europe last fall. I stayed in Gengenbach which is a small and strange historic town nestled in a valley of the forest. Looking back on that time is a thicketed phantasmagoric montage. It was a time of psychological purging on all fronts and I’m grateful for the cosmic brew I had to swim my way out of. I spent my days running, meditating, writing and reading Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections which is a retelling of his life from his earliest memories. At night I had vivid dreams bordering on night terrors and panicked fevers unlike anything I’ve experienced. It was a rebirth of some sort. The sculpture Nights With The Wild Boar (2018) is a portrait of that time. I found out weeks after I left Gengenbach that the Black Forest is known for its healing properties and many rehabilitation and retreat centers are hidden throughout. Wild boars run through the forest and are responsible for a handful of human deaths each year. Many believe the Black Forest is home to fairies, gnomes and spirits. 

After my time in Gengenbach I took a job in Switzerland in the farm country outside of Zürich. All of these disparate elements came together so swiftly and sweetly. I continued reading Memories, Dreams, Reflections as I found myself wandering the streets of Zürich and Basel in stride with Jung’s recollections of his life in these exact places. I felt a strong need to at least be near the Bollingen Tower and specifically the stone carvings. On a day off I drove to Bollingen which consists of a playground, a four car parking lot and a few large houses on the lake. The tower is unmarked and not open to the public but it was a cold and rainy Tuesday in November and I recognized a turret through the thick trees surrounding the property. With wind at my back that felt as though it was Jung himself I jumped the fence, then the stone wall, skinny dipped in the lake and meditated with my back upon the stone cube he carved. I can barely describe it. It was the most magical day of my life!” 

Mackenna relates to substance in a sort of magical way, much like the ritual art we call fetishes, or how a shaman works with objects and plant medicine to cause them to relate to meaning in a way that connects matter to the astral planes, bringing healing and insight. She imbues her materials with power, meaning and revelatory identity but also sensitively works with them to draw out and highlight their own innate significance and character. Her work is magical in the sense that its creation is in tune with the mysterious, transformative process known as life, which is deeply connected to art-making itself. Magic is perhaps only something we do not yet understand, but its mystery fills us with awe and humility. Mickey MacKenna’s work reminds us of the energy we imbue in objects, and the energy inherent in matter/physical existence itself.