September 21- October 7, 2023

liza-sokolovskaya.com

Liza Sokolovskaya’s first solo exhibition, It is the Closest We Will Be, is a humorous and poignant exploration of materials and memories, featuring oil paintings, textile works, acrylic skins, small sculptures, and papier maché objects. The concept for the installation is an artist’s live-work studio, the environment filled with images, detritus, and treasures from Sokolovskaya’s life, sometimes autobiographical, and at other times fictional. The works in this show are strongly suggestive of the idiosyncrasies of memory, its permeability, the way it fades and is distorted. Certain things, people, places, and questions haunt us. The show is focused on Sokolovskaya’s experience as an immigrant and her migratory life, travelling from Uzbekistan to Montreal, to New York, and then returning home. This show is a sort of homecoming as she was raised in Montreal, but left for several years to study in New York City.  Sokolovskaya was born in 1989 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and her family immigrated to Montreal when she was a child. 

Sokolovskaya moved to New York City in 2016 when she began studying at the New York Academy of Art. NYAA has an esteemed MFA program, and is known for classes which focuses on technique and working from live models. After graduating, Sokolovskaya maintained a strong studio practice, during which she has explored painting pleinair painting, oil painting on mylar, textile art, making shaving cream monotypes, and more. Her experience at the prestigious NYAA refined her painting practice, but also seriously loosened her up and gave her oeuvre a sense of cohesion. She learned how to paint the figure from life, to work more quickly, and to paint more boldly with larger brushes. The result is that her paintings are more dynamic, immediate and approachable and they mesh successfully with her more experimental and playful pieces. 

When you enter It is the Closest We Will Be, you start with a mix of new and old, prints, paintings, and two fibre works, on the whimsically-painted early 20th century walls. The choices make more sense as you take in the entire exhibition. To our left, we see the distended torso of a woman with long brown hair hanging in tendrils like Medusa’s snakes, a fragment of the artist. We cannot see her face, but this oil and oil pastel painting’s title, Disease or Desire, asks the question most on the viewer’s mind. Golden Tooth, Beaded Eyes a stuffed and beaded textile piece that looks like a mask almost seems to mock or threaten us as we approach, like a gargoyle warding off those who may not appreciate the show with its bared beaded teeth and beady eyes. On the walls of the hallway leading to the main exhibition room, we see two more fresh oil paintings from this year. Curved, in cool violet, blue, and lemon yellow, is a self-portrait nude torso  that shows a body that seems to bend in a stretch, or perhaps just an odd position as she uses the selfie camera on her phone. Also pinned up in the hall is a painting of the arm of the artist’s father painted lovingly and softly against the luminous folds of a pink duvet. The works in this transitional space set the mood for self-reflection and family history.  A bright abstract acrylic skin shows us that things are about to get weird. 

Entering the unconventional main exhibition space, the viewer is probably unsure whether they are intruding upon a private studio, as there is an odd combination of coloured walls, paintings on the wall, odd works scattered about, furniture, and objects which are not normally seen in an art gallery. In the corner to the right of the entrance is an artist’s working station. On a drawing table are a sketchbook, a few art supplies, and a papier mâché Opus card that would definitely not get you a ride. Upon closer inspection we find a lumpy paper cup with questionable ability to hold a drink, and a papier mâché painted apple core, surprisingly detailed, evoking an image of the artist having just left off sketching and snacking. Set up near the work station are a bra with detailed eyes, both seductive and creepy with beaded eye-whites. You can imagine a needle piercing the eye again and again, and lower eye lashes dangle strangely. Above this bra, as if just stripped out of it, are pearlescent white papier mâché sculptures of the artist’s champagne glass breasts. Kitty-corner to those works is the shape of Sokolovskaya’s belly, and above it, gold-tipped breasts. 

Attention grabbing works a bit further into the space are the bright acrylic skins hanging near the middle of the gallery that are made to look like human skins. They are both funny and grotesque, draped over coat hangers suspended on a closet bar, as if the dotted paint garments are the artist’s human self waiting to be put on. The skin, our largest organ, allows us to feel, to touch and be touched, and to a figurative painter, the skin is so important. The way human skin looks in different light, the way it can reveal our inner workings, our muscles and bones underneath, the ripple of cellulite, the pulse of blood, our fragility, our textures. To paint skin well is to have mastered one of the most difficult things there is to paint. 

Pinned unstretched on the wall near the skins are oil paintings of Sokolovskaya’s lover posing with them. It is a bit meta, since the acrylic skins are rendered in a painterly, almost pointillist or pixelated way, and then we have two paintings from this year of the skins posed with real humans. In My Bed, shows lovers’ legs stick out from under the bed covers along with the feet of her acrylic skin. It makes me think of someone sitting with the memory of a person who is about to fade away, vanish into little dots of colour. These paintings show intimate scenes, that are a bit comical and also sad in a way. They remind me of how we sometimes cling to outworn relationships, to who we thought our lovers were, to the memory of them. On the other canvas, Your Arm, Sokolovskaya’s lover’s arm is embracing the skin of her body left behind, as if she shed it like a snake and he remains in bed with what is left of her. The human experience is inherently tied up with mortality, with wear and tear, with love and loss. Sokolovskaya touches upon this with quirky curiosity and a touch of existentialism. The unstretched canvases themselves speak to the transitory nature of the artist’s relationship between New York and Montreal. They were rolled and put in her luggage and brought on the train from city to city.

In painting, Sokolovskaya often makes portraits, painting models in class, friends, and most typically, herself. She is interested in moments that are unposed, unusual, funny, and even unflattering. Conventional beauty is not a primary interest to her in making work, and she even explores what many would call ugliness, and yet her work is often beautiful because of her skill with light, colour, and her ability to seemingly effortlessly render skin, bone, and body through a series of dynamic, rapid, yet keenly observed brushstrokes.

Perusing the show feels as if you are creeping in voyeuristically on a private space of the artist in an intimate moment. The ghost of Sokolovskaya—painted loosely on a clear curtain— showers nude in a corner, while on the bed a slice of New York margarita pizza waits for her. Blue-rimmed bowls from her childhood in Uzbekistan and round, hearty Uzbek bread are memories waiting to comfort her, while on the futon bed is a Tarot spread of three cards perhaps indicating a question about the future. The thick cards, the Tower, the Fool, and the Magician, set the tone for change and upheaval, with a touch of hope.  The cigarettes which discretely fill the space, in corners, on the sheets, in a bowl, suggest the persistence of a habit, or anxiety. The butts glow with life, skillfully painted, they seem hot and flammable. Some are long with ashes, and some are even gold, as if they are fantasy cigarettes. Sunny side up eggs are scattered around on paper plates, and even loose on a shelf, making the place appear both strange and lived-in. Are these dreams of eggs? Who is this messy, hungry person? 

