the craft....

Emilie, Karl and Dean Mattson. The Craft (detail).
Willow branches, cow placenta, fibre glass.
2006

Two young men and their mother paddle silently across a moonlit pond in a canoe.  It’s a performance and an image with echoes throughout human history – the family, the boat, the journey.  Displacement, travel, migration; gestation, birth, death, transcendence – a whole life journey is summed up in it.

The mother, in this case, is painter and mixed-media sculptor Emilie Mattson; and the canoe is an artwork completed in collaboration with her two sons, Dean and Karl, each an artist in his own right.  Made from willow branches stretched with cow placentas and coated with fibreglass, it is called simply The Craft.



Reprinted from Art of the Peace magazine, Issue 12,Spring/Summer 2009. Find the complete article here.

between

Giorgio Morandi. Still Life of Vases on a Table. Etching. 1931.

Giorgio Morandi, painter of vessels. Of vases. Of stillness and silence; the settling of dust. Or, as Alistair Sooke puts it, painter of “the dialogue between mute objects, animated by the space between them.” 

(See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/9805870/Giorgio-Morandi-Lines-of-Poetry-Estorick-Collection-review.html.)

Greg Payce. Ebony. Ceramic.

Greg Payce, sculptor of vessels. Vase is hardly the word for them, though they echo the form. They are almost columns: inverse caryatids. Compelling because of the humanness of both scale and form. Face them or turn sideways, slip between them. Fit into the spaces they have animated; the spaces between. 

These objects are anything but mute.

Greg Payce and his Al Barelli. Ceramic. 2001.

Greg Payce. Pantheon. Ceramic. 2004.

On cars and sacred architecture ...

Brian Jungen and Henry Moore artworks,
installed at the Art Gallery of Ontario in summer 2011.
Photo from www.catrionajeffries.com.

Last summer I stumbled upon an exhibit of Brian Jungen's work at the AGO in Toronto. It featured deer hides, circles missing where they had been cut out for drum heads, stretched around car fenders and displayed atop pristine white freezer chests. Below is a letter I wrote to my best friend who attended the exhibition with me, late in the night after viewing it.

Years ago (maybe a decade) I read Ronald Wright’s brilliant book, A Scientific Romance. It’s an apocalyptic novel which imagines the outcomes of the environmental choices and technical innovations we are making now in a future England where something has drastically altered the world and killed almost all of the human population.

A time traveller from 20th century London journeys north until he encounters a small group of survivors who have turned the skeletal remains of cars into upright monoliths and arranged them in a vaguely Stonehenge-esque fashion as a sort of religious architecture/ritual site. The idea that after human life is long gone, our cars will remain; and be misunderstood as expressions of our spiritual quests (or conversely appropriately understood as the fetish objects they actually are) makes me laugh and cringe at the same time.

I think Brian Jungen and Wright are on the same page to an extent. The use of car remnants as vertical and monumental sculpture references our culture's consumerism-turned-into-a-religion; an idea that turns up repeatedly in Jungen's work. The hides are not unlike his earlier uses of leather -- think of black leather sofas being skinned to make a teepee, or Nike Air Jordans being dismembered to make masks -- except in that they are removed from the consumer economy: pre-consumer versus post-consumer uses, if you will. That shift distills his materials to their essences; reduces them to simplest terms.

Also the use of the freezers as pedestals is kind of interesting. The freezer is potentially the resting place of the flesh of the animal whose hide is mounted on the exterior. That play of interior vs. exterior, essences vs surfaces is kind of interesting. But again it speaks to meat/food/abundance/wealth in an essentially pre-capitalist or non-capitalist context; one in which the producer of the food is also its end consumer. A cashless economy, in which one's work feeds one's family in a very direct and unmediated way.

But meanwhile the freezers themselves are consumer items, and are likely to end up as relics, the remains of which will outlive us; and are in this exhibit already taking on the role of "religious architecture" if you will.



For more posts about Brian Jungen, click here or here.

The Shape of Longing

Morley Myers. Linear Thinking. chlorite, 26" tall.
Photo from www.morleymyersgallery.com.

Morley Myers: The Shape of Longing

His influences are both the Moderns and the Ancients.  At times one sees in his work the fracturing of form of a Picasso, at times the elongation of a Modigliani, at times the roundness of a Henry Moore.  And through and beyond these, one recognizes the simplified masses of Inuit carvings, African masks, perhaps even Easter Island monoliths.

He is Salt Spring Island sculptor, Morley Myers. Working in found metals, cast metals, and stone, Myers portrays the human form and the human face with the simplest of means. A single curve defines a stance, a way of occupying space that is at once physical and emotional. A single angle describes a question; a void implies a longing. There is both projection and penetration, both desire and merging. Both smoothly polished surface and rough rock: boundaries and loss of self.

