[Bcma-l] CMA Clipping Service: Artists in Land of Wanderers
bcma-l@museumsassn.bc.ca
bcma-l@museumsassn.bc.ca
Mon, 27 Apr 2009 11:00:48 -0700
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<b>Artists in a land of wanderers</b></span></font>
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Sarah Milroy, The Globe and Mail, Saturday, April 25, 2009</span></font>
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OTTAWA – The West has always been the domain of wanderers and
outsiders, drifters off the grid of societal expectation. In the
contemporary art of British Columbia, this theme has a special place. </sp=
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You can see it in the photographic work of Liz Magor of the past 20
years - her pictures of hippies and indigent makeshift housing -</span></f=
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and also in her sculptural investigations into the practices of hoarding
and hiding in the wild. You can see it in Jeff Wall's backlit
Cibachromes of homeless people, or Roy Arden's documentation of
the urban wilderness and its rootless migrants.</span></font>
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Making an exhibition of new art from British Columbia, National
Gallery of Canada curator Josée Drouin-Brisebois at first thought she=
would be dealing principally with this motif. The exhibition Nomads,
though, ultimately has a wider purview, exploring the meandering
way of thinking and working that is being practised by five emerging
B.C. artists. Landscape is traversed, but so is history, world culture,
media and the categories of high and low art.</span></font>
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The most literal nomad in the group is Gareth Moore, who has been
gaining attention for his odd and eclectic installations documenting
his travels from Marfa, Tex., to Paris, France, to the coast of
California. Like several in this exhibition, he is presenting a work in
progress that shows no signs of coming to rest any time soon. With
his assemblages made from found materials on the road travelled,
Moore invokes the historical tradition of the Grand Tour, infused with
a hobo aesthetic. He calls the work <i>Uncertain Pilgrimage</i>.</span></f=
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One photograph documents a pair of moss-covered running shoes he
discovered by a roadside, an intriguing image that conflates motion
and stasis. A video projection records images of movement that he
has captured: cars on the freeway, wind through the grass, airplanes,
waves on the ocean. A modified walking stick - that signifier of the
19th-century French <i>flâneur </i>- has been rigged out by Moore wit=
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compartments to hold a cigarette, a match, and a pencil, for
spontaneous acts of creation. A standing vitrine holds a pair of heavy
men's shoes that he has made, each cobbled together from two pairs
nested back to front, simultaneously coming and going.</span></font>
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Moore has also instigated a migration of sorts within the gallery,
harvesting three lesser known paintings from the gallery's collection
for inclusion in his installation, all of them records of landscape at
dusk. The work feels like a mini-museum, gathering together objects
that evoke the motif of the peripatetic artist, at home nowhere</span></fo=
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and everywhere in the world.</span></font>
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Myfanwy MacLeod wanders between historical periods, making work
that relies on antique postcards, and comic retro images of drunks in
popular culture, flunk-outs from social decorum. Her principal work
here is a cast acrylic sculpture of a tousle-haired drunkard in tails, a
figure who (as accident would have it) looks remarkably like the
globe-trotting Vancouver artist Rodney Graham, with whom she
shares an interest in the comic grotesque. Her little man crawls on all
fours up a pedestal, bleary-eyed and dishevelled. </span></font>
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Another work of hers here is a perfectly art-directed pastiche of a
frontispiece for a fictive volume titled The Complete Practical</span></fo=
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Distiller, typeset to suggest the manuals of the 19th century. (I
wonder, isn't distilling what artists do?)</span></font>
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Exploring the theme of inebriation, MacLeod spotlights the idea of
escape through altered states, but her thematic connection to the show
seems the most tenuous of the bunch.</span></font>
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Geoffrey Farmer's <i>The Photographer and the Surgeon </i>also seems to
stretch the show's theme a bit, but it is a delight all the same: a group
of 365 puppets that he made from dismembered picture books
acquired at a Vancouver second-hand store. Some of the characters
are recognizable (Trudeau in his hippie days makes an appearance, as
does a jowly John Diefenbaker), but the faces are mostly hard to
place, interspersed with sculptural heads from world archeology and
art history. The darkly comic collages of German modernists</span></font>
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Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield are called to mind, as are the
medieval passion plays that once toured Europe. All the world's a
stage, and Farmer's menacing and enchanting cast of characters are
among its most exotic players.</span></font>
