Petra Halkes

An exhibition by the Ottawa-based artist, writer and curator Petra Halkes at Cube Gallery in Ottawa, “Lights On!” was comprised of recent oil paintings that reproduce the aesthetic qualities of hasty snapshot photography in order to defamiliarize everyday scenes and make them seem otherworldly. Curated by Marcia Lea, the exhibition included selections from two related bodies of Halke’s work, her “Window Shopping” series and her “Reflections” series. In both, Halkes refers to source photographs in the production of her paintings, and she plays up the accidental effects of the lens-based imagery in them, underscoring the disproportionate time and materiality of their making. These images cannot be disposed of so quickly. Halkes confounds the traditional conception of a painting as a window onto the world by superimposing the perspectival planes of more recent technological developments, multiplying windows to other possible worlds.

The most recent paintings in the exhibition conjure up blurry and abstracted visions of big box stores and chain restaurants at night, the trademarked iconography of their illuminated signs rendered almost illegible. A series of 15 x 30 inch canvasses, the majority dating from 2011, were installed, for the most part, on one wall in a grid of 12 paintings. In one of the paintings, Driver, 2011, Halkes appears to show her hand with regards to how these images were generated. A blurred stream of bright LCD colour found on the other canvasses is framed in this painting by the windows of a car’s interior and reflected in the side-view mirror. These are the freeze-frames of drive-by photo shoots, brought to a standstill for investigation in paint. Automobile autonomy cruises the frictionless space where supply meets demand but can only deliver a view that is partial at best. The abstraction, distortion and distension in the painting Staples, 2011, for example, makes the notion of “easy” immeasurably more complex.

In her curatorial essay, to provide precedents for the work, Lea makes reference to Gerhard Richter’s blur paintings and the halation in Georgia O’Keefe’s night paintings, but it’s my sense that the spirit of Edward Hopper is haunting these images as well. Halkes’s Yellow Windows, 2011, is like Nighthawks at the Diner without the nighthawks. Solitary figures and light as a transcendental motif are shared characteristics. Halkes, however, depicts artificial light sources in her paintings as being otherworldly. In her artist’s website statement she says they show a desire for an impossible transcendence of this sphere, and they often appear to float unmoored from the laws of physics, as in Floating Light Box, 2011. The suggestion of other worlds is again created through the exploitation of a photographic device, the levelling of detail that renders incidental or unwanted elements as accurately or dispassionately as the rest. In this series, scenic views from windows compete with glimpses of interior spaces presumably reflected on the pane of glass separating the inside from the outside. Interiors are registered more forcibly by artificial lights, within which, by a trick of the eye, float in the distance too. Titles from the series describe specific geographic locations, but the refracted, indistinct vistas, overlaid with thumbnail elements of the interior, a shadowy figure or a glowing lamp, exist in a limbo state. In View of the Ottawa River, 2006, the shoreline is covered by a hovering lampshade; in View from Kee’s Place, Rijswijk, 2009, hanging globe lamps dangle above a futuristic city at night, with a dark door in the distance a portal to another dimension. Flatbed impartiality provides Halkes with a licence to paint visions that border on the surreal. A View from a Restaurant on the St. Lawrence, 2008, contains paranormal forms, streaks and hallucinatory, cartoony, gooey clouds. By invoking and deploying technology, her landscapes become extraterrestrial.

Making excellent use of a potentially troublesome aspect, eight paintings from the “Reflections” series were installed back to back in the four large windows that run along the gallery’s storefront, offering a different view looking in and out of each. The works displayed to the street were at first glance perhaps at a disadvantage, given that they were almost completely obscured by the glare of daylight and myriad reflections of the busy commercial strip where the gallery is located. But their installation in this context actually reinforced the content of the paintings, adding another layer. Here the viewer’s own reflection is literally caught in the surface of appearances, and transported to another plane through the looking glass. ❚

“Lights On! Paintings by Petra Halkes” was exhibited at Cube Gallery, Ottawa, from January 2 to January 26, 2014.

Michael Davidge is an Ottawa-based artist, writer and independent curator.