The Shape of Longing is the artist’s monograph, comprised almost entirely of exquisite photographs of Myers’ art, allowing it to speak -- as it does -- for itself.

Morley Myers. African Venus. soapstone.
Photo from www.morleymyersgallery.com.

See more of Myers' art or purchase The Shape of Longing here.

Lascaux

The Hall of Bulls at Lascaux, France.
Photo by Sisse Brimberg, National Geographic.

Bulls and horses and stags wrap around the curved walls and ceilings; walls and ceilings which enclose you as in a womb (or a skull). Dim lights flicker over the uneven surfaces, animating the animals. And you're there, standing in the middle of a prehistoric dream; yourself a character being dreamed by a Paleolithic hunter or shaman or midwife. Time means nothing. Seventeen thousand years slip away and you are also the dreamer.

And you stand there in recognition, knowing that the dreamer/painter and your self are one soul. Your humanity responds to his or her humanity; your divinity to his or her divinity.

Illuminations

Mont St Michel

Down the long path to Mont St Michel, the abbey-cum-castle a few meters off the coast of Normandy, across the causeway and up the steep and narrow streets of the medieval town. On uneven cobbles, up uncountable stone stairs, and through a labyrinth of seemingly random rooms and passageways. And it is all worth it, just to be there. Just to experience it. Just to walk in centuries' worth of footsteps of the anonymous and the devout. Just to see the views of land and sand and sea from the top.

But wait there's more.

Turning into one of the larger rooms, you come upon a flight of illuminated letters. Based on the elaborately embellished initial letters painted by monks on manuscripts in earlier times, these letters were painted on glass and suspended from the ceiling. They catch the light of the lowering sun and send it dancing around the room. Art literally enlightens the darkness of the quiet stone room.

You come around a corner, and there are stars projected onto the vaults of the ceiling above a beautiful solo harpist.

In the next space, abstract and changing colour fields of light are projected past spiky constructions and onto stone walls. The harp still audible from the room before, the colors flicker like northern lights around the silhouette of Mont St Michel itself. See the video here.

In another room, figures from manuscripts are projected onto pillars.

A small chapel contains a gold cross suspended above the altar. Its shadow is projected on the ceiling using multiple light sources, creating multiple perspectives. In some, the cross appears as an X, canceling itself out.

Room after room, space after space, overflows with art and music. A solo flautist, a solo cellist. Massive stone walls unable to contain the waves of sound, the insubstantiality of light. The whole abbey turned into an illumination by anonymous artists working in the dark.

Same as it ever was.

In one of the final rooms, a constellation of bare light bulbs hangs from the dark ceiling at various heights. Make a wish. One of them is for you.

All of the light art was created by Kolektiv Alambik. 

All photos by Wendy Stefansson. Video by Ariel Tarpey.

Damien Hirst - Even Better Than the Real Thing

Music  by U2. Video (behind the band) by Damien Hirst. 

Burning butterflies.

The fate of witches and martyrs. Rebirth followed by second death. Salvation followed by immolation. Heaven followed by hell.

Or the final liberation: body released from form into light. Into energy. Into spirit. Whole again on the other side of the fire.

Even better than the real thing?

Damien Hirst - In and Out of Love

Damien Hirst - In and Out of Love, 1991 - Photo by Caroline Claisse 

You wander into a room. There are canvases on all of the walls, each painted with a single bright, glossy color; each with a number of butterfly specimens firmly affixed. In the central space, ashes. The remains of numerous packets of cigarettes.

Damien Hirst - In and Out of Love (detail) - Photo by Hettie O'Brien

You move through this room and -- passing through a veil -- into the next room. You are again met by butterflies. This time, they are living ones. Having been affixed to canvases as chrysalises, they have (some time ago) emerged as winged creatures, dripping a blood-like fluid down the blank canvases of their rebirths. Paintings made with their bodies. Butterfly calligraphy, written in the language of flight.

Damien Hirst. In and Out of Love. Photo: Google Credits.

Damien Hirst. In and Out of Love. Photo by Caroline Claisse.

In one room, the stasis of death; bodies like memories. In the other, all the chaos and the messiness and movement of life being lived. In one room absence, in the other  presence. In one room the past, in the other a vital presentness.

The work is Damien Hirst's In and Out of Love.

Brian Jungen - The Ghosts on Top of My Head

                                     

Brian Jungen. The Ghosts on Top of My Head.
Painted steel, installed at the Banff Centre 2011.
Photo from www.catrionajeffries.com.

i come upon it

unexpected in its whiteness

thinking it an animal form

until, from the right angle,

it resolves
into antler,
into bone

shape matched by shadow

the darkness its complement, its completion

its wholeness, its other

the yin to its yang

its soft, shed skin

these things take whole lifetimes

to understand.



For more posts about Brian Jungen, click here or here.