We find her painted loosely in the corner on the shower curtain, a nude brunette, soaping her pits. Acrylic skins of a one-piece bathing suit and bra and panties hang beside. Perhaps the artist is showering paint from her body, or returning from the pool, and will get dressed afterwards, have a cigarette, and think about her next painting while eating her slice of pizza or finishing her eggs. On the bed we find an acrylic skin of a sock that looks like it could have come out of a Phillip Guston painting.  Papier mâché Opus and Metro cards make it especially clear the on-the-ground relationship to both cities Sokolovskaya has, and they are strikingly accurate, but also cartoon-like, somehow, in the way they are rough and thick, the opposite of what the sleek familiar cards are. The most erotic painting in the show, Red Body, is an oil painting tacked up by the shower, a pink torso of Sokolovskaya done from a steep perspective that calls to mind nudes one might send to a lover late at night, as seemingly huge fingers graze the bare surface of her pubic mound and her breasts fade off into darkness. The image is faceless.

There is a zest for life here, a hope for the future, and a nostalgia for the past, what could have been, what was and what wasn’t. The works call to mind the way that memory functions, they are wobbly, melting away in a moment. Memories are not as clear from year to year, and eventually they become memories of memories, cartoon-like. Sokolovskaya’s first solo show is a synthesis of everything that came before, and a promise for what is to come, when she returns to Montreal—as this exhibition foreshadowed—to live and work. As in Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, however, she doesn’t return empty-handed. She returns with new knowledge, new skills, new relationships, and the drive to create new works. She also returns with the aim to create community, which she has been doing for a few years now with her Artist Confluence project that she is bringing to Montreal. 

It is the Closest We Will Be is a strong first show from an artist keenly interested in personal reflection, materiality, and experimentation. Deeply considered and finely executed, the works in this show don’t take themselves too seriously. Sokolovskaya seems to have an innate understanding that life is best felt deeply and lived lightly. To do being human well is to be powerfully present while remaining skilled at all the release and letting go that necessitate the mortal experience. In this installation there is a fascination with the self that is the pursuit of many figurative painters, especially young ones—the questions “Who am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going? Why am I here? Can I make others understand me?” arise from all deep thinkers and feelers. But beyond the personal, there is also a fascination for what it means to be human, what it means  to deeply inquire, to deeply seek to understand and interpret one’s own human journey, which, although unique, is an experience we all share.

@Liza.Sokolovskaya

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Galerie Bellemare Lambert April 8- May 6

À l’ombre d’une corolle

The title of Dominic Papillon’s latest solo exhibition at Galerie Bellemare Lambert loosely translates to In the Shadow of a Flower Blossom. Both the show’s title and the titles of the works provide poetic entry points, giving us a riddle or a clue while not telling us everything. I first noticed Dominic Papillon’s work at Papier in 2022 when his sculpture, Dure-Mère II was presented at Galerie Bellemare Lambert’s booth. At the Belgo, I was able to enjoy this paper, wax, and watercolour figurative sculpture more slowly. Dure-Mère II directly translates as “hard mother”, but the phrase is a scientific term for the outermost membrane of connective tissue which protects the nervous system, the dura mater. This is an interesting play on words, evoking both the ubiquitous human experience of being born to a mother, and also a thin layer that protects our vulnerability. This hollow sculpture represents a walking or posing human form, the sex unidentifiable. The paper and wax construction seems to refer to the delicacy of the human body, while the vibrant hues of the watercolour bring it to life. A headless and hollow form, this sculpture is in its foundation paper white flecked with salmon pinks and blues which give it the appearance of a gorgeous seashell, but also of disease, or varicose veins visible through translucent human skin. This seems to be a skin that someone has shed, leaving a shell behind. 

The work of Papillon is often simultaneously beautiful and grotesque. It calls to mind the complexity of the human condition, in that all that is gorgeous, enjoyable, and pleasurable in life is also temporal and bound to fade or end abruptly. We exist in places and forms which can have only temporary beauty; the material world is continuously replicating itself and leaving behind what is outworn. Is the frailty of the human condition what makes life so precious? When will the threat to the survival of our species make us treasure our own lives and the life of our planet?

Born in Quebec, Dominic Papillion lives and works in Montreal. He obtained his baccalaureate from UQAM in visual and media arts, and his master’s degree in sculpture from Concordia, where he now teaches sculpture. He is represented by Galerie Bellemare Lambert and he has shown there since 2015, and has had other solo exhibitions at Maison de la culture Frontenac, Plein Sud in Longueuil, Circa Art Actuel in the Montreal, Regart in Lévis, Sporobole in Sherbrooke, and Galerie Verticale in Longueuil among others. Papillon’s use of the human form in a playful but also serious way to evoke emotion and the human experience reminds me of the character of some works by Kiki Smith and David Aljmedt, but, of course, he has his own unique language.

Perhaps the most striking piece in the exhibition is a wall-mounted human form at the back of the first room in the gallery. Humeur acéphale II shows a limp, headless body with a sickly pallor, stuck to the wall with large daubs of pink or wine-coloured wax which resemble deflated balloons or oversized flower petals. These coloured wax pieces stand in warm contrast to the corpse-like tones of the figure, which, laying limp, recall Jesus being taken down from the cross, a scene recreated by so many artists during the Renaissance as The Deposition. Gallery director Christian Lambert said he admired the figurative wax pieces for their resemblance to marble, and indeed Papillon’s wax works do evoke classical marble figures from antiquity. 

