“On the Nature of Things”

“On the Nature of Things,” a recent group exhibition at the Kamloops Art Gallery, guest curated by Patrik Andersson, was eclectic and, on the whole, very good. The exhibition was comprised of work by 15 contemporary artists from Canada and abroad, whose work, Andersson points out in his catalogue introduction, “…has the ability to return our attention to the nature of a variety of strikingly Modernist forms and structures.” In his statement Andersson inserted an audience directive towards imagining a revised Modernist avant-garde. It was curious then, that Vancouver artist Gordon Smith’s recent, small paper-mâché, plinth-mounted sculptures and large semi-abstract painting titled Pachino #1, 2011, were the first works encountered upon entering the gallery. While interesting, these works are firmly entrenched in an early-mid 20th-century Modernist ethos of marrying abstraction to a kind of hermetic, sublimated realism. Although the small sculptures were only somewhat reminiscent of Cy Twombly’s plaster/mixed-media sculptures on a formal and symbolic level, and not as eccentric and evocative as Franz West’s “Adaptives” and related works, they did embody a certain canonical reference to modern art. In this challenging exhibition was Gordon Smith included then, to provide an audience comfort zone through works that didn’t problematize the canon?

Since the turn of the century our collective apprehensions about entering this new millennium appear to be behind us, yet there are still lingering questions and anxieties about just about everything. The questions may include, but are not limited to, positioning current contemporary art against the historical backdrop of Modernism and Postmodernism. Although no one expected Modernism to exactly go away, (after Postmodernism) the assumption was there would be a realignment of models of critique and not necessarily just that of restoring the tried and true models of the past. There has been a tapering off in top-down criticism in recent years so that various streams of art and cultural history and theory—broadly based, hybridized, and internationally receptive—have had time and space to form new, more adaptive critical positions toward modes of production and interpretation.

To accommodate the installation of “On the Nature of Things” the gallery was divided by partitioning walls, and two separate projection rooms were constructed to screen Nettlecombe, 2007, a video by Sarah Dobai, and a 16-mm film by Shannon Oksanen, titled A Little Boat, 2007. Oksanen’s film is a tightly wound, paradoxical narrative eliciting states of empathy and objectivity, apprehension and carefree joie de vivre in both the principal character (the little boat), and the audience. Equally entertaining and mesmerizing, this recent film combines a cinema vérité aesthetic with an abstract electronic music track edited together to good effect. Oksanen is also represented by two small portrait paintings from 2011 titled Parent Trap. The loosely painted canvases are based on film stills and portray actress Hayley Mills as each of the two identical twins in the 1961 movie The Parent Trap. These paintings are exquisitely attractive works, but they also harbour underlying, unsettling psychological contradictions beyond the superficial doppelgänger effect that conceptually links them to her enigmatic film The Little Boat. Oksanen’s work seems intended to provide us with the luxury of aesthetic and intellectual navigation without concern for getting lost or maintaining our way, and with a sense that there is adventure, pleasure, and something to be learned in aesthetic and intellectual circumstances. Maybe both states aren’t incompatible after all.

From Euro-North American art history we know that 18th-century philosophers Kant and Hegel, although divergent in some ways, jointly set in motion parallel tracks for the advancement and theorization of Modernism. In the 20th century Marcel Duchamp created a third direction. With all the arguments in support of, or against, their respective influences effectively behind us we now see how intertwined their impact upon art has been. Evidence of this is found in Kristi Malakoff’s work, represented here by Stardust, a mixed-media wall piece from 2009, and four small wall-mounted, glass-encased sculptures from 2008, fashioned from intricately cut and folded paper money. The latter pieces, indistinguishable from high-design, slowly give up their uncompromising one-off, hands-on production methodology and mysterious identity to defy any paradigmatic reading or classification. Like Malakoff’s work Evan Lee’s “Stain” photographs from 2003 also make that “suspend your disbelief” leap from the ordinary to extraordinary in their optical presence alone. The “Stain” series are straight documentary photographs of oil stains on rain-soaked Vancouver streets. Through careful consideration of the photographs’ relationship to the genre as well as their layered representational meanings, we can begin to appreciate their beguiling complexity and timelessness.

Jack Jeffrey’s piece Untitled (table), 2008, could be seen as the unauthorized cornerstone of the neo-Modernist dialectics of this exhibition. Best described as an open-form, obelisk, tower-like sculpture with a pyramidal top, this aloof 300-cm-high assisted readymade is surely idiomatic of the monument. In a fittingly subversive way it may be understood as a tribute not only to the origins of modern art but to Modernism itself. In doing so, however, it inverts the thesis to antithesis, the monument to anti-monument. Untitled (table) for all its industrial and autonomous appearance is, in fact, a hand-crafted production whose conceptual and aesthetic origins lie in the found object: a collapsible support structure of a down market, commercially produced camping table. This single uncelebrated, détourned element gave rise to the creation of an intricately fabricated artwork whose meaning both supports and critiques many hallmarks of the Modernist pantheon, but more to the point, as in many other works in this exhibition, keeps that dialectic operating and open to question in the mysterious interstitial spaces. ❚

“On the Nature of Things” was exhibited at the Kamloops Art Gallery from October 15 to December 31, 2011.

Gary Pearson is an artist and associate professor at UBC Okanagan in Kelowna.