Theresa Sapergia

Theresa Sapergia paints animals like nobody’s business and makes no secret of the fact that her relationship to the animal kingdom is somehow sacrosanct. She transformed the main floor of the Parisian Laundry space into an imaginary post-apocalyptic Canada with radiant and unforeseen results. A titanic moose drawn directly on one wall seemed to be frozen waiting in the open, as though alert to a warning scent. Adjacent to it, wolves moved warily in the foreground of a huge diptych that also depicts a brace of human skulls still burning in the afterglow of arc light. We sense transgression, extremity and rumours of the afterlife. Humans are extinct here. The animals, more resilient than we are, remain and take back their original domain.

Sapergia sacralizes the animal, not the posthuman, in a moving and even transcendent way. She draws and paints animals with aching verisimilitude and care. We feel the pulse quicken within them; we read fear, curiosity and aggression in their eyes, their demeanours and movements. These are the animals we once knew in childhood, in the deep forest when, refusing to pull that shotgun trigger, we allowed that noble, nimble deer to escape the crosshairs and bound away, back into its habitat, unscathed.

In a superb recent book, The World Without Us, journalist Alan Weisman asked: what if all humans disappeared en masse and at once from the planet? He arrives at some surprising and not-so-surprising conclusions. For instance, he has no doubt that the wily coyote will survive long after the cows have all returned to dust. Sapergia’s painting experiment segues to Weisman’s thought experiment with amazing congruency. The “if-then conditional” that is also the point of fulcrum at the heart of her work is at once restorative and warning; here is a curiously liberating and uplifting requiem.

It should be stated baldly that the animals Sapergia draws represents her own way of seizing them, without draining them of life force, well short of eviscerating them or leaving them a taxidermist’s stuffed dummy for a wall or a diorama. She possesses them and makes them her own, unlike her fellow traveller in painting, Marc Séguin, who personally kills the wolves, coyotes and crows that populate his harrowing boneyards. Theresa Sapergia is less intent on letting real blood. Still, the extraordinary naturalistic cast and tenor of her art remind us that she has an eye to ownership, imaginal ownership maybe, but ownership nonetheless. Still, she is no craven trophy hunter. She is also not Ken Danby. There is nothing sentimental, overwrought or metaphorically overreaching here.

Rather, Sapergia shares a gifted eye and hand with those armourers of Japan after the Samurai fell silent, when they used their skills to create the most remarkable creatures out of the materials they had once used for making armour. After the Meiji restoration in 1868, the blacksmiths who had fashioned the metal helmets and such for the warrior class put their preternatural talents to work creating amazingly lifelike insects, dragons, fish and reptiles out of iron plate. The hands and tongs that once made the full metal jackets for generations of warriors now fashioned feathers, scales, plumes and wings for fully articulated creatures that so resemble the real that they are still often mistaken for it.

Walking alongside the works exhibited at Parisian Laundry reminded me of a group of those objects I had once seen at the British Museum: dragon, crab, crayfish, carp. Like Jizai Okimono, but on a vastly magnified scale, Sapergia’s feral creatures seem to be so realistically shaped and alive that their bodies and limbs are seemingly articulated and poised like real animals in real space.

A willing conduit, a wilful conjurer, Sapergia is not essaying some wayward End of Days saga here, but rather a moving meditation on what our disappearance as a species might entail, and she does not paint or draw her bestiary in black and white, even if graphite and white paper are her chosen medium most of the time. Those burning skulls in the diorama are more than a depth marker of human finitude. They are meant as a truly communal memento mori at the end of human history.

Sapergia seems to be suggesting what Weisman states so eloquently at the end of his book: that we humans have many species to thank for our own survival. The world without us would certainly endure, even flourish. And yet we are still here, observing her drawings and paintings and making them our own. We recognize their plethora of skulls as a timely reminder of vanitas, as she performs a lovely Las Meninas-like painterly pirouette between actual and possible worlds. ❚

“Canada Day” was exhibited at Parisian Laundry, Montréal from January 9 to February 14, 2009.

James D Campbell is a writer and curator in Montréal who contributes regularly to Border Crossings.