The grotesque has long been a part of Christian art, with sculptures of suffering Christs or saints martyred prominently displayed, mostly in churches, reminding us of their stories. A wax figure also evokes death in other ways, sometimes creating a look that is reminiscent of the tradition of human bodies presented after death preserved in formaldehyde, made up and patched up with putty so that their loved ones can regard them one last time and say goodbye. Our culture has a strange relationship with life, often not valuing it while alive, but also not giving much attention to death, avoiding thought of such matters, thereby keeping death out of sight and out of mind. Wax is an interesting medium for a sculptor to work in, it resembles the human body in texture and feel, and as such, it can be used to get remarkably life-like effects. The heating and drying process of the material makes it very malleable, but also vulnerable to changes in temperature. Wax is also used by sculptors in techniques such as with lost wax casting. Wax work figures are a fascinating and kitschy human preoccupation often shown in museums as a tourist attraction, showcasing famous figures in a bizarre state that is at the same time very life like, very dead, and also often comical. 

One of the most intriguing pieces in the show is Papillon’s Humeurs acéphales, a ceramic work where the figure is cast in nearly matte black is emerging from underneath a gold-coloured blanket made from thick coils. The person underneath seems to be undergoing some sort of transformation, and three feet can be seen along with three hands. Is there more than one being underneath, engaging in carnal activities? Or do the hands and toes tense from pain? No head can be seen, and from the title we can wager that what is felt is of the mind, not of the body—the title of the piece translates as “headless mood”. To quote Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, “don’t lose your head!”

Alanguissement is another work that plays on words as well as forms, and brings some levity and pop-style (think Rocky Horror or the Rolling Stones). The word alanguissement means languor, which is a mood of lassitude or indolence. A langue is a physical tongue as well as a language, and a huge, lolling, red wax tongue is what replaces the face on this pallid waxen bust. The man seems to be taste itself, his shoulderless huge throat emphasized by the way it emerges from the wall. Most of the head isn’t present, it is simply a massive, smooth, wax tongue. What if taste had a face? What if, in the sensual experience of being in a body, taste consumed you were little more than a tongue? What kind of languor could bring about such a moment? Can our desire ever be sated? 

On the wall and floor we find Abattis I, II, III. Generally speaking, they are iron-coloured ceramic works representing roughly-hewn body parts. Abattis I is a skinny arm, Abattis II is an arm, elbow and forearm, and Abattis III is a more abstract and barely identifiable torso which is presented on the ground. An abattis is a weapon formed from a branch of a tree, sharpened, and laid out defensively before the enemy in war to delay their approach, so that they may be fired upon to exact the maximum damage. Are these body parts the weapons or parts of the bodies that were wounded by the weapons? Or both, as a human race we destroy each other, despite being one family. These body parts look worn down and manipulated by touch, we can see the impressions of the artist’s hands and fingers. The effect is reminiscent of the consequences of being human. It makes me think of all that touches us, damages us, wounds us, all the ways we cause hurt and are hurt in turn. 

Near the Abattis sculptures is Dure-Mère I, a paper bust where the head seems to be tearing away layers of its own face with its hand. Like its sister piece, Dure-Mère II, this sculpture is also made from paper, wax, and watercolour, and the colour palette is the same. We seem to be able to see through its transparent skin to the capillary and vein systems. The piece is both lovely and discomfiting. Papillon’s work is unsettling in the way it reminds us of our own mortality and vulnerability, he seems to play with the human body in sculpture like a scientist dissecting a cadaver. In fact, Papillon’s work in this series reminds me strongly of surgical models used to train medical students, disturbingly lifelike, but also clearly not alive. These sculptures are momento moris, reminding us of our ultimate demise, but also of the beauty inherent in the forms which allow us to exist on this earth, to feel, to experience, and to create. 

What I found most striking about Fait ou défait, c’est idem, Galerie Deux Poisson’s fourth show, was how collaborative it was, how well the works of these four artists worked in a sort of humble synergy that was at once nameless and named. The show was curated by artist and writer Benjamin Klein, and the curation was strong in this group show; I find group exhibitions are exceedingly hard to pull off, as they too often seem forced, like a gaggle of people compelled to hang out awkwardly. Either they don’t seem to relate at all or they are gathered simply by common theme or medium, having nothing else to bind them together. In this exhibition, however, that was not the case. It had a real grassroots feeling, a sense of true collaboration and excitement. I am going to refrain from describing each work individually; the spirit of this exhibition is the sense of unity and togetherness that makes all the pieces work as a whole. 

Fait ou défait, c’est idem, translated as “done or undone is the same”, alludes to the process of art-making. How does one know when a piece is completed? Is it ever truly done? An artist can stop working at any point and call it finished, no one can ever truly know when a piece is completed, including, oftentimes, the artist. It becomes a choice, an intuition, or it could come with being fed up or having a deadline. The word faire in French means both “to do” and “to make”, so, evocatively, the show’s title could also declare, “made or unmade, it’s the same.” One’s making and one’s doing carry the seed in the same word, as well as its opposite, as from the moment we are born—or made— we start dying. 

The first thing one would encounter when entering the gallery is, ironically, a painting by Malcolm McCormick entitled, The End. It’s roughly but tenderly composed, with black “photo corners” and white script declaring “The End” in the middle. It is plaintive, mock sentimental and also cute. Smears of mustard-paint allow one to see the underpainting as if through a screen. 

If one doesn’t strictly make the rounds, the visitor would likely then notice the impressive installations at the room’s centre. On the floor is a piano-shaped wood and cloth structure titled The Sparrow on the Hill Sees the Fool Going Around by Malcolm McCormick, a painter who also works with drawing and installations. Inside are works on paper by Mathieu Lacroix and Rachel Crummey, and ceramic hands by Michelle Furlong, along with found objects. There is a play on collaboration here, music is more frequently made in a group, multiple instruments and players create greater complexity than one individual is capable of. 

Behind this piece, on a white block rests a piece by Lacroix, another legless piece—do we have a leg to stand on without our friends and collaborators?—is a three-legged chair propped up by stacks of papers and drawings, with a ceramic hand by Michelle Furlong pointing to a spot in the stacks. After this, certainly one could not help but be drawn to the immense in situ mixed media wall piece and installation by Rachel Crummey and Michelle Furlong towards the back of the gallery, titled Experience no. 2, after a piece by John Cage. Layered with bold and gestural marks in charcoal, graphite powder, acrylic paint and spray paint, the eye follows the energy of two artists and one can’t help but visualize their process, working together, erasing the work of the other, wondering if they worked in harmony or at times, adversarily. I think of how Robert Rauschenberg came to de Kooning to ask him if he could erase one of his drawings, which was allowed. Klein told me that he witnessed the process, allowing the artists to work uninterrupted, and saw how many times it could be completed, yet a new movement and shift began. It seemed a process fraught with dynamism and energy. The piece is so energetic that it cannot be contained to the wall.

