Bev Pike

Enveloped in lowlight, Bev Pike’s six large-scale (20 x 8 foot) gouache paintings on paper command the University of Manitoba’s School of Art Gallery in a cavern-like installation. The exhibition’s title, “Hymenal Views,” places the viewer at the cusp of vaginal vistas where Pike transforms the Victorian concept of hysteria as a catch-all woman’s condition into empowered visual narratives on her own terms. Five imagined landscapes and one dramatized interior furl, fold and unfold in material-like forms that simultaneously appear biomorphic, geologic and handmade. Arranged as a panoramic view, the paintings require measured viewing from incremental distances and circling the exhibition yields a sense of being on the edge of a mystifying drama.

Imbued with its own mysterious architecture, the hymen has been a contentious marker of transition, a membrane that has historically represented a woman’s purity and, in turn, her fitness for marriage. In the opening chapter of Marie H Loughlin’s fascinating Hymeneutics: Interpreting Virginity on the Early Modern Stage (Bucknell University Press, 1997), the author describes the fissure in societal myths of the hymen’s presence as a marker of virginity in early modern Europe. Inconclusive dissections of the female body and its irregular representation in anatomical texts of the 16th and 17th century culminated in a paradox: a marked societal body dependent on an elusive presence.

This materiality of elusive presence is embraced in Pike’s articulation of liminal forms. The earliest work in the exhibition, Hymenal View of Lunacy, 2003, faces the viewer with twisting, brightly coloured fibres. Her cloth-like bundles appear as stand-ins for absent bodies, the trace of their connective histories marked in their hand-laboured intricacy. However, some have become indignant at being bound-up to the point of unravelling. Coming undone, they emerge as arrested, sea-like creatures.

Installed across from one another Hymenal View of Alchemy, 2008, and Hymenal View of the Reflective, 2007, both show resemblances to guru-like figures surrounded by Pike’s now-familiar, sweater-like mounds. Both paintings suggest folds leading to transition: Reflective builds up to ascension with a pearl-like luminescent organic interior while Alchemy draws the viewer in with a descent framed by stalactites. The connection to passages and rights of passage reverberates between the works, even if it remains ambiguous whether the viewer responds as if they have arrived or are ready to depart.

The newest work in the exhibition, Bizzarria View-Margate, 2011, departs from the “Hymenal” series in fruitful ways. Moving beyond wholly imagined spaces, Pike’s signature sinewy forms infiltrate an interior rooted in a real but enigmatic space. Margate is a seaside town on the southeastern point of Kent, England and home to the storied Shell Grotto. According to the area’s tourism website, the recondite structure was discovered in the first half of the 19th century and contains nearly two thousand square feet of subterranean passageways encrusted with more than 4.5 million shells. Its origins are mythologized in local lore with no definitive history and the grotto’s initial purpose remains an exercise in speculation. While Pike adheres to a recognizable representation of its interior, two knotted columns interrupt the grotto’s moody reverie and appear as abstract caryatids. Draped in tones of smoke and rose, the columns seem to eviscerate Margate, an odd but nearly erotic dissonance between interiority and exteriority. A central pillar built of flesh and ash hues, painted with a chenille-like texture, divides the composition and the viewer is seduced into visually penetrating two equally alluring archways. This central suggestive pillar is akin to a burlesque prosopopeia that could identify Pike’s intervention as a politicized spatial activation claiming a feminized voice. Bizzaria marks the first painting in the artist’s new “Folly” series and it will be intriguing to see if Pike’s interpretation of fanciful ornamental grottos will lead to darker labiarinths.

Follies are broadly defined as whimsical structures with purely decorative intentions. However, as landscape historian John Dixon Hunt has pointed out in his essay, “Folly in the Garden” (The Hopkins Review, vol. 1, no. 2, 2008), while the structures themselves may support this definition, their relationship to place can yield a more nuanced commentary on their political and cultural context. In this sense, Pike’s previous work asserted a voice in a realm that was essentially placeless in its hymenal cosmos. Interrupting the realm of the real and exploring the grotto as an activated interior offers an opportunity for redefining place. Perhaps Bizzaria will direct a new, built mythology inside Pike’s oeuvre, one that transfigures several material and biological cultures that move beyond a discourse rooted in responding to archaic notions of hysteria and into new reimagined territorialized spaces. ❚

“Bev Pike: Hymenal Views” was exhibited at the School of Art Gallery, University of Manitoba, from March 8 to April 19, 2013.

Courtney R Thompson is an arts writer living in Winnipeg.