The Grand Western Canadian Screen Shop Retrospective

The large print by Gordon Lebredt, Natural Facts (Scan) (1977), which confronted the viewer on entering the Grand Western Canadian Screen Shop Retrospective at the Ukrainian Cultural Centre last September typified the most striking aspect of the contemporary screen print as an art form. Many print makers in this medium are conceptual and documentary in their subject matter. Natural Facts (Scan), a bit self-consciously as the title suggests, consists of a small coloured photo in the lower left hand corner and two enlargements, the second really large. They present us with a kind of psychedelic underwater reality. It is perhaps too obviously a retouched photo, blatant, and without apology. What else is there? these artists might ask. The sentimentality of fact imbued with the inescapable narcissism of photography, conveys the irony of the artist with nothing new to say. Mind you, it’s a good photograph, but the odd thing is how its documentary character suggests reminiscence.

A not-quite-definable hint of reminiscence haunts the show as a whole and not simply in the fact of its retrospective character. As such it is an excellent and revealing survey of a dedication to craft over the last fifteen years. It is surprising how many of these prints romanticize childhood, rural life and the past—surprising in contrast to the highly technological nature of the medium. Even the name “Grand Old Western Canadian Screen Shop” suggests the good old days. One almost expects ‘Shop’ to come out as ‘Shoppe.’ Merrye Olde Westerne Canaday.

The most obvious form of this is in the pieces like Randy Gledhill’s circus images. These are decidedly ‘quaint’. Even his View of the Pyramids is a treated blow-up of a post card, the reminiscence par excellence. It’s a nice print, but flaunts a somewhat studied quirkiness.

Also David Thauberger’s horses and rabbits, as well as Portfolio 1978, portraying a farmhouse on the prairie, all striking and exuberant images, suggest with a tinge of sentiment the long-gone past, the purity and innocence of childhood and the good old days in the west. The same artist’s Tarzan Print, so different in character, audaciously abstract, evokes the exoticism of old movie and comic strips. Glen Lewis’s Survival Paradise presents a lush example of nostalgia for the idyllic rustic, not, perhaps, without a touch of irony, but ever so gently.

Maybe the point of all this is precisely the juxtaposition of homely and easily-recognizable subject matter with the sophistication of advanced technique. The medium has a great deal to do with the message. There is the irony of antithesis, the fusion of antithetical worlds and maybe there is less sentimentality. Maybe the real statement is a kind of ‘in’ joke.

Richard Hrabec in his large Untitled (1972) presents the opposing fantasies of contemporary life: the comic strip and space exploration, with suitable adjuncts centred by the Whore of Babylon (I assume). The implied criticism, or simple irony, again suggests the corruption of innocence.

At the other extreme is the large machine-like print Ikoy by Winston Leathers, a purely formalist statement, cold and aloof. A smaller print by this artist, Forest Encounter is a sheer delight of pure congeniality, one of the few prints in the exhibition that is free of the self-consciousness so often imposed by this technique. And yet the work is unmistakably a screen print and does not deny its origins.

Bill Lobchuk’s recent prints also escape the overstrained self-consciousness of the screen process at the same time that they exploit brazenly photographic processes. Sometimes as in Moo One, he does get a little cute, but his exceptional print of sunflowers from the Screen Shop’s 1983 Portfolio and The Yellow Road (1980) are standouts as both craft and artistry. They let the process speak without inhibition.

In a different vein but with an equally distinctive balance, the prints of Lobchuk’s coworker at the shop, Chris Finn, impress with images of great power and finesse. His Miasma (1981) a striking image of a caged tiger is imposing because of its texture and through its formalist elements, while Allies (1981) is one of the more moving pieces in the show.

At the opposite pole again from the strong image and the reminiscence are Tony Tascona’s almost painfully elegant abstractions and the stridently imagist productions of Joe Fafard. The latter are impressive in their painstaking technique and visionary quality. Even so, they are too rich for my taste.

Judy Allsopp’s prints are a high point of the show. They are joyous in a way that is quietly reflective. This artist conveys a rare quality that combines innocence and refinement. Her work has a purity that is unself-conscious and shines through whatever medium she happens to be using.

My initial impression of an aura of reminiscence hanging over this show does not, on reflection really get to the heart of the matter. Screen printing inevitably reflects what an artist has on his mind because more than the other print media, it lends itself to image rather than to textural or formalist subtleties. The line is not the immediate vehicle of physical gesture (indeed line, as such, does not even exist in a screen print) and the planes are more subdivisions than planes. This is the medium’s strength and weakness. Like all disadvantages in art, it can be turned to account. But the temptation is to indulge in an intellectual exercise and the inevitable intervention of the printer in the execution of the work by the print neophyte, however skilled as an artist the latter may be, must introduce a hiatus.

Perhaps I should say that effects which avoid appearing mechanical come of long practice and only to the skilled practitioner. This happens with the work of Lobchuk, Leathers, Thauberger, Finn and one or two others. One can see the process emerging in this way quite clearly in the development of Lobchuk, with whose work I happen to be fairly familiar. I can’t help seeing in prints by Kelly Clark and Ivan Eyre, (and these are fine prints indeed), primarily an interesting variation of their artistry and not of the medium of printmaking. And many of the other prints come in between. This is no reflection on the Screen Shop itself, which has admirably enabled artists to achieve a type of expression, both marketable and educative, that would not otherwise have been available to them. But it also explains the hodge-podge effect that this large exhibition produces.

The finest work tends to get obliterated by a bulk of mediocrity. Yet a show such as this cannot be exclusive. All the inclusions have something to say. The aim is to give an overview of a remarkable enterprise: the artistry might vary but the craft and expertise are always manifestly there. ♦

Arthur Adamson, a Winnipeg poet and artist, is the visual arts editor of Arts Manitoba.