A large piece of cheap-looking wall-to-wall carpet was contorted on the floor and subjected to the treatment of paint, recalling Furlong’s crumpled painted canvases. Most of the works in this show walk a thin line between ugliness and beauty, humility and humour. A leg made of black faux fur projects from the wall, reminding me of Dada creations. The piece sports rope of a gaudy purple shade, connecting the wall to the folds of carpet like an umbilical cord, its colour standing in stark contrast to the rest of the piece’s monochrome.

A painted disc of carpet stands alone like punctation on the floor, and large strips of black velcro and fringe with what appear to be large black pasties could suggest a crude face. The sort of feminine grunge aesthetic of Crummey and the slick, cool aesthetic of Furlong make an uneasy but pleasing contrast which gives the work a sort of personhood, even beastiness. I imagined it being made with John Cage playing in the background, the artist’s gestures and erasures moving to the sound like the surges of a symphony. 

Scattered throughout the exhibition are Michele Furlong’s shiny, black-glazed ceramic hands pointing, squatting and hiding. They made me think of Thing in the Addam’s family, and their ubiquitousness felt as if they were the same hand, everywhere. They seemed at times to be the hand of the curator, invisibly and gentling guiding your attention. 

Rachel Crummey is an award-winning Toronto-based abstract artist (and writer) working with painting, drawing and installation. Her work is layered, rich, and informed. She is an emerging artist who received her MFA from the University of Guelph in 2014. Her work is most successful in series, and this exhibition has a few of her works on paper, oil pastels on paper and acrylic on board or canvas. Her play of lines and layering is often very graceful. As in Experience no. 2, her installations in charcoal and graphite look like traces left by a ghost or the residue of a spirit or slug, but it could also be a kind of unusual wallpaper, worn with time and peeled away in strips. Her small works in this show are subtle in comparison to the collaborative installation, and quite accurately she describes her work as a “softly moving web.” One of her most engaging pieces here is a network or lung of actively tangled blue lines, made from oil pastel on paper.  Much of her work is very tender and touching, and improvisation plays a strong role in her practise. 

Malcolm McCormick is a primarily a painter (and drawer) but is also a multi-disciplinary artist. He’s from Vancouver and came to Montreal as an MFA candidate at Concordia. He’s spoken of being interested in colour, the formal aspects of making, collage-style work and things that are non-monumental and subtle. His work is sometimes wryly humorous and it has a sensitive yet painterly touch.

Besides The End, another funny piece sits on the floor saying: Take Me Home. Another work is an invisible house where all you can see are illuminated windows and a hastily painted, blue-steel background with brown ground and green grass, uneven letters imploring the viewer. Does the artist wish to go home, or the painting? Every painting for sale in fact says this wordlessly, and it was charming to have it so imploringly stated as it wasn’t even hung. His other oil painting, Banging Your Head Against a Warm Rock was textured with pebbles and almonds. Overall, McCormick’s work is deceptively simple, endearingly unostentatious, but skillfully handled and exploratory.  McCormick said in an interview for his Kelowna Art Gallery duo exhibition in 2017: “ I like to make things that show an accumulation of decisions, and to leave traces of each decision so that the viewer can come into it and get a sense of how this thing developed over time”. The poetically titled, “Looking into His Ear” is a painting layered with transparent polkadot fabric, which leads one to visualize the layers and channels of the body and the delicacy of listening and looking. 

Michelle Furlong is a Montreal-based multi-media artist, a recent graduate of Concordia’s Painting and Drawing program. Her work frequently consists  of cutouts, textiles, texture, silhouettes, sharp contrasts, soft forms, stylized shapes and often, a cold, almost graphic, design. working primarily in paint, drawing and sculpture. Her work is largely concerned with the body, and hands are a major player. Her drawing sits on the floor in the corner, and is layered with outlines of hands, much as a child would use their own body as a starting point for making shapes and forms, and paint with their fingers. The effect of the ghost-like hands layered in blacks and whites and layers of charcoal, using negative space, and tucked away on the floor is at once haunting, playful, and evocative. There is a sense of ephemerality and whimsy, an awareness of temporality, of the limitations to the corporeal form in Furlong’s work. The hands play throughout the gallery, dark and shiny, slick, but not sinister.

Mathieu Lacroix is a Montreal native and multidisciplinary artist who received his BFA at UQAM.  His grid of drawings here are reminiscent of architectural drawings, but also de Chirico. Some are on vellum, some on brown packing paper. There are elements of collage, and they are all cleverly composed, contemporarily-aware works that aren’t precious at all, which is why, I suspect, he titles all of these works NON ART. They fit perfectly with the drawing theme of the exhibition and the sense that creativity will continue and art will be made regardless of the means at one’s disposal. These are unpretentious drawings, and, despite being a rather conceptual show, Fait ou défait, c’est idem is also quite unpretentious and certainly process-oriented.  Lacroix’s drawings contain a sense of resilience in their delicacy. His work uses reclaimed and recycled materials such as cardboard, ordinary, cheap substances. Art can and will continue without expensive materials and resources that often make it the domain of the privileged. Lacroix’s playful sculpture, NON ART: Chair, calls to mind the absurdity of Dada, a three-legged chair. Is it a comment on academia? The third leg is made of theory, of drawings, of studies. All of his works in this show are labeled emphatically NON ART, and then given a secondary title, in this case, NON ART: Chair. As an artist he to seek to connect to the ordinary and mundane through his subject and media, then thwart our expectations. These drawings engage with formal abstraction and imaginary space. We see a square building with grass growing out of its centre, long black hair pouring down like a waterfall; we see what may be a railroad station with water emerging through it being transformed in shape by its passage through the building, the rails of which pour with light, a power station, an A frame building overruled by a flow chart, a collision of realities and geometries, an unusual combination of formal fascination and dreamy imagination. They could be diagrams made on acid or instructions for or by aliens for human society. 

