Bev Pike

Stalactites in anemic, cave-dweller colours of celadon, rose pink and ivory frame and are reflected in glassy pools. Emerging from and receding into the shadow-layered canvases, many iterations of the grotto— recesses fashioned to resemble caves—comprise Bev Pike’s solo exhibition “Grottesque,” a tour de force of demented whimsy currently on display at Regina’s Dunlop Art Gallery. _ The titles of the paintings name the decadent diversion that each cave has been constructed to host: Subterranean Day Spa, Buried Dancing Pavilion, Underground Riding Academy, Cavernous Sun Parlour and Gazing Pond Chamber.

They may seem like pure flights of fancy, but Pike is inspired by the history of excess embodied in English Rococo grottoes of the 1700s. Take financier and fraudster Whitaker Wright’s underwater ballroom, for instance, which was constructed at the bottom of an artificial lake on his estate, in the slightly later Victorian period. Pike’s subterranean suites also make reference to a category of aesthetic entertainments that represented a backlash to changing values in the English Baroque period (1630–1780). She notes that popular diversions of the time, such as opera and tableaux vivant, sought to overwhelm reason with spectacle, thus consolidating the power of the ruling aristocracy.

A grotto is more than a hole stuffed with aspirations of grandeur. It is a rejection of traditional hierarchies via bel composto—a collision of architecture, sculpture and painting and multiple competing focuses coupled with the disorienting and claustrophobic architecture of the labyrinth. The grotto is a contradiction, a structure made possible by wealth and power, yet the excesses of its construction hold the key to undermining hegemonic control. These are not hideaways from the problems of the world, but a calcification of authority turned to stone, coral and shell. When she speaks about grottoes Pike connects, through the twisting histories of class, gender and ecology, the entrenched classism and colonialism of the 1700s with today’s paranoid rich and perpetually distracted masses.

It’s a daunting task to write about the work of an artist who has considered her own practice and subjects so deeply. This consistent thought was apparent in Pike’s artist’s talk and on the following day when I met her at a cat café—the kind of frivolous experience that could be imagined as the subject of one of her paintings. Pike, who proudly claims the title of “cat lady,” arrived bundled in layers of crimson paisley and floral prints, topped off with a hand-knit sweater, hearkening back to the work that she is arguably best known for: twisted and knotted piles of sweaters on a heroic scale.

Pike’s sweater paintings are a feminist take on the all-over painted canvases of abstract expressionism. In order to apprehend the image it’s necessary to escape its enveloping expanse; up close it dissolves into sinuous strokes of what Pike calls “yummy, luscious detail.” Coils of wool, built up of squiggled lines of colour, each representing a stitch locking one loop of yarn to another, conflate the labour of the artist’s hand to that of the knitter’s, an analogy that would certainly be frowned upon by proponents of paintings about painting.

On the subject of why feminist painting is important, Pike recounts the tale of how, in art school, she developed a layered style of painting that obliterated the subject in order to avoid the criticism of her male professors. While the play between abstraction and representation remains constant in her work, the turn from garment to architecture is a surprise.

Asserting that feminism continues to underpin her practice, she described how the architecture of the grotto—a narrow passage opening up into a cozy room— replicates the female reproductive system. It’s another approach to her consistent desire to represent women’s bodies without engaging with the spectacle. She declares her paintings “anti-pornography.”

So, while not pornographic, there is something lush, and lurid, and dangerously out of place in “Grottesque.” A plant with verdant, spade-shaped leaves, dripping with inverted bell-shaped blossoms, dominates Pike’s improbably quaint Cavernous Sun Parlour. I am suspicious of flowers that bloom in the dark. This plant, doubled and reflected as if viewed through a prism, might be the hallucinogen Angel’s Trumpet. The dark visions and zombie-like state the blooms are said to invoke mirror Pike’s intentions to overwhelm the senses with her busy, concatenated canvases, leaving the viewer stupefied and vulnerable.

Imperfectly symmetrical, the grotto scenes in “Grottesque” are uncanny, unreal spaces. Lacking a single point of focus, the paintings provoke an anxious engagement. The world is multiplied and doubled back upon itself, confounding and difficult to know which way is up as you feel yourself enfolded, invaginated, by the cavernous space, the other world, on the other side of the canvas.

Both the cockeyed imagination and illogical geometry of Pike’s imagined subterranean dens of luxury bring to mind the words of Herbert Marcuse: “The revolutionary potential of art is to imagine what does not or could not logically exist.” On the other side of the canvas, a utopia, some non-space, beckons. ❚

“Grottesque” was exhibited at the Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina, from January 19 to March 25, 2018.

Sandee Moore is a nationally exhibited artist, administrator and art writer who now calls Regina, Saskatchewan, home.