Elspeth Pratt

Elspeth Pratt is one of Canada’s most accomplished and possibly least appreciated sculptors. Her materials and scale are intentionally non-heroic, her forms are subtle and understated, and yet her ideas possess both heft and depth. Through her art, Pratt grapples with complex problems concerning the built environment. Her sculptures appear to be abstract but they are, in a conceptual sense, representational; that is, they manifest her investigations into spatial, material and social dynamics within the arena of contemporary architecture.

Pratt’s work seems to root itself, formally, in Constructivism, especially in the corner reliefs and counter reliefs of Vladimir Tatlin. Just as Tatlin created abstract assemblages out of unglamorous but new and politically resonant industrial materials, Pratt employs her age’s most banal building and packing materials, from corrugated cardboard and Polystyrene insulation to dowelling, Formica, hardware cloth and low-end laminates. Recent work added foamcore, balsa wood, textured vinyl cloth, CorroPlast and carpet underlay to her list of unexpected media. All evoke their homely origins and their associations with the construction industry (and also their invisibility: the fact that they are largely unseen or unconsidered once a structure has been completed) while repurposing themselves within a fine art context. A few years ago, Vancouver Art Gallery senior curator Bruce Grenville wrote that Pratt deploys a “calculated gap” between her materials and her meaning. Polystyrene insulation doesn’t look smart, it looks stupid and inarticulate, but in Pratt’s hands, it is very smart indeed. It eloquently unsettles our assumptions about what is “appropriate” in certain hallowed contexts and conditions and about what holds “value” in the high-end marketplace. (I think it’s important to recognize that Pratt has been employing such anti-heroic materials for years, long before the garbage aesthetic was significantly embraced by a younger generation of artists.)

The apparent banality and, in some cases, ephemerality of Pratt’s materials (corrugated cardboard will fade and eventually crumble, as will foamcore and a number of her other archivally doubtful media) and their seemingly slapdash mounting (her works are often hung by tacks on gallery walls or seem to lean perilously against them) contribute to their sense of provisionality. That provisionality is an important part of her philosophical approach, and is amplified by the way she handles her materials within each individual sculpture. Pieces of vinyl cloth, nylon fabric or glycine droop and sag; plywood and cardboard corners are skewed or overshot. In Moveable Feast, on view in her most recent show, “Nonetheless,” one of three stacked and interlocking boxes, all painted in smarmy, pseudo-Venetian condo colours, is balanced on a San Pellegrino Limonata can. It was a temporary studio solution that stuck—for all the right reasons.

Again, Pratt challenges old but still lingering notions of the heroic and the monumental and, in so doing, incorporates a sub-textual feminist critique of both art and architecture into her work. In the past, she has spoken about the elements of doubt and vulnerability in her sculpture, in opposition again to the expected masculine assertions of conviction and strength. Not that Pratt is interested, necessarily, in articulating gendered space or examining the domestic realm. In her explorations of the way the built environment controls our movements within, usage of, or reaction to, “semi-public” spaces, she has addressed airports, office towers, casinos, sports arenas, tropical resorts and other architectural manifestations of our supposedly post-colonial age. Her forms have been, and remain, abstract and evocative rather than literal and concrete.

A number of works in “Nonetheless” speak to Pratt’s current interest in the improvised housing found in favelas, the shantytowns that have grown up on the socio-economic and geographical margins of large urban centres in Brazil and other South American countries. Her interest is in the ways in which people build on this edge, this urban frontier, under the duress of extreme poverty but free of restrictive bylaws and building codes. She is attracted to experiments in structuring space and establishing alternative means towards social cohesion and community interaction. Her long-standing embrace of unconventional materials parallels the favelados’ use of discarded and scavenged or recycled and repurposed materials. Such salvage stands in contrast to the extravagant, wasteful and environmentally unfriendly building practices of wealthy nations.

Pratt exercises her intellectual curiosity about the alternative building practices of favelas while acknowledging their origins in dire economic and social circumstances. She does not romanticize the poverty, crime and squalor that afflict the lives of favelados, although her practice translates what must be a grubby physical struggle into the light, bright and cerebral. Still, that lightness and brightness attend her unlikely materials and their unlikeliness parallels that of her point of inspiration.

Not all Pratt’s new work is about the improvised architecture of the poor; she has also been looking at, and referencing, modernist buildings in Europe, highly inventive postmodern structures in Japan and the plague of glass towers spreading across our own urban centres. Among the most impressive works here, in both scale and complexity, is Building Back. It riffs on a multi-storey condo Pratt encountered in Vancouver, initially under construction and shrouded with tarpaulins. Her idea was to speak to the building’s infrastructure by creating a small tower of interlocking cardboard forms, with an elegant curve to the structure’s façade. The interwoven horizontal and vertical elements mimic the collapsible compartments inside liquor boxes and again suggest an element of vulnerability and insubstantiality, especially within the geological context of the earthquake-prone west coast. It’s easy to imagine the whole structure pancaking, as has happened in San Francisco and other cities in which growing populations buy overpriced real estate and live in daily denial of the inevitable. The idea of collapse also functions as a sharp metaphor for the economy and the housing market. An oval of lime green nylon behind the cardboard tower is suggestive of artificial nature. It also evokes the tarpaulins that, in rainy Vancouver, cover not only buildings under construction, but leaky condos under reconstruction. The perforated plastic crate on which the entire structure is balanced perfectly complements a work and an exhibition fraught with vulnerability and provisionality. ■

“Elspeth Pratt: Nonetheless” was exhibited at the Charles H. Scott Gallery in Vancouver from March 11 to April 20, 2008.

Robin Laurence is a writer, curator and a Contributing Editor to Border Crossings from Vancouver.