The works here as a group, and even individually, don’t say “I, I”  they say “us, we”. There is a particularly Montrealaise spirit here, a sort of “struggling artist”, communal sensibility of resourcefulness, resilience and joie de vivre. There is strong sense of line, of hesitant but necessary declaration and bold erasure. The marks made by the individual on the world, the lines that tie us together. The connections. The overlap, the influence. The give and take. This exciting and ground-breaking exhibition is a sign of innovative work both in artistic production, support for emerging artists and dynamic curation taking place at Galerie Deux Poissons and bodes well for future developments. Galerie Deux Poissons is a blessing for the artistic community of Montreal for its role in maintaining the importance of the Belgo Building as a Montreal landmark which has recently lost some important galleries.

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.

Anjuli Rathod and Vanessa Brown are emerging artists whose work interplays oneirically in The Far Off Blue Places at Projet Pangée, where the viewer becomes a shadow character from the works themselves, walking among pieces rendered alternately in two and three dimensions. Both artists present strong, whimsical, dreamy work that one can return to again and again to discover new elements and interpretations. The imagery and colour in these paintings and sculptures rhymes and riffs in a harmonious manner without feeling forced. The works in this exhibit are markedly influenced by surrealism yet also brings in contemporary concerns and display a love of materials as well as the symbolic.

Anjuli Rathod is a young painter from Queens, New York, who has been making sophisticated paintings for such a young artist. Her works in this show are acrylic and flashe, a vinyl-based, matte, opaque material. She possesses an elegant and variegated visual vocabulary, gleaned from sessions of automatic drawing. The themes function like elements of recurring dreams you try to piece together upon waking, but which resist logic and linearity. These paintings also often feel like playful clues in a hallucinogenic mystery story, strongly featuring elements such as keys, question marks, footprints, locks, notes, and knives. There are nods to surrealism in Rathodâ€s work, and you can also feel a subtle influence from such painters as Chagall and Guston. Her colours, saturated but not hyper-saturated, form a largely primary palette, muted by the thinness of the paint. There is a marked dominance of royal blue and softened electric blue.  You can tell early on that Rathod’s practice has a foundation in water-based media, and recognize her strength in drawing; not in the way of a conventionally exceptional draughtsperson, rather in her confidence of exploration. There is an awareness of uncertainty, but also a drive to push on. The movement of brushwork in this series looks windswept, always from left to right, a west wind, perhaps warm.

There is a pervasive sense of mystery to these works. Her stream of consciousness leads us on as if we are in a game of Clue. What has happened? A crime? A surreptitious romance? What secrets are kept and which revealed? Footsteps become question marks. Beyond the somnambulic imagery and process-based, intuitive approach taken from the surrealists, Rathodâ€s motif of the hole or well is reminiscent of Daliâ€s voids. Encountering serpents, candles, knives, shells, ropes, question marks and spiders, we are reminded of our forgotten dreams which fill us with a sense of déjà-vu. We are brought into a realm of fear, anxiety, wonder, and hope, a world rife with desire and uncertainty. One of the most noticeable presences in these paintings are the grasping, clawed, demonic hands and cartoon footprints, which conjure thoughts of the way we make and the way we go. Here is life as a journey or a mystery, a puzzle to be solved and concurrently, the sense of allowing it to be so.

Compared to Rathodâ€s older work, this series offers some new developments. She continues to invoke surrealism with the collage style and dreamy imagery which evades direct interpretation. However, the new paintings have a different, blue-focused palette, they are more harmonious and uniform in their use of space, while remaining inventive in the use of form. The artist works with specific imagery in each series but allows old elements to leak in.

Getting specific, Blue Shell Well features a spider which resembles an electric current travelling between two mask-like faces which are also giant pennies. A conch shell graces the foreground, and the terrain bears faded footprints you could almost miss. A butter-coloured high-heeled hoof descends, with a serpent behind. We see a hole with a rope in it, which reads like a void in the fabric of the nocturnal landscape, simultaneously muscled and made of fabric. Considering the title, this hole is clearly a simplified well. Despite being omnipresent mythologically, particularly in the Old Testament, wells are paradoxically sources of life-giving water and also present life-endangering risk, of drowning or poisoning. In Night Scene there is the spider, upside-down this time, crawling between two stage-like red curtains, with its comrade behind. With the knife floating apart from the grasping hands we are given a sense of wanting, grasping, desire and fear intermingled. Shadow and light stand apart in sharp contrast. The repeated image of the conch shell, worn by the sea snail, appears again here and pervades this body of work. Besides bearing a beautiful spiral shape, the conch is richly textured with points on the outside, and silky smooth like skin or porcelain on the interior. The conch is a important symbol and presence in Hindu mythology, for initiating a ritual auspiciously with a haunting om-like bellow, it is redolent of beginnings and purity.

On a table in Waiting is the ubiquitous, patient spider and carrots which float off to the top of the canvas. The carrot is a returning theme from Rathodâ€s older work, perhaps symbolic of desire, motivation or temptation. Behind the table is a large, inverted head with closed eyes, and behind that, a thin veil and a silhouette of a woman illuminated in the doorframe. In What Fires, a Burning Room there are footprints which turn into question marks, a large key, and a lock framed by a patchwork of colours and legs. Are they walking away, or ascending to some higher dimension? One resembles an X-ray, you can see its bones. It is as if a voice is saying, look harder, look inside. Hatch has a strong use of shadow against grey stone, cut-out shapes like paper with shadows of window panes with spiders crawling across them. These rocks are presented before a green screen, tears in the fabric of reality? A Place Called Home, my favourite of this series, shows a destabilized room, upheaved as if by earthquake, a humble table with a conch atop it. Two snakes intertwine and ascend, triggering thoughts of kundalini, the sacred energy that travels up the spine during samadhi or spiritual union, but they could also be interpreted as a caduceus in the way they are joined together.  A switched-off fan rests on the table, the night feels cool and blue. A beam of light thick enough to touch illuminates a pile of discarded socks that a ghoulish hand is reaching for.  Pennies proliferate, a thing that has value but is practically worthless. Perhaps this is the artistâ€s studio at night, as a box, table or wall unfolds itself with a white blank expanse on it, of canvas or paper. A crescent moon looks on from the window.

Vanessa Brown is a Vancouver-based sculptor who has shown throughout North America and abroad. Her seemingly delicate painted cut-steel objects in this show are sometimes reminiscent of still-lives or pop-up books, while others stand against walls as a sort of totem pole or staff of power at rest. The still life works are made from a few pieces of painted steel which fit together at angles, giving them a dimensionality that varies widely depending on which direction they are viewed from and the light available. There are sometimes cut-out shapes and bends to the pieces, and they are afterward painted in a loose manner. These sculptures have a deceptive, playful delicacy to their appearance which belies their tough nature. Their rough-hewn fragility reminded me of feminine strength. A dreamlike mix of figurative elements plays between two and three dimensions in these works.

