Janet Werner, Melanie Rocan, Tammy Salzl

This spring Saskatoon played host to three noteworthy painting shows, and a panel discussion to mark the occasion—all by women and all of women. Not that there’s anything especially noteworthy, at this herstorical juncture, about women painting women, or women talking about women painting women—just saying. Harkening from Western Canada, all three exhibiting artists share an academic base camp at Concordia University in Montreal: two as students of the third. Melanie Rocan and Tammy Salzl both studied with Janet Werner, and although all three are figurative painters (of girls), the lineage shows more with Rocan than Salzl.

“Dreaming Painting” was the title of the panel organized to consider the good fortune of having a constellation of three independently programmed and meritorious painting exhibitions in the city at one time. Moderated by the Mendel Art Gallery’s Associate Curator, Sandra Fraser, the roster included a fourth female painter of female figures: Allyson Glenn (Assistant Professor, Department of Art & Art History, University of Saskatchewan).

With all these girls—pictured in paint, donning berets (figuratively speaking) and wielding microphones (phallically speaking), you might think the concentration of feminine content and production would be something to remark on, an idiosyncratic blip, a symptom of concrete emancipation.

Men look at women, who in turn look at women. It was never symmetrical—Lacan 101. And to complete the vicious cycle, women looking at women (at themselves), did so through the eyes of men. That was the problem: no autonomy (power) in the female gaze—but is it still the problem? Maybe, but we don’t talk about it as much anymore. In the 1980s, as Manet’s Olympia was discursively transformed from a sign of class-consciousness to a sign of feminist-consciousness, the rigorous and hopeless conclusion that there was no way for women to break open the closed circle of patriarchal vision slowly dissipated. Manet’s picture became a rallying cry for the possibility and viability of an empowered feminine visuality.

During the Q and A, Dagmara Genda, Director of Saskatoon’s aka gallery, took a brave stab at addressing what would have been the burning question 30 years earlier, by referring to George Baselitz’s recent indictment in Der Spiegel. “Women don’t paint very well. It’s a fact,” he stated. And had it been 1984, the inflammatory remark would have provided the opening volley for a rousing debate on the hows and whys of patriarchy. But today the quote was delivered with a smirk and received as the quaint, attention-seeking and impotent ruminations of an old German white guy.

While the provocative posture of Olympia still functions as a de facto political badge for feminine agency, today it simply doesn’t have the same urgency. The vacated subjects for which Janet Werner first became known were never confrontational in the same way. They couldn’t be—they weren’t really there. They only looked like subjects and even now in her recent paintings, so embellished by scale, hair and bathing suits, she offers no satisfaction to viewers who need insight and essential character traits in their portraits. Her subjects are ready-made in the market: they come from the world of fashion and are statistically honed for mass appeal. It’s their obdurate blankness that’s confrontational. When Sandra Fraser stressed desire as the functional operation at work in her painting, Werner was quick to add deviance as her more immediate aesthetic quest, over-amplifying the beauty of her perfect sources so they begin to hint at the grotesque.

If Werner hints, Salzl screams. If Werner is flat, contemporary, blank and broadly stroked, Salzl is glossy, mythic, oozing with metaphor and obsessively detailed. Her figures are sinewy and permeated with bruises and sores that evoke stories of terrible and disgusting acts. Salzl’s is a world of the Grimm’s Brothers—a pre- Victorian, even paganistic world where good and evil aren’t yet fixed as easy moral dichotomies.

In Salzl’s The Compromise, three prepubescent girls in identical blue dresses, headscarves and black wristbands kneel down behind a naked boy, who is laying on his side. Typically for Salzl, the children combine extreme cuteness (big eyes and well-proportioned features) with grotesquery or human-animal hybridity. Elbows and knees are overrun by hemorrhoidal swellings as the girls lay their spectacularly gnarly hands across the pearl flesh of the boy’s body. The boy is part animal. His fingers are capped by claws, and snaking around from behind, and presumably emanating from his lower back, is a strange, bony tail: a very phallic amalgam of vertebrae and intestine.

Sexual innuendo and the possibility of cultish ritual pervade the scene as the artist taunts viewers with their own illicit associations and abject fantasies. Grand dichotomies like innocence and experience inform the picture and ally Salzl’s work to the ambitions of Baroque allegories and the perversities of the court. Banality does not live here. This is more than a covert game of doctor.

Melanie Rocan’s girls are much lighter: their bendy bodies float over jumbled landscapes as if they were wisps of smoke blown from a pipe. A Chagallesque, free association of psychic debris combines to produce images that are both haunting and delightful. Where Werner’s brushy backgrounds play secondary supporting roles to her monumentally empty figures, Rocan fleshes out her landscapes in order to tell her subject’s stories. More vacuous and far less particular than Salzl’s girls, Rocan’s figures are catalytic agents that activate and give sense to the main events—which are buried in the ground. They are signs that point inwards. The background is the key to the subject’s interior life, which quickly breaks down as abstract marks on a canvas.

Rocan uses paint the way a jazz musician uses sound to signify modal themes like disorder, harmony and alienation, for example. Girls in long dresses stand atop mountains of gestures, only some of which resolve as houses, ladders, broken umbrellas—the detritus of domestic life and the psyche. Some girls are almost completely enveloped by dabs of paint. Unresolved, unanalyzed content rendered as abstract painting: like the title of one of her almost completely abstract paintings: Poubelle.

Psychic material, like trash, never goes away. It’s sorted, or not, it goes dormant for a time and it piles up, layer upon disorderly layer—as in Melanie Rocan’s paintings. Who knows what message Olympia will convey next year as she looks back in anger? This year, we seem to be interested in solid, beautiful, provocative painting and no matter how hard we try to make something of it, girls painting girls is simply no longer so remarkable. ❚

“Janet Werner: Another Perfect Day,” at College Art Galleries, Saskatoon, February 8 to May 4, 2013; “Tammy Salzl: Into the Woods,” at aka gallery, Saskatoon, April 12 to May 24, 2013; “Melanie Rocan: Souvenir involontaire,” at the Kenderdine Art Gallery in partnership with the Doris McCarthy Gallery, Toronto, and Plug In ICA, Winnipeg, February 22 to April 27, 2013. “Dreaming Painting,” panel discussion, the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, with Janet Werner, Melanie Rocan, Tammy Salzl and Allyson Glen, moderated by Sandra Fraser, April 13, 2013.

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