Daniel Laskarin at Deluge
As I looked at the sculpture Packing The Fleece And Trapping Owls I was reminded of a recent experience I had trying to assemble a small paper cut-out monster truck for my son. With the best of intentions I continually failed to make the truck stay together as flap slid out of slit and axle detached from tire. The planes flew off in states of arrested movement and, if I had known that the experience would inform my later visit to Deluge Contemporary Art to see Laskarin’s show Packing The Fleece and Other Things, perhaps my aggravation would have been tempered. Alas, I reached for the tape to satisfy my need to control the situation and to return the angles and planes to their “monster truck-ness”.
Support or framework plays a crucial role in all four works in this show. Utilitarian objects push and pull, twist and reconfigure, and are placed in a delicate balance upon/against/beside supports. It is the starting point for this viewer, and I would guess for the artist as well. Placed opposite from each other, the four works divide into two pairs, and begin an intersecting conversation about form and balance, expectation and surprise.
Holding Still and Love (Soft Pink) have a deceptively simple elegance that echoes their poetic titles. Here we have the support and the supported, two nests of resin sitting atop their posts. Holding Still captures a moment of frayed fragmentation, and sits on a tripod built to chart, document or survey. The beauty of the wood and metal finish of this object is in contrast to the six by six post of Love (Soft Pink). Laskarin has whittled this lumber down (or should I say up?) to a slight taper, with a mottled accuracy that I particularly enjoyed. The surface of the placed resin nest on top plays nicely in the light, and changes as I move around it. These are subdued voices, yet the interchange between the two pieces can still be heard even when they are challenged by the more raucous exchange created by the remaining two works.
I have to admit to a certain relief in the realization that Packing The Fleece And Trapping Owls and Holds One Feed shared the same number of parts (five), more a reflection of my needs as a viewer than a compositional necessity. Nonetheless it allowed me to move back and forth between the two in a game of visual tag, or call and response.
Packing The Fleece.., was named after a farmer’s table (found in an old catalogue) that provided the starting point for the dominant element in the piece, a geometric congregation of white metal planes that manages to elude focus as I move around it in an attempt to bring the image together. I am left with a suggestion of something I think I might know, but can’t put a finger on. This is in contrast to the relatively organic blue flow of the packing quilt that is bound to the support, and that falls to the floor. (The waves of stitching add nicely to this sense of cascading.) All is industrial and carefully placed, even the rope binding the quilt to the support, except for the last undiscovered element, bound and hooded by the quilt, a rough ball of resin/matter. Is it hiding or trapped? Its presence is felt by the form it creates, but it is discovered only when I search for the missing voice that pairs it with Holds One Feed across the room.
The geometry of Holds One Feed, whatever its origin, has become rough and aggressive. The clean line is replaced with prickly orange, rejecting touch but demanding your eye. I also see transparency and reflection in the form of (once again) cascading sheets of acrylic wrapped around the chromed support (car jack) in two layers. Here I see myself in the sculpture, and the play of light and shadow as I move around it and as it moves around itself. A steel ball in a state of decay is cradled beneath all this light. Perhaps my favourite element of this piece is a small black object off to one side, on the floor. Resembling a tiny wedding cake, it is either supporting the whole, or is hanging off of it. On its own it might suggest the monumental, a tower or building, and as such it throws a sense of scale into the mix.
I find myself thinking of this work as similar to a jazz quartet, (in particular to the “Dutch Swing” of Misha Mengleberg or Han Bennick) where each player is given equal time, and often a known or recognizable theme/form is used as a starting point for composition. This is then twisted and warped to the point of disintegration and collapse through the interaction or competition of the players. There is a risk of things falling apart that keeps the players and the listeners on edge and engaged. There is also humour and play that is facilitated by a strategy and structure. By pairing these works Laskarin has empowered his sculptures through a conversation/competition with themselves.
Tyler Hodgins
2 comments:
I once worked in a commercial fiberglass shop where craftsmanship was at its very highest,I know what kind of garbage we left on the floor on a daily basis. Enjoy the weather.
On Craftsmanship
I am trying to decide what on this might mean…I suppose I can only interpret it matter-of-factly, or positively. That is, one of the overwhelming qualities that these sculptures presented to me was a disciplined restraint, the way the supports (tripods, etc.) seemed to be so critical in establishing a relationship with the potential of the materials as workable or frangible. The sense of internal limit each element presented was orchestrated rather scrupulously (nothing wasted) with the question of the works’ purpose (and here the word ‘usefulness’ comes to mind) being at the supposed centre of these forces of construction or giving way.
The question for me was this…Do we observe a larger process that had been stripped away to bare components that become less remote as we spend time with the work? Or do we begin with the proposition of something whole –the aggression of those supports in setting up a sense of contingent agency- only to watch it fall out of cohesion and toward the obscurity of waste? If it’s the latter, I admire the way certain elements (the blanket, the slump of the fibreglass) retain their clarity to the very end…On the other hand, I suspect it’s the attempt to read the rougher elements as constructive potential (‘I know this can be hashed out into something!’) that leads people to get stymied.
Of course, it’s both. Like a view through a lens that shows a bit of astronomy or a bit of a cell, the radial views offered by these pieces show us something that could be drifting farther apart or closing toward a recognizable configuration. What I admire is that the opening to formlessness –the drama of materials- can be offered without being supercilious or grotesque, so that each element is allowed to act with dignity (I have always enjoyed this phrase: ‘without embarrassment’). Some of these preserve their dignity seemingly as raw materiality (the wax chunk hidden in the blanket), others as more fully developed forms (the painted white metal). An argument emerges about raw forms really having a valuable poise, or finished forms being in the end still raw and open to new combinations.
I think that regardless of any biographical content implied by the titling, the real subject matter of the work is craftsmanship. I recall Megan Dickie telling me about the slump of that Plexiglas seeming like a verb in tense, a little moment of the studio experience that has been observed and carefully repeated. There is a moralizing dimension to this presentation…this is an observation I wouldn’t have been able to make if someone had not recently written that Chardin was moralizing, which I interpret –aside from obvious didactic conventions of Vanitas still-life- to be in the sphere of presenting things in a manner that exposes their failings but also preserves them as exemplars.
J.L.
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