Cosmic Screen is a blue and black piece, whose title suggests the projection of reality and how reality descends dimensionally. The artwork’s title jives with its materiality and construction, as do the other pedestal-standing works, by turning flatness into three dimensions. It is a still life, and as such, it functions as an object of meditation by making us recall how life is stilled in death. The indigo screen conjures a priestâ€s confessional or a trip to Morocco, yet it is shaped like a mountain softened by time. A hand reaches for a bottle, but is it poison or potion? There is a distinct sense of the magical, the alchemistâ€s hand as the artistâ€s. Hands are a recurring theme for Brown. Her 2016 solo show, The Hand of Camille, presented recently in Vancouver, deals inventively with Camille Claudel, lover of the sculptor Auguste Rodin. We are also reminded of the famous Dada symbol of the pointing typographical hand, but here it is the gently grasping hand, also disembodied.

Thermochrome Steel is an object of pink and purple painted shapes. Dripping white dots form a polka dot pattern, the only bar or dash melts into drips and becomes a chalky crutch. Sun Milk is made of exquisitely delicate-looking white layers which look like paper but have the strength of steel.The artwork’s gorgeous play of light and shadow features numerous shades of white and grey depending on the way it is lit. Newspaper in Flight, a bold and stark work, is reminiscent of a Franz Kline painting with its aggressive, feathered brushstrokes of black on white.

Attic Light could be a totem pole of dream imagery, or a magicianâ€s staff. It bears an orange, a hand, a window, a candle, a cloud and a fishhook.  Another staff sculpture, Breakups, has smoking lips, the moon, a boot, a French manicured fingernail, a martini glass and an upside-down plant. Are these memories of a relationship? Or ways to cope with separation? Perhaps they are objects returned or overturned, thrown about. He is given the boot, and solace is taken in a book, a new lipstick, and a martini.

Vanessa Brownâ€s works here in The Far Away Blue Places feel like added clues in Anjuli Rathodâ€s paintings. Or part of Rathodâ€s paintings that got away, came to life, and populated the space, yet they also stand on their own as sophisticated works of abstraction in the strength of their form and sense of playfulness and paradox.

I first encountered Farajâ€s work this year at Papier in Joyce Yahouda Galleryâ€s booth, tucked away around a corner, presumably because of their explicit erotic content. The lovely, bleeding watercolour images of recumbent women exposing themselves in a sexual and unabashed attitude were quite striking, and I found myself drawn to them over and over throughout the event. While this solo exhibition, The Whole World Has Gone Joyously Mad, at Joyce Yahouda Gallery also deals with female nudity, the take is decidedly more political. Ranging from whimsical yet powerful portraits of Muslim feminists to representations of the Montreal tuition hike activists, this installation by Faraj honours the courage of those women who use their nudity to protest. According to Faraj, they inevitably also display their vulnerability by such bold acts which use their own bodies to make a statement. To me, that is a further testament of their courage.

One enters this installation by passing through two sentinels—phallic tree trunks, tipped with a cadmium red that almost glows and drips down the shaft. To exit the installation, one must also pass these guards, each of which bears the title Lingam. Lingams are egg-shaped, or round-tipped, pillar-shaped representations of the penis, usually in stone, which are honoured in India as symbols of the great god Shiva, the destroyer. They make an intriguing counterpoint to the feminist celebration on the wall, providing balance and seemingly, protection in the way you must walk between them to access the watercolours. They are the sacred masculine, perhaps representing the men who stand by our side and understand that the true nature of feminism is equality, not female supremacy. In India, Lingams are normally bathed in milk to be honoured, but these are tipped with red like blood, which could represent intensity of feeling, a throbbing erection, or the bleeding, vulnerable and damaged masculine principle.  I believe the ambiguity added a successful layer of mystery to this installation.

The watercolours span the largest wall of the gallery in a crowded grid which binds the portraits together in sisterhood. Faraj works in her familiar bleeding, stained style, but these are a little more hard-edged. These girls have some boundaries. They know what they want, and they want it now. Their mouths are open, their breasts bared, and often one or two arms are raised in vocalization, but their words are written on their chests.

These works are a loving tribute to those women who use their bodies to speak their minds. Farajâ€s past work has been more distinctly sexual, a diversity of bodies merged in embrace or joyful abandon, their blurred boundaries and splayed limbs reflecting a wonderful freedom, while these works are a bit more resolved, and not sexualized. They are nudity as frankness, as honesty, and as protest.

Among the many striking and successful watercolours, a few stood out as my favourites. In Free the Nipple circles represent breasts with a red dot in the center, looking like targets drawn all over her brown skin.  In another portrait, a smoking and leather-cuffed brunette has words in Arabic written on her body, as well as the name “Amina”, which is indubitably Amina Wadud, feminist cleric and professor of Islamic studies.

Considering Farajâ€s watercolour stain paintings, one cannot help but think of Helen Frankenthaulerâ€s abstract stain painting of the 50s. Faraj takes such techniques to a new level in her splendid watercolours, which go beyond political statement into a celebratory expression of joie de vivre. These women love life and will fight for the freedom to live as they want.

Real Men Donâ€t Look at Explosions

Sebastien Worsnip is exhibiting his strong new series of paintings at Joyce Yahouda Gallery this June and July.  These works are similar to Worsnip’s usual modus operandi, with a twist–they deal with spectacle in a quantum way, presenting us with visual meditations on time and paradox. These highly-layered, complex abstractions are generously painted, the viewer is likely to wish to revisit them again and again and look for a long time.

Kara Williams: Why did you choose explosions for the theme of this exhibition?

Sebastien Worsnip: It was a convergence of several things. I think Iâ€ve always worked with time, even though when I was doing more landscapes there was always the idea of time. I always liked the idea of even when I was doing abstract work you could sense when time was passing. It came together. There was a time when things were a little difficult for me, and I was thinking about stability and instability, and my daughter showed me this video “Cool Guys Donâ€t Look at Explosions” and it was that coincidence, a flash in my head, what if you walked into a room and every painting was exploding? All around you things were disintegrating and falling apart or moving. I started with straight up explosions, Hollywood movie things, sketching these things.

