Multiplicity of Voices

This exhibition was inspired by a desire to document the current practice of Manitoba women artists. As such, it was more indicative than representative of the women’s community here. The most serious criticism of the show as a whole is that it was not inclusive enough. As it stood, the Multiplicity of Voices project, which ran concurrently at Plug-In and Gallery 1.1.1., was a valuable glimpse into a women’s community, remarkable for the number of talented individuals working within it. The show featured established artists in conjunction with more recent graduates of the School of Art, and, in so doing, offered a rounded view of the aesthetic assumptions animating the community as a whole. These assumptions appeared to be drawn from the general body of aesthetic ideas judged to be current, rather than from any that might be categorized as exclusively feminist. This is not to say feminist issues were not addressed. They were, but they were shaped by individual experience and perception.

According to Sheila Butler, The Blonde and the Black Sedan is a transitional work which affords insight into the intellectual and technical processes of one of the community’s more senior artists. Butler’s work very often begins with an image or a number of images that do not quite satisfy her. From these images, she then tries to derive others more to her liking. Then, with evidence of a number of such critically purified images in front of her, she constructs out of them a coherent whole. This process of vision and re-visioning allows, by accretion, the slow build-up of an armature of discarded assumptions about the figure upon which the final image convincingly rests. This process is consummately articulated in the foreground figure leaping into the pool (or off the picture plane, if you like). Here, the meshing of the calligraphic with painterly elements provides a brilliant exposition of all that is best in Butler’s work. Contrast this with the heavy-handed literalism of the blonde herself, complete with telephone and thongs. It is not so much the narrative elements per se that defeat the painting, as the literalness of their handling. The rich mutability so characteristic of Butler’s vision thus far has here begun to be relinquished in favour of less satisfying preoccupations with thongs, telephone cables and cast shadows, which inevitably require a stronger sense of structure than the painting provides.

Diane Whitehouse’s work is perhaps the most frankly ‘beautiful’ of any in the show. Her visual concerns arise from the formalist preoccupations of the 60s but here, in Look at Me and less satisfyingly in Moonlight, they are shaped by the adroit exercise of metaphor to avoid the arid reductivism of a period piece. Against the attenuated geometry provided by the articulation of a room, Whitehouse builds a texture of colour variations whose shifting tonalities both affirm and deny the architectural integrity of the planes they define. The sense of containment and fixity inevitably determined by boundaries is here subverted. For Whitehouse, these issues function metaphorically as a preoccupation with the shifting parameters of identity. Their borders must be continually renegotiated in the flux of living.

Susan Chafe’s Falling into the Lake presents a succession of canvas rectangles of diminishing size, laid one on top of the other, concluding with a magazine page featuring a choice example of the post-war woman as embodied in the commercial stereotypes of the 50s: the wide red mouth and tears-on-tap expression beneath the ‘tadpole’ eyebrows of the period. The painted rectangles of canvas function as both subject and object, as both conclusions in and of themselves, and as an elaborate series of frames for the magazine page. This is an effective device for slowing our approach to the centre image, giving our final arrival at the heart of the matter an added force. The question is, why? Although Chafe goes to considerable length to draw attention to the image, she offers little to suggest what significance the image has for her. Are we to read this as an ironic poke at the sexist conventions with which we grew up? A camp send-up of one more Donna Reed look-alike? If this is irony it lacks sufficient focus to make it sting. Chafe directs our attention but does not attempt to shape it in any way. The results at best are ambiguous.

Wanda Koop’s strongest work operates within a framework of compression in which the images, arrived at through a process of editing and re-evaluating, come on like a force of nature. The scale and bellicose vitality of her approach, coupled with the content-under-pressure quality of the imagery, give to her work an affecting power and strength. For this reason the 16 drawings from the Fracture series make for a curiously diluted experience of Koop’s work. While this private alphabet of signs has some of her characteristic directness, on the whole the grouping lacks focus and the strategically linked imagery which gives her larger pieces a cumulative force. Similarly, Rosemary Kowalsky’s drawings lack her usual manic intensity. Less poetic than perfunctory, they remain more interesting in idea than in execution.

Eleanor Bond’s painting, Converting the Powell River Mill to a Recreation and Retirement Centre, is, quite literally, breath-taking. Both the scale and the artist’s aerial vantage point jerk the viewer into what feels initially like a mid-air collision with a northern mining town. But Bond is not content to simply pull the rug out from under our feet. In this piece, she has given us a compelling visual parable in which the strength, purpose and dignity of industrial forms are contrasted with the absurdity of their recreational functions. In a society bereft of employment, Bond implies, terms such as recreation or retirement become euphemisms for corporate mockery. Bond achieves this without resorting to the rhetoric of the merely partisan through a richly painted, thoughtful assessment of her subject matter. This is a powerful statement, powerfully stated.

