“Contemporary Drawings from the National Gallery of Canada”

While Joseph Beuys’s pronouncement that “everyone is an artist” too easily devolves into a universal, neo-liberal call-to-easels (to say nothing of papering-over and effectively devaluing hard-won skills and accomplishments, honed sensitivities and even talent), there is nevertheless a nagging hook to the idea that imagination and creativity are just as much the province of accountants as they are artists.

“Contemporary Drawings” may not be the most glamorous premise for an exhibition and there’s not much wiggle-room in a National Gallery of Canada (NGC) touring show for a curator to strut her stuff, but this is a pretty solid show. Rhiannon Vogl (Curatorial Assistant, Contemporary Art) has assembled a stimulating cross section of works acquired by the NGC since 2000. The exhibition is more an index of institutional collecting values than the signature of any individual’s aesthetic predilections, but it does have rhythm and contrast, and the didactic information is quite thoughtful—all telling signs of a steady hand working behind the scenes. Aboriginal and Inuit drawings are well represented and overall the works oscillate between depressive and ecstatic, obsessively dense, exquisitely light, conceptual and expressive.

Drawing holds an interesting place. While it’s long been conceived as a foundation to any art education, it resists hard definition and typically evolves as a free zone for experimentation. Not only does the oppressive weight of old masters seem to evaporate when moving from easel to sketch pad, but more importantly, drawing is essentially non-specialized; we all do it. Also, because drawings are so often considered as prelim-inary studies to finished works of art, they promise clandestine insights into the formative processes of an artist’s conception. In fact, drawing may be one of the most direct and unfettered routes to the imagination we have—a characteristic not lost on artists. Consider the fantastic imagery in this show and the preponderance of direct utopian quotations. Even the titles of Shuvinai Ashoona’s two entries: Fantasy Landscape and All Kinds of Spiders in Different Views spin her map-like views into the realm of marvels.

Tristram Lansdowne’s Axis Mundi reimagines Moshe Safdie’s visionary housing project, Habitat 67, enveloping a small mountainous island outcrop. Small puffy pink clouds floating close to the structure are either decorative exhaust or gaseous angels gracing this Arcadia. The modular components of Safdie’s scheme made it an easy fit for any site, but Lansdowne’s island as an indeterminate no-place actually reinforces the original utopian impulse of Habitat.

Habitat 67 is also featured in Simon Hughes’s epic, five-panelled drawing: Northern Landscape. And just in case you miss the utopian reference, he includes Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome (built as the American pavilion at Expo ’67) as another utopian icon in this incongruous and fantastic urban agglomeration. Hughes says he is “struck by a portrait of this country that doesn’t exist,” which suggests that this scene lies halfway between utopia and nostalgia. But of course, lurking behind all rose-coloured representations is a darker, more contradictory vision. Peering through the windows of the Habitat structure we see paintings on the walls, wood stoves and couples making love. Outside a whale is being cut into large blocks of meat/fat and carried away by snowmobilers over bloodied tracks. The geodesic dome is a greenhouse for exotic palm trees and two log-cabin skyscrapers are flanked by the speech balloons of their inhabitants, made with cut-out texts excerpted from the yellowing pages of aging paperbacks. This frontier in Hughes’s non-existent country is a romantic fantasy, built on jagged pack ice that threatens to break up and swallow the whole enterprise.

The reality checks in Hughes’s drawing coincide with a larger evolution in Inuit and Aboriginal art over recent decades. There is a new realist impulse with younger generations of artists to show community and family life as it is. Tim Pitsiulak forsakes the traditional dogsled for the modern snowplow as his subject. Annie Pootoogook is well known for her depictions of substance abuse, boredom and domestic violence. Man on the Radio is not one of these. The picture depicts the main room of the 1960s-era prefab house in which the artist grew up. Her mother prepares meat on the floor and her father is using a CB radio. While there is nothing dark about this picture, it flatly resists the kind of traditional-life scenes of her elders and casts its lot unapologetically with modern times.

Two works, one very small, the other very big, immediately come to mind when considering the flip side of utopia: one is Alison Norlen’s monumental Edifice and the other is Daniel Barrow’s series: “Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry.” More than 12 feet high and 18 feet across, Norlen’s industrial spectacle is both immersive and ominous. Based on a combination of old industrial structures in southern Ontario, Edifice is part ruin and part construction site. Ladders and scaffolding litter a vast, depopulated, open pit, which is exposed to a portentous night sky filled with flaming stars. The massive scale and profusion of detail is vertiginous, and the dominantly red palette seems to scream out: “here is Armageddon.”

Daniel Barrow rejects the spectacle, but embraces violence and anguish. Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry, the title of Luba’s 1983 top-40 hit, takes its cue from the moralizing serials of William Hogarth and comic book storytelling. However, in this series of beautifully rendered drawings, morality gives way to circumstance, romance and the human condition. Barrow combines his sure hand and muted palette with small scroll-like text panels that move the story along and comment on its progress—much like a Greek chorus. Barrow is known for his low-tech, live animation performances and a short, magic-lantern-like video version of the sad tale accompanies the series of drawings.

Other drawings in the exhibition might be thought of as involuntary: Brian Jungen’s Vernacular, where for years, the artist kept a large sheet of paper available for doodles, notes and preliminary sketches or the psychogeographic, Luanne Martineau’s Untitled, Jason McLean’s Rubber Game for the Working Class and especially Pia Linz’s exquisitely detailed Mile End Park, which tracks her walks through the park along with particular measurements and observations to produce a hybrid representation based on personalized and measurable criteria.

Many of the drawings in this show are deliberate and finished works of art, but many others have a more ephemeral and provisional status traditionally aligned with the activity of drawing. Perhaps we don’t really get any behind-the-scenes and telling insights into the creative act of the artist, but there are definite rewards for prying. ❚

“Contemporary Drawings from the National Gallery of Canada” was exhibited at Remai Art Gallery of Saskatchewan, from January 24 to March 30, 2014.

Marcus Miller is Director of the Gordon Snelgrove Gallery at the University of Saskatchewan. He is a curator, teacher and critic.