KW: Did you work from a still frame from a video, the film itself or from your memory of those movies?

SW: I was looking up images of explosions and came across natural disasters, Burning Man even, anything spectacular, but very quickly I realized it wasnâ€t that interesting to me to represent that, it was just interesting to sketch, what was more interesting was to have that feeling. I think thatâ€s even what Iâ€ve always done with landscapes, because I prefer the feeling of something. Where I can transmit that in a more oblique way where it is more open, where the story is not necessarily told, there is an openness to interpretation, in way an ambiguity. It became much more about these structures deconstructing then maybe coming together again. The last two paintings were the most explosive that I did, Skyfall and Piège de Crystal.

KW: Did you use a masking liquid on some of your pieces? Such as Les traces qui restent?

SW: I used a pouring medium and a tube that was flattened out on a turkey baster, so I could draw long lines like that. I was trying to find a way to draw on the painting and originally I hadnâ€t thought of doing those kind of lines, I made the turkey baster to do like you do with a bamboo stick, like Van Goghâ€s kind of drawing, that nervous line. Thatâ€s what I was trying to get.

KW: It looks like you have a natural facility with line.

SW: I like it. I like the contour. I was seeing if I could get the energy of a small sketch, that immediate energy. Iâ€m still working on that. The movement is so different.

KW: I admire that since my line is so different from yours.

SW: It actually that has to do with the tool, you have to hold it with two hands, and my whole body is moving, it becomes very linear and sinuous.

KW: While weâ€re talking about line, would you say that your education in industrial design informed the way you make art?

SW: Yes, yes and no. I finished school as a sculptor and painter. I worked as a prop maker and set painter, a lot like Peter Doig. I stopped sculpting and started painting because I was doing all my sculpture commercially. I started to not want to do it, it didnâ€t feel authentic. When I would go see installation shows, I could feel all the fussiness behind it, and it drove me crazy. It made me think of all the stuff I was doing professionally, and it turned me off sculpture, except really raw, raw sculpture.  I think that when I paint now I look at it a lot of times as a sculptural thing. Iâ€m trying to imagine the space sculpturally in my head and try to work it. Thatâ€s why I like the detail so much of having the thick and the thin of the paint work. On the one hand you have this space that you can imagine projecting yourself into, but at the same time theyâ€re so big and textured, I want people to be aware that it is an illusion, paint on canvas. I like that tactile feeling. Working with the masks and stuff is a lot about that. Iâ€ll mask off one area, itâ€s a bit like surgery. How can that area be as interesting as it can possibly be? That one little spot that Iâ€m working on it has to be as dynamic as it could be.

KW: How much planning goes into making a piece?

SW: Thereâ€s a lot more planning now than there used to be. On the one hand some of the paintings in this show were really well planned out with sketching and photoshopped and as I work I  continuously photoshop between what Iâ€m working and what Iâ€m trying to get to. So I have this photoshop sketch of what Iâ€m trying to get to and what Iâ€m working with. So some of the more layered ones were definitely like that because I had to plan the layers I wanted to get to.

KW: Roughly how many layers would you say do you make in the average painting in this exhibition? How many times do you go in?

SW: I would say about six. Roughly the big layers.

KW: We spoke at your opening about the unusual palette, the contrast between the explosive content and the softness of your colours. Do you want to talk about your use of colour in this series?

SW: People comment that the work is very soft and pastel and meditative. For example, one of them, All Sunshine and Rainbows, is using very manga colours. I used a fluorescent pink and phthalo green as a base. Theyâ€re very violent colours to start off with but they cancel themselves out, which I find fascinating. As youâ€re working with them, they become grey. In this show, I went back to some more earthy colours. With this other series I wanted to work with colours that are not natural. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone. How can I make something interesting with colours that I find absolutely garish? Thatâ€s where the beauty comes in. To start off from a point that is difficult for me and I try to get myself out of it. Now I changed my work so I canâ€t go over it so much, but when I used to paint over things, a lot of times at the end of the day I would mix up whatever was on my palette and just randomly put it on the painting to spook myself the next day.

KW: What is the most engaging or satisfying part of painting for you? What excites you the most?

SW: Itâ€s really basic but creating something out of nothing. Creating this world that almost seems real but you know it isnâ€t. Still to me, especially with abstract stuff, I wonder, why is this interesting? Why is this abstract space or thing interesting? I canâ€t even define it. Iâ€ll leave sketches and scribbles around my studio and people will come in and be like, that scribble is really interesting. And Iâ€ll be like, I know and I donâ€t know why. Why is that interesting? Doing this process now where Iâ€ll hide things and then paint on them and take it off, thatâ€s really exciting. When I take off the masks, all of the sudden POW, itâ€s just there, living with everything you did before. You had an idea of what it would look like but you didnâ€t really know.

KW: Like an explosion on the canvas.

SW: Like a shock. My wife and kids sometimes will be at the studio and theyâ€ll be like, can we do it can we do it? Itâ€s fun. Youâ€re discovering this stuff underneath. Itâ€s very similar to when you develop black and white photography when it starts to come up. My mother was a commercial photographer and I spent a lot of my early life in darkrooms. It has that same feeling, she just let me play with stuff.

KW: Iâ€d like to hear more about your thoughts on abstract art.

SW: I sometimes think of doing more figurative things, although in a way, I think right now the abstract stuff Iâ€m doing has structures that are figurative in a way because theyâ€re very defined, and then Iâ€ll mess with them. Theyâ€re not referring to something thatâ€s absolutely there. I like the idea of having it open. Of letting someone be able to dream with it. Itâ€s kind of meditative too. Iâ€m a big fan of Rothko, that kind of experience of painting where you sit in front of it and let it wash over you, although mine are more dramatic. I used to share a studio with an older painter who did minimalist work and he used to tell me, youâ€re very dramatic. There is an openness in suggesting something where somebody can bring their own experience to it. It always surprises me when someone describes to me their experience of my work, how close it comes to my intention.

I donâ€t look for meaning very deeply. When I go see work, even very figurative work, Iâ€m not looking for symbols or meaning, thatâ€s not the way my brain works. I tend to look at it more visually and look for poetry in it. Iâ€ve seen people analyze something and look for links and meanings and I realize Iâ€m not doing that at all. Itâ€s not my go-to way of being. Itâ€s different ways of thinking, different ways of being. I think I very much follow a tradition of looking. Of being more visual, more tactile. Thatâ€s where my interests have always been. Itâ€s a different way of communicating. Iâ€m definitely communicating something with what Iâ€m doing itâ€s just not something Iâ€m able to put into words.