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Althea Thauberger is another kind of traveller, showing a new film
work that sheds light on the phenomenon of tourism - that perverse
human fascination we have with travelling far distances in order to
see things that stay put and remain unchanged. </span></font>
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Last summer, Thauberger spent some time in the isolated Fassa
Valley of northern Italy, where the rare dialect Ladin is spoken, an
ancient Romance language that has survived in seclusion. Working
with local villagers, she recorded a rather rough-hewn performance of
a traditional myth: the tale of how Death was defied by the old
woman Poverty. Refusing to respond when summoned by Death, Old
Poverty instead trapped Death in a tree, permitting his release only on
the grounds that he would travel the world and not come back to
bother her village. Thus Poverty lives on forever, and Death, too,
roves the planet, bent on his relentless mission.</span></font>
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Several themes spring to mind. Poverty, like death, is part of the
human experience, and always will be. But the video also suggests
how we long for the rootedness these people have in their landscape,
their culture and rituals, their antique language and their storytelling
traditions. By contrast, the artist's fate is to be the itinerant</span></=
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recording angel, her perspective perpetually in flux by virtue both of
her profession as detached observer and her role as tourist from a fast-
paced urban culture. </span></font>
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Thauberger has made several other sociological studies in the past -
her poignant debut video work <i>Songstress </i>(2002) comes to mind, in
which she spotlighted amateur female teen singers performing a
cappella - but this is her best work to date, a haunting, at times comic
and extremely beautiful meditation on community and belonging.</span></fon=
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The work of Hadley + Maxwell (Hadley Howes and Maxwell
Stephens) is as contemporary and edgy as Thauberger's is primeval, a
mixed-media gallery-sized installation that responds to one of
Western culture's sacred pop touchstones: the Rolling Stones' 1968
recording sessions for <i>Sympathy for the Devil</i>, as documented</span>=
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by the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. Godard's <i>Sympathy for the
Devil </i>was a highly political film, marrying images of the band with
fictional footage of the Black Panthers and other political agitators,
and it would become the source of a struggle between filmmaker and
producer when Godard protested the ending imposed by the producer:
the conclusive performance of the title song. Godard wanted to leave
things openended, so Hadley + Maxwell have obliged him,
"unfinishing," as they say, Godard's film with their work here:<=
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<i>1+1+1</i>. </span></font>
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Their installation, shown here in its largest of several incarnations,
includes projected sequences of the Stones in rehearsal borrowed
from the Godard film (blown up large enough to clearly reveal the
image pixelation) as well as sharply focused images of contemporary
musicians jamming (among them Maxwell and fellow Vancouver</span></font>
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artist Kevin Schmidt). One sculptural vignette in the space involves a
snare drum (of the sort used by Charlie Watts in Godard's film) and a
metronome bathed in red light against a scarlet scrim. Articles of
clothing worn by the band in Godard's footage are echoed here (a
white ruffled shirt, a pair of men's pink boots, an orange Tshirt)</span><=
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and they have about them the air of religious relics. Theatrical lights
with coloured gels are scattered through the space, lending an
atmosphere of morning-after disarray.</span></font>
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The song was an anthem of the 1960s, with a tribal drumbeat that
seemed to call a whole footloose generation together. Revisiting it as
they do, Hadley + Maxwell take a trip across time to a utopian
moment when massive social change was afoot. But the togetherness
of 1968 today seems almost quaintly anachronistic. Hadley +</span></font>
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Maxwell's fractured reiteration thus seems to express a more
contemporary zeitgeist. Like the other works in this show, the world
view expressed here is one in which every individual is adrift in an
infinite sea of information (each to his own iPod and bookmarked
preferences) in which past and present are suddenly simultaneous
through technology, in which every image from art history and film
are retrievable in a nanosecond, and in which each of us finds
ourselves navigating an ever-smaller planet. We hash through, and</span></=
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then we rehash some more. Irresolution is in the restless wind.</span></fo=
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<i>Nomads continues at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa until Aug.=
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<i> </i></span></font>
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<i>or 1-800-319-2787).</i></span></font>
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---   30   ---</span></font>
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