Jen Aitken

Palpable anthropomorphs composed of deceptively simple forms, the recent sculptures of Toronto-based Jen Aitken offer a welcome invitation to the dance. They are also sufficiently novel that it is difficult to overhear any enervating echoes of related sculptural practices. While the sculptures of Duff, Therrien and even Robert Grosvenor come lazily to mind when we passively appraise them as objects (searching as viewers always do for avatars, forebears or referents), the closer-to-home truth is on another level entirely. When we move around and through them, we are struck by the way they insistently direct our attention not only to their own peculiarities as things, but to the spaces around them. Then, another figure comes to mind.

Aitken has spoken of a small yellow brick building in Toronto that she likes to look at: a 1960s, modernist structure comprised of a smaller box stacked on top of a larger one, adjoining a squat cylinder. But it is less the geometry of this basic structure that speaks to her; it is more her recognition that it is a hatchling that unfolds in its surrounding space with tentacular grace. Geometries that seemed readily assimilable at one moment are changelings the next; circles morph into ellipses with missing segments; internal volumes achieve radical parity with external spaces. She could just as easily be describing her own sculptures: seemingly opaque on first inspection but surprisingly generous, if not garrulous, the more you look at and move around them. Aitken directs her viewers slowly and inexorably towards a truth of seeing: its predicates hide in plain sight and this establishes her filiation with an unlikely fellow traveller: Michael Snow.

She posits a number of compelling dichotomies: fragile and solid, cloistered and capacious, inside and outside, whole and partial. Resolving the dualism means solving the sculptures, each of which is formed from two or three individual concrete units that interlock together like LEGO toy bricks. Indeed, Aitken’s sculptures are like hypertrophied perceptual toys. This is certainly the case with Lunopel, 2016, Galomindt, 2016, and Yna, 2016. They evolve unit by unit until a certain figural threshold is reached. The progression—the interlocking of forms, interlacing of figures—is purely intuitive. But not without the rigour that has become her hallmark. At a certain point, an interior mass defines an exterior negative space rather than being defined by it, and the sculpture itself possesses a supple sort of prosthesis in moulding surrounding space.

When working the epidermis of a given sculpture, Aitken’s awareness of the way concrete picks up the texture of whatever surface it is cast against is always in play, and this allows her to make skin grafts that contribute to the persona of a sculpture. Small but telling and potent painterly epiphanies can be experienced when inspecting surfaces at close quarters. She always adds small pieces of polyurethane foam to her concrete mixture that then crop up in the surface like lovely dimples. The pink taches in the upper element of Galomindt, 2016, also read as chewed bubblegum affixed to schoolyard concrete walls. Aitken adds powdered pigment to the concrete mixture she buys from the local hardware store, to give the grey complexion a slight yellow or purple undertone. She never buffs or performs any other finishing work because that would be artifice in which she has no interest. The fact that the surface is intrinsic rather than applied ensures its integrity.

While never programmatic in facture, Aitken still works within a fixed set of limitations in finessing these skeletal structures: 90- and 45-degree angles and correlated radii. In a sense, this is akin to DNA sequencing—making sure the genomes of her sculptures are true to her aesthetic needs and will result in hybrids that work—like Oppik, 2016, and Pthona, 2016. It certainly ensures the notably good posture of her sculptures.

On the gallery floor, these fulsome anthropomorphs form family units that preserve their individuality while bouncing off one another. This interplay is captivating. They are chameleons that keep changing and unfolding as you walk around them, so they resist taxonomy even as their spaces shift in keeping with the viewer’s movements around and through them.

The balancing and counterbalancing of individual units—they aren’t fastened together in any way, but simply stacked on top of one another—extends to the aggregate of the sculptures. As Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari asserted in A Thousand Plateaus (1988), she makes sculptures—and directs our assimilation of them—as a way of travelling and moving; proceeding from the middle through the middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing.

The exhibition as a whole reads not as a static Stonehenge of ponderous masses but as a gathering of ambiguous forms that belie their weight, that balance and counterbalance, align and realign, open and close themselves. Here is the apotheosis of somatic movement and imaginal understanding.

Mention should also be made of the publication by the gallery of Aitken’s first monograph, which accompanied the exhibition. It is conceived like a sketchbook bringing together studio drawings and studies of works under development.

According to the Urban Dictionary, “Numa” means something overwhelmingly cool but also an overweight person dancing. “Look at that Numa over there! He moves, and then 30 seconds later the rest of his gut follows” which, if you think about it, is quite pertinent to our experience of Aitken’s restlessly pivoting sculpture. ❚

“Numa” was exhibited at Battat Contemporary, Montreal, from May 5 to June 25, 2016.

James D Campbell is a writer and curator in Montreal, who is a frequent contributor to Border Crossings.