Margaret Priest and Jen Aitken

Have you ever considered that everything from the past goes to the same place? Romanticism, mistakes, pharaohs, WWI, WWII, grandmothers, tsunamis, food scraps, black socks, plane crashes … they are all in the past. Now, consider the present tense as a place; all things conceived as the present occupy the same space. “Material Matters: Investigations into Place and Placement” at Georgia Scherman Projects (GSP) pairs renowned artist Margaret Priest with emerging artist Jen Aitken. Together, their work empties modernism of its ambitions, objects and people, and offers instead highly formal, altered, replacements that confuse our sense of time.

The title of the exhibition suggests an exploration of place, which I see as unavoidably connected to time. Priest and Aitken create a strange experience of the timeless, which, contrary to the titular goals, also manifests a sense of the placeless. Priest’s astute graphite renderings depicting modernist architectural sites seem barren. Although the viewer cannot physically enter the illusionistic spaces, her images manifest a feeling of utter isolation that haunts the brain and lingers within the body. In two pieces from the “Immurement” series (aka ‘quarantine’), titled The Prison and The Hospital, 1989, Priest reproduces modernist hallways or, more accurately, she produces absence. Priest retitled, and thus redefined, these places not as schools fleshed out with students and teachers, but as desolate institutions unfit for bodies. Through perfect pencil work she boldly comments here on the failures of modernist design. (Le Corbusier thought buildings should function as “machines for living in.”)

Although her drawings depict specific places, they are also spaces of transition. In the drawings titled Stairwell No. 2, 1989, and Finisterre, 2012/17, Priest provokes the question, “Is this the beginning or the end?” as the viewer mentally descends/ascends into walled-up dead ends. Her answer seems to be “neither,” and this is the hard-todescribe- in-words quality of her subversion. Priest renders place, but really she describes black holes. Without colour, objects, furnishings, nature or people, she (re)produces sites emptied of the stuff of both the past and the present and therefore asks, “Is this really a place?” Her drawings are literally and metaphorically void; it’s no wonder that our contemporary gaze goes limp when faced with such austere infinity.

Aitken’s works do not evoke bleak sites, but rather evidence material exploration and geometric permutations resulting in ambiguous rather than specific architectural-like sculptures. Like Priest’s, Aitken’s work relies on fragmentation and ambiguity to communicate; however, the result is gentler and her disruption more light-hearted. In the cast-concrete floor sculpture titled Oppik, 2016, small bits of coloured foam are exposed by irregular holes in the surface, an indication of a soft, vibrant centre beneath a serious exterior. Although Aitken doesn’t claim to address a modernist agenda, as the GSP gallery writes about Priest, she does make clear references to Brutalist architecture. Aitken is further from the high days of modernism than Priest, and yet Oppik, Galomindt and Yna feature repeated modular elements and distinctly articulated masses familiar to modernist buildings found in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s—and, pleasingly, no clue whatsoever of their possible function. The sculptures’ titles, which are recognizable as words only within Aitken’s unique vocabulary, are another welcomed detour from the strictures of the past.

While Priest removes all things human from modernist space and thus the bodies of historic time, Aitken’s work suggests a timelessness that is embodied. In the backspace of GSP, one of Aitken’s newest wall-mounted pieces, titled Phaxa, 2017, absorbs the viewer’s body into its concrete-encrusted folds. Like a box opened flap by flap, it arrests your gaze in a central flattened space: hers is the illusion of time standing still. However, to walk around Aitken’s floor-based works is to watch time evolve via form, continuously, without cessation. In cahoots with Priest, Aitken gives no clear indication of beginnings or ends.

I understand why Scherman paired the two: the formal overlaps between the artists’ practices are numerous, while the distinction between their conceptual parameters proves to be generative. The aesthetic consistencies (fragmentation, geometric guidelines, modernist architecture, a fascination with concrete, surface and texture) are strong, while the installation leads the audience through complex shifts in elevation. Everything seems to fall into place; Priest declares the faults of a utopic architectural mission via technically perfect drawings and Aitken explores the material relationship between the everyday built environment (albeit it seems more like modernism’s endless influence on the ‘everyday built environment’) and contemporary abstract sculpture. So, why am I left feeling weird … a bit underdone?

Although Priest’s and Aitken’s works are elegant and subtle, their shared aesthetic leaves me cold. Here, the past and present collide in a system that predicts a sterile future. In this way their combined work performs as a kind of ruins: symbolic of yesterday while continuing to persuade today and tomorrow. It’s normal to doubt after being exposed to such ghosts, and I am left with a difficult and yet productive question: If the current moment seems intolerable because it is as precarious as the future, how do artists create the present? Priest and Aitken do not appear interested in confronting the task, but instead dig deeper into past forms, perhaps as relief, if not remedy, from timesickness. ❚

“Material Matters: Investigations into Place and Placement” was exhibited at Georgia Scherman Projects, Toronto, from December 1, 2017, to January 27, 2018.

Jasmine Reimer studied visual art at Emily Carr University and the University of Guelph. She currently works and lives in Toronto.