Laura Letinsky’s photographs possess a compelling, subterranean intensity. Letinsky ruthlessly uses the camera to siphon her flashlit subjects from the airless, surrounding darkness. The effect is both confrontational and claustrophobic in the extreme. Her abrasive use of light peels away from her subjects any insulating sense of the familiar. They appear with unsparing clarity, pinned and wriggling against a wall of social and sexual assumptions. This is particularly evident in the Mr. Nude/Miss Nude shots. The viewer is given little relief from the confrontational aspect of the photographs. The immediacy of the work induces an uncomfortable sense of complicity and a near-automatic resistance to that complicity. In revealing her subjects with such remorseless candour, Letinsky has, in effect, shown us ourselves. As we judge them, so too must we judge ourselves.

There is more air and less ozone in the photographs of Joanne Jackson Johnson. She moves between a frank appreciation of the complexities of industrial form and a curiosity about the workers whose lives are conditioned by the exigencies of life in hydro-electric communities. There is an understated sense of inquiry in Johnson’s photographs, carrying them beyond description or flat-footed observation. “Slave Falls Generating Station” is about men looking at a woman. In the reactions of six men on a bus, the photographer gives us a quiet summary of the attitudes predominating in the culture at large, of which this becomes a microcosm. In examining the worker and his environment, Johnson effectively frames the issue all of us must share: the shaping of attitudes and the assumptions by which we live.

Donnelly Smallwood’s Survey concerns itself with the peculiar combination of boredom and anxiety that so often colours our relations within an increasingly technological world. Her construction documents in excruciating detail the technical operation of her job as a telephone researcher: how the host of researchers connected with their prospective subjects; what the interviewer was to say, etc., including tips on how to get people to cough up the precious information in which such agencies traffic. Further, we are given details of the macaroni-and-weiner diet of her co-worker. This is presented in two triangular pieces of board, decorated with illustrations of innocuously cheerful people talking on the phone. The cumulative effect of all this information is, not surprisingly, boredom. And boredom is boring. Okay. Now what?

Louise Jonasson’s work exudes a wry sweet-and-sour lyricism. The drawings seem to offer us episodes in an ongoing fairytale, as though to enjoy the complications, the artist had updated the usual round of heroes, heroines and sweetness by setting them in a discarded landscape just before she pumps out the oxygen. Jonasson’s anonymous protagonists enact their rituals in front of TV sets, or float, sleep, or trade places with one another in a patchwork landscape convincingly removed from the necessities of a world governed by gravity. The colour has a dreamlike, opalescent quality, skirting monotony by the rigorous layering of one colour on another, hatched, scratched and scraped into union. Jonasson is tight-lipped about the proceedings, refusing to title the works other than by their dates of execution. Too bad. Doesn’t every poem need a title?

Aganetha Dyck’s Cabbages display her familiar deflating irony, harnessed to enormous skill and an ingenious gift for transforming silk purses into sows’ ears. Turning shoulder pads to cabbages neatly skewers the inanities of fashion and the fashion industry’s assumption that our value is conditional on what we wear. Reva Stone shares with Dyck a scrupulous sense of craft. Document functions as a stage on which the accoutrements of identity are mounted for consideration. Not the usual fans, jewels and gloves of status portraiture, to be sure, but something more ambiguous and perhaps unequivocal is evidence of a serious imagination at work. There is a nice sense of ‘montage’ to the work, a layering of information in a format that simultaneously dramatizes and encapsulates. The work seemed to suffer slightly in the installation as the lighting bleached the image on the plexiglass, or perhaps the image needed to be more emphatically stated.

Kim Ouellette’s work has a similar unabashed sense of theatre with a rambunctious vitality that marks Ouellette’s temperament as a romantic of the heroic variety. In her untitled piece at Plug-In, Ouellette gives us a tour of a contemporary inferno with one of the Damned as protagonist and guide. The heroically scaled figure is quite beautifully drawn with a luminosity Caravaggio might have appreciated—as though that mattered, since the drawing is torn, cut, stapled and reassembled, giving us something of what Butler did. Except that Ouellette carries the process one step further. The provisional nature of the work is emphasized over and over. The state in which the work is exhibited differs from the state in which it was photographed for the catalogue. Unfortunately, there is a consequent loss of momentum. The catalogue version sets the same figure against two large panels that function as both backdrop and environment, suggestive of energy or a technology that is sinister and encompassing. The caged roses introduce a theme of nature. Between these elements the figure is precariously balanced. If the meaning of this fragmented drama is, finally, of our own deriving, Ouellette makes every effort to convince us that the struggle portrayed is of titanic proportions. If there is a potential weakness here, it is in an over-reliance on the histrionic, on the thunder claps and gothic lighting of melodrama. All that notwithstanding, Ouellette has produced a powerful piece of art.

The Voices show affirms a community of highly individual talents. The curator, Sigrid Dahle, writes that the artists participate in a shared ‘dialogue of resistance’ but she’s careful to avoid reducing the artists to illustrators of a polemic, aesthetic or otherwise. Dahle’s essay in the accompanying catalogue provides a thorough, intelligent consideration of each artist’s work and, as such, it offers an excellent introduction to the show. If the fate of survey shows is inevitably to bring to mind the should-have-been-included, the community here is sufficiently endowed with talent that the absentees could easily constitute the next Voices show. And the next. ♦

Tom Lovatt is a Winnipeg artist. An interview with him appeared in Volume 6, number two.