Katie Bethune-Leamen

Just inside the entrance of Katie Bethune-Leamen’s recent exhibition at Latcham Gallery is a digital animation of 19th-century explorer Robert Peary riding a ship painted in camouflage. He stands at the bow looking ghost-like, all in white furs, as the ship coasts forward through fog. The animation quality is like that of a video game or Ice Age, 2002, only with more accurate proportions and fewer hi-jinks: the looped, low-action shot recalls early video art, yet the form and backdrop shout Pixar. It is humorously melancholy, and I can’t help laugh as Peary’s white furs blow back in the wind, despite his limp arms and sloping shoulders. His posture says defeat, but the ship moves forward anyway.

Defeat shifts to inspiration in an installation entitled Robert E Peary First Sees Ahnighito. The work comprises facing projections separated by a freestanding wall. The first is a looped digital animation of Peary’s fur-covered head looking out toward the second projection: an animation of the Ahnighito meteorite, which momentarily hovers and glows before falling back on the snow.

Peary learned of the meteorite while travelling in Greenland, where he observed the local Inuit using tools made from iron. The source of this metal was a set of three meteorites, the largest of which was the Ahnighito, weighing 34 tonnes. Amazingly, both in gall and physics, in 1897 Peary brought all three meteorites and five unfortunate Inuit to New York. According to Astronomy magazine, the Ahnighito is the largest of its kind “in captivity.”

Here, the facing videos polarize the action of wanting. Unable to view both images at once, the viewer is placed in the physical space between the covetous subject and his desired object. Peary’s bulging eyes and the meteorite’s mystical movements suggest slapstick lust or comical hallucination. Like Wile E Coyote picturing the Road Runner as a roast, Peary simultaneously sees the prize and what he’d like it to do for him.

Around the corner from Robert E Peary First… stands a replica Ahnighito, only Bethune-Leamen’s is aesthetically more akin to a roadside attraction than astrological re-creation. The object is strangely two dimensional: when approached frontally the outline of the meteorite is the same as depicted in the video; however, from the side the formation appears flat. Furthering this Brechtian spirit, layers of pallet wrap are visible under dripping coats of pearlescent paint.

The sculpture calls to mind Vladimir Nabokov’s “poshlust,” a word he coined in his novel Lolita to describe “a love of the fake,” and has been applied to visual art by writer David Hawkes. Like the roadside attraction trying to entice you to pull over and buy something, this meteorite is cheerily faux. Passable at the correct distance and angle, the illusion unfurls at closer inspection, triggering meditation on the character of farce undertaken by sculpture—roadside attraction or historical museum display.

Referencing a different kind of love is a painting installation loosely reminiscent of an early Jules Olitski impasto. Interference paint is applied like stucco, and two central white holes acting as eyes reveal the gessoed canvas beneath the thick paint. The painting speaks via a laser-cut Plexiglas word bubble hanging from its inferred mouth: “I smoke, I drink/I’m supposed to stop but I can’t/I’m a dog, I love hos/ and I’m addicted to money cause it glows.” The line is a deliberate misquote of rapper Lil Boosie (currently incarcerated on murder charges). There is further evidence of the painting’s shady disposition: the canvas rests upon a stack of 26 copies of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, an erotic pseudo-memoir written in prison and first published in 1748 to great scandal. Here Fanny Hill and Lil Boosie’s intractable desires are obliquely allied with Peary’s. As Bethune-Leamen re-tells it, like the animated Ahnighito, the painting’s object of desire also glows, both literally and metaphorically.

This multifaceted exhibition’s ethos: Bethune-Leamen draws from tragic-comic moments somewhere between the mall and the library, form and aesthetic. The results are complex research projects as if acted out by a teenage heartthrob—they have academic clout in content but are distinctly MTV in sensibility. Here loosely applied sparkles and interference paint can refer to a moment in Modernist painting as well as a fetish car finish. It is the language of attempted surface amelioration, like body glitter or anti-wrinkle cream, and this trope speaks to earnest desire, unabashedly manifested in material form. In the words of Fanny Hill, “Truth! Stark naked truth, is the word; and I…paint situations such as they actually rose to me in nature…; and you have too much sense, too much knowledge of the ORIGINALS themselves, to sniff prudishly and out of character at the PICTURES of them.” ❚

“Older, Sadder, And All In White This Time” was exhibited at the Latcham Gallery in Stouffville, Ontario, from October 30 to December 4, 2010.

Kelly Jazvac is an artist based in London, Ontario, where she teaches sculpture at the University of Western Ontario.