Patrick Mahon

For the last decade or so the most apparent characteristic in the art of Patrick Mahon has been the motif of a network, mosaic or grid. Looking at a network it wouldn’t be accurate to describe individual elements, since connections are what make a system functional. This conceit links Mahon’s production to the ideas of Gregory Bateson, an English anthropologist and pioneer in the field of cybernetics. Bateson famously asked his students how many fingers are on one hand, and when they replied five he yelled No! That is a stupid question, there are not five fingers; there are only four relationships between fingers. Bateson saw the whole world as connections, and looked for the patterns that connect living things to each other. But he would never just spell out the answer. He had a unique way of presenting his epistemological theory as a series of scattered anecdotes, stories and observations. Patrick Mahon’s exhibition “Nonsuch Garden” at Katzman Contemporary operates by the same logic. The viewer is asked to connect a cast of actors—vines and flowers, a backyard garden, nautical rope, a ship, a fence, pieces of wood—and imagine all the ways they relate. The work’s ambiguity gives rise to many meanings.

The walls of the gallery house four variations of digitally printed collages; some are printed on Plexiglas and others directly onto birch panels or basswood veneer. In Nonsuch Garden Perforation Drawing (Fence/Dots) we see an image of foliage and flowers, an orange security fence and houses—a fairly mundane backyard scene printed on veneer. A pattern of round holes perforates the surface and seems to create a bullseye around the orange fence. There is a hint at relationships here, but what they are exactly is not disclosed. In the absence of human presence, the garden, fence and houses read as signals for the achievements of human labour, the ingenious and fraught relics of mastering the natural world. But the most striking element of the image is its pixilated, almost pointillist nature, as though a Lichtenstein was put through a Photoshop filter. The photograph appears to be made entirely of tiny dots.

In Nonsuch Garden Wall Panel (Ropes/Potholes) we see another garden of pixilated squash leaves in a vague backyard, this time with collaged circles depicting nautical rope. The juxtaposition of rope and garden vines as products cultivated by humans brings to mind the connection between the histories of navigation and botany, which became increasingly intertwined in the early modern period as Europe’s colonial enterprises spread around the globe. It would be easy to jump to moralizing conclusions of meaning here (the perils of colonialism) but Mahon’s presentation deftly leaves the “lesson” out. As viewers, we are free to consider many coexisting realities, and the democratic process of pixilation these pieces undergo symbolically suggests that the whole needs each point to exist and vice versa. There are no individual dots here, only relationships between dots.

Imagery of nautical rope and ships throughout the exhibition generates many possibilities when thinking about relations. Sea navigation was central to the creation of the world as we know it, a vast endeavour for forging networks between disparate people, continents and resources. The specific ship depicted by the artist was a seafaring vessel called the Nonsuch, to which the show’s title owes its name. Explorers commissioned the original Nonsuch in 1668 in their search for new trade routes and passages. The efforts and explorations of these captains led to the establishment of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which in 1970 commissioned the full-sized replica that appears in the exhibition. When Mahon was 17 years old he got a job repairing this replica, now on display at the Manitoba Museum. The narrative of the Nonsuch connects it to innumerable other points including the history of the colonial project and Canadian society, Mahon’s own youth, and the exchange of biological material that gained fast momentum during that period.

Relationships seem to interest Mahon not just in terms of history and imagery but also in the way he makes art. His practice has contained a collaborative dimension, including his exhibition “Drawing Water” in 2008, where he held drawing workshops with First Nations students from a school in Kamloops BC, and showcased images of their drawings in his show. In this current exhibition his relationships with people as an educator and artist are made emphatic. In the centre of the room is a sculpture made in collaboration with Dickson Bou, Mahon’s former student and current assistant. Titled Large Gardenship 1, it is a network of arcing strips of wood veneer tethered around the gallery’s load-bearing column. Some veneer has been printed with the same pixilated garden as the other collages in the show, and these strips intertwine to form a lattice and then also to jut out in expansive swooping curves. The entire structure is held together with a network of ropes, echoing the connections made in the other works between rope, the Nonsuch and the garden.

Another collaboration in the show is a stop-motion video made with Jennifer Wanner, also a former student of Mahon’s. Swept Away features strips of wood and wildflowers that energetically scurry into the frame and do a sort of dance as they overlap and intertwine before making their exit. Wanner provided the leaves and flowers—endangered species from around Banff where the video was made, and Mahon provided the strips of wood. The “dance” of the pieces could be seen to symbolize both the dynamic nature of biological relationships, and the lateral exchange of ideas between teacher and student.

In using a recurring cast of actors in this exhibition, Patrick Mahon sets the stage for viewers to see aesthetic connections, as well as mapping out geographical, historical, interpersonal and political relationships. Surveying Mahon’s recent practice, it is likely that this is not the last time we will see a ship, pieces of wood and collaborators intertwine in his enduring drama. ❚

“Nonsuch Garden” was exhibited at Katzman Contemporary, Toronto, from November 19 to December 19, 2015.

Anna Kovler is an artist and writer living in Toronto.