Dualité/Duality: Mélanie Rocan and Shaun Morin

You don’t generally expect to contend with contemporary art on a trip to a cultural centre. The reality of artistic hierarchies may be loudly and exhaustively debated in art academies and the white cube, but try talking about the business of good and bad art in anything but a whisper in a community centre—it’s just not what these places are about. White cubes promote their brand of artist, while cultural centres continue the business of encouraging the pursuits of their citizens; the results are mainly a difference of aesthetics and value judgments, with a shared application.

Shaun Morin and Mélanie Rocan, in addition to being noted members of Winnipeg’s young artists’ community, are also identified with the Franco-Manitoban community from which they emerged. Had this show been mounted five years ago, the unique context it provides would not have been relevant; at that time, these artists had not yet achieved the level of formality that several of their current works display. Today, the kids are grown and this exhibition can be seen as one of those debts of gratitude to a community that provided early recognition and support, a shout out to the old school. It’s an important gesture, especially for audiences who remember seeing Morin and Rocan’s earlier artistic forays in similarly modest venues: Everybody loves bearing witness to progress. More than that, though, it raises the bar of what an audience expects to see outside of the kunsthalle.

Morin’s strength is as an illustrator; Rocan has distinguished herself with tiny, whimsical paintings of the landscape and the remembrance of things past. On the scale of public approval applied to types of art and artists, these pursuits are well-regarded, and an association with the commercial aspects of illustration and landscape/genre painting can be useful in establishing credibility as a professional artist. This is not to undermine the seriousness of each artist’s endeavour within the realm of contemporary art, but to point out their good fortune in being proficient at what they do while ideally positioned to bridge the chasm that divides the masses from the art elite.

Morin’s larger collage works are dizzying amalgams of retro advertising, cartoonery, Depression-era motifs and often obscene and/or adolescent doodles, further overwritten with the exclamatory, punning textual style of vintage comics. The experience of viewing these works is like popping a handful of fizzy candy—explosive, nostalgic and rapidly over. It is the one-liner that is Morin’s gift: Little drawings like Time’s Ticking and Dance Floor remind us that the simplest image, articulately rendered, can evoke whole worlds and histories. Popular illustrations are meant to appeal to an audience directly, to impart something quickly, to capture a prevailing mood or to transport the viewer to another dimension momentarily—in effect, to strike an instant chord in the viewer. This is not easily accomplished and requires both conceptual and technical precision. Viewed as isolated fragments, many of the original doodles in Morin’s collages succeed in this same way and could be better served as individual works, foregrounding his considerable illustrative skills and the one-two punch of image meeting title.

In Rocan’s case, a recent transition to oil painting results in a schizophrenic effect amongst the exhibited works. The tiny watercolour vignettes coexist uneasily with large-scale, expressionistic oils. What Rocan does best is convey scenes of life as she knows and remembers them, and it is no accident that she was nominated for this year’s RBC painting prize for a work called Small Town. In the same way that it is difficult to assess an exhibition at a cultural centre on the rigid, black-and-white scale of good and bad, it seems churlishly narrow-minded to dismiss such utterly subjective and lovingly depicted images. Whether or not you care for her style, there is an earnestness to the little scenes she portrays that carries its own appeal. When she takes the personal out of her painting (works like Surrender), it begins to look like everything else—just another young artist experimenting with oils.

The exhibition is titled “Duality,” implying a divergence in practice; what emerges is a yinyang kind of relationship between the two bodies of work. Morin’s graphic style has a hard-edged machismo; Rocan is all soft edges and pastels. In placing these two artists side by side, the exhibition underscores how two artists from the same generation, community and artistic subset will nonetheless approach the business of making images very differently. Still, there are similarities to be found amidst the oppositions. Both artists succeed best with less: Morin with instinctual illustrative riffs; Rocan with snapshot memories. Both are also nostalgic in their own ways— Morin by appropriation; Rocan in practice. Perhaps it is here that the exhibition’s uniqueness lies: that these two emerging artists choose to embrace nostalgia, and in such very different (dual) ways. ■

“Dualité/Duality: Mélanie Rocan and Shaun Morin” was exhibited at the Centre culturel franco-manitobain in Winnipeg, June 29 to August 4, 2006.

Christabel Wiebe lives and works in Winnipeg.