KW: Thatâ€s why you put it into paint.

SW: Thatâ€s funny because I teach, and I sometimes have a hard time describing what it is, but I have an easier time describing someone elseâ€s words than my own.

KW: What are some of your other influences? You mentioned Rothko.

SW: I was really a fan of Kirkeby, but at one point I stopped looking too much at the work because it was blocking me, my work was too close. This was earlier on. Heâ€s a Dutch painter. I look at work but I try not to look at it too much.

KW: Not to the level of being influenced.

SW: Yeah. It does scare me. With Kirkeby I found if I did a line, I was like, thatâ€s like a line in his painting. Especially with abstract stuff it can come so close to what youâ€re doing, youâ€re like, oh God. One of the influences of this series was Peter Eisenmen. Heâ€s not a painter, heâ€s an architect, his emphasis is on structures, so I really drew on his structures.  Digital architecture is part of my teaching, you were asking how design fits in here. A lot of digital architecture is about spaces, I find it interesting that the spaces that are done digitally are very cold, they donâ€t have much humanness to it, and when I draw them they become more human, more organic. So Iâ€ll take that as a starting point for the sketches and sometimes even incorporate it. Thatâ€s the skeleton on which everything is built. I might keep doing that because it is efficient. The basic structure is there.

KW: Do you find that sometimes paintings get away from you? Sometimes go in other directions? You mentioned you do a lot of planning and Photoshop, with many layers and stages. Do you find they go their own way sometimes?

SW: Yeah, the other thing Iâ€ll do is Iâ€ll always start two paintings, sometimes three. Different sizes, big, small, little.  The medium one is almost as big as the one Iâ€m working on so Iâ€ll do all the stuff Iâ€m scared to do on that.  A couple of the paintings that were in the show were those ones. Theyâ€re sometimes much fresher.  I was having a really hard time producing work, and I thought this was a way I could increase production and not be scared.

KW: What is the most difficult part of the process of artmaking for you?

SW: I would say that it is what makes it interesting too…the fear of not knowing exactly where youâ€re going. When I start it I have an idea and its only by working through it that = it starts to define itself and to make sense, but when you first start it you donâ€t know where youâ€re going with it and youâ€re not even sure if itâ€s going to be any good, so there is self-doubt.  The uncertainty that youâ€ll even have enough work for a show in the time given.  Three-quarters of the way through the year I had a couple of paintings that I thought were quite good and quite pertinent for the show and then I relaxed. Usually I donâ€t until the show opens but I felt itâ€s okay, I have something here.

KW: A couple of your pieces, After the Rain and Loverâ€s Leap donâ€t seem to be of explosions in the literal Hollywood way. They also feature orbs floating in the sky or water. Tell me about them if you wish.

SW: That was a little off-topic but I liked them so I put them in.

KW: I was just wondering how they fit in with the idea of explosions or time.

SW: I fear saying something, they mean something to me, Iâ€ll tell you and youâ€ll tell me if it breaks the painting for you or not. To me, it is a waterfall, and the bubbles are like all the energy of that waterfall going back up, like the little bubbles on a river.  I thought they were really nice like that, all the colourful bubbles. I just like that painting and I wanted to put it in. Itâ€s kind of a landscapey with a quirky element to it, and I would possibly like to do more with that kind of work.

KW: Is that something youâ€re thinking of doing next?

SW: Yeah weâ€re going off to France in a few weeks, what I was thinking Iâ€ll taking my camera and look at a lot of landscape paintings and seeing if I can rework them.   Even in my own paintings I will sample a part of it to work on the next one. I will take my camera really close and find a detail and sample it.

Visiting Andrée-Anne Dupuis-Bourretâ€s recent exhibit at Circa Art Actuel was like taking a step into the artistâ€s inner landscape. An immersive, sensory experience of protruding shapes and suspended reality, the environment altered regular visual and spatial perceptions.

Moving around the installation was similar to walking through a forest, or entering new, unaccustomed surroundings for the first time. Stopping to investigate something that could be a plant, considering the view from each angle, experiencing your body in relation to the objects and organisms around you. As Dupuis-Bourret put it, her work is, “A path for the body and the senses to experience.”

The forms that inhabited the space were created using silk screened and twisted sheets of paper, which were covered with lines and pixelated patterns of different tonal qualities. The sculptures began their life as 2D objects, pieces of paper, before the artist transformed them into their eventual 3D formations, which came to resemble organic matter.

An interesting element of Dupuis-Bourretâ€s installation was its juxtaposition with its outdoor environment. The galleryâ€s open window let in the sounds from Sainte-Catherine, and allowed a glimpse of dreary office buildings across the street. The contrast was marked, and further highlighted the surreal quality of the work. In her artistâ€s statement, Dupuis-Bourret says that she is generally interested in the threshold between the real and imagined, the interior and exterior, the outside world and inner thought.

Documenting these processes, including the creation and assembly of her works, is an important part of Dupuis-Bourretâ€s practice. She posts photos of her installations on her research blog, Le Cahier Virtuel. These actions multiply the existence of her pieces, which become both in-gallery installations and online photographic records. The incorporation of the online consumption environment is interesting and something many artists are realizing is increasingly important in todayâ€s Internet-centric world. Many audiences will only ever see her work online, which in some ways makes this digital format equally important to the physical manifestation.

Andrée-Anne Dupuis-Bourret works across: collaborative and evolving site-specific installations, paper sculptures, images, photographic documentation and artistâ€s books. She has exhibited at galleries in: Canada, USA, Mexico, Holland, Italy, Israel, and Australia. In 2011, she was awarded the Governor General of Canadaâ€s gold medal for her Masterâ€s degree project. She is currently completing her PhD in interdisciplinary approaches using print media at UQAM. She also teaches printmaking and is the author of two blogs: Le Cahier Virtuel, and Le Territoire des Sens. For a preview of her upcoming work, take a look at her recent blog about her summer atelier.

Circa art actuel
Andrée-Anne DUPUIS-BOURRET | Francis ARGUIN
May 16 – July 11, 2015
www.circa-art.com

John Francis – FRACTURED

 

www.galeriedonaldbrowne.com