This spring I noticed that the Fifty Fifty Arts Collective had to issue an announcement limiting crowd capacity for performances at its Douglas Street location, that The Ministry of Casual Living is proactively soliciting patronage for its continued survival, and that a significant creative presence in the Brown House collective (Emi Honda and Jordan McKenzie) have left Victoria to settle in Montreal. Finally, at a recent open house for the Vancouver Island School of Art some graduate students and younger instructors were talking very positively about the prospect of staying in Victoria and making it work...somehow.

I suppose this has brought to mind the question about making, exhibiting and selling art in Victoria...especially with regard to artists who have begun participating in local group shows or have had the attention of solo shows, and now wonder about strategies for maintaining a sense of momentum here and presence elsewhere...Putting aside momentarily the mere question of survival, what about the problem of trying to reach an audience past that show at the Lab or Open Space? How do we grow a more sustaining art scene?

J.L.

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

Fault Line Vol.1 #1, Issue 1 spring 2006-03-31

Fault Line is an irregularly- produced forum for free contemporary criticism and commentary. The purpose of Fault Line is to encourage interest, argument and pleasure, and comments and complaints are welcome. [Please Note: As this is the first issue of Fault Line, the editors regret that it has been delayed so that the work discussed is no longer on view. For more information on the work described, please contact Deluge Gallery at antimatter@shaw.ca]

Sandra Meigs at Deluge.

This show has been written about in three separate venues (nothing short of a miracle in Victoria), yet little of the critical attention seems to have been focussed on what goes on inside the paintings, how they work. Despite the fact the ‘expressionistic’ (read awkward, grotesque, silly or morose) aspects of Meigs’ subject matter –as well as the artists’ biography- tend to attract attention, there are formal elements to the work that should be talked about. In part because they lead to a fuller understanding of the conventions of expressionistic painting in general, and in part because throughout this installation (of older work that the artist has revisited), there are examples of a thoroughly controlled use of colour, texture and especially space.

There is an old art-historical distinction between ‘optical’ (the view at a distance, as in painting) and ‘tactile’ (touchable, as in sculpture)…in modern times, painters (such as Rothko or Newman) have requested a tactile distance of the viewer -within the ‘personal space of arm’s length- and used the vibration of saturated colour to mark the subtle switch from regarding to touching that takes place as we move closer. Meigs’ work at a distance fulfills the role of a narrative series, as related to their connection to song lyrics. Up close is where they are properly experienced as individual events, about working distance (eighteen inches), so that the supports turn from rectangles to open spaces, the frames dissolve and the colours begin to soften and merge with reflected light.

Colour, space and line (including the texture of the paint body) can’t be separated here. In one piece, for example, a simplified torso appears, as a red field of colour, inside of which is a knotted lump of paint, illegible as chewing gum. The knot is a visual problem, one gets hung up on its texture, while the red field, momentarily ignored- begins to swell and contract. This is a way of creating friction – smooth versus striated space- the smooth space allowing the eye to hover and the striated form attractive but also agitating, granular, like sand in an oyster.

Van Gogh is an accessible example to look at for contrasting the frisson of texture with the radiant effects of embedded, intense colour. A closer reference might be Chaim Soutine, once declared a supremely ‘oral’ painter by Robert Hughes -a description that also fits here- for the curiously cramped-yet-heaving compositions of his paintings of the village of Ceret…A horizon that becomes a figure or vice versa, a drooped, lumpy line that suggests presence by implying mass, like a saddle or a uterus. In terms of the tight fit of a figural image to its immediate space, I’d compare them to the impasto work (such as the ‘hostages’) by Informel painter Jean Fautrier, the way in which the image is not (yet?) clear but hovers in the space where we expect the readable image ought to be. Look for this same occlusion in the abstract pictures of Philip Guston. Meigs uses this device with great control in the Mary paintings: there is a great instinct for scale as it relates to a sense of physical closeness with the viewer, and her colours and forms are deliberate-looking but also atmospheric.

Are the painted frames too intrusive? They look too strict in Deluge’s bright southern light at midday, defaulting to a hard graphic black (only close up, the colour swims a bit and the frames do what they should)…this is not necessarily a problem at other times of day, however. The frame of each piece creates a long (‘landscape’- oriented) picture on the left and a vertical (‘portrait’). The device could look a little contrived at a distance, but is very effective close in at competing for the viewer’s attention by offering two interfaces which, in terms of the usual sympathetic visual scan (the search for a figure to identify with in the picture) are unsatisfactory. The landscape images seem to be scenes in which a tiny figure may be just visible or churned into some mastication of strokes (too far), and the portrait segment gives us something of a face – a chunky silhouette, rope for hair, three orifices- that is more a smudge (too close).

Wendy Welch (writing in Monday Magazine) has suggested that the open expanses of colour in some of Meigs’ compositions recall Minimalist colour field painting. It seems an odd connection at first, except that looking back to seminal statements from that era (like an interview with Frank Stella and Donald Judd from the ‘60’s) one sees that so much of what defined that period was the sense of immediacy that was meant to break with European ‘composing’…The famous insistence on a presentation of ‘wholes’, rather than a representation incorporating parts. This meant no metered introduction into the space, no contrapuntal balancing of hard and soft elements, no narrative tension in the splice between figure and ground. The works demand the space around them and become figures themselves. As such, classic Minimal presentations (such as Stella’s Black Paintings) have a tendency to stare –there is no other word for it –which is to say, direct their mass toward the viewer in a way that can’t be deflected. Meigs has used devices in other work (paintings lined with reflective Mylar, compositions with light bulbs, title placards) that cast her work into the space around it, and her paintings stare as well.

What kind of stare? There is a delay from the recognition of these forms to the sense of their becoming fluent; they are clear but obtuse. This gap belongs to all kinds of indicators of ‘expressionist’ or emotive painting that came after Pop art, as potentially not (or not only) a way of depicting feeling, but its quotation. The nature of Meigs’ characters has often underscored this problem, as figures that don’t amount to identities: ‘resin heads’, ‘orifaces’, ‘Canadians’, and most compellingly, ‘dummies’. The figures are exactly that: projections, quotations, questions, or formulations, like De Chirico’s composite mannequins, tailors’ dummies and statue-shadows, or Guston’s Klansmen…A way to get the figure into the picture and yet not. A blank stare as no feeling is forthcoming. Although these comparisons have already risked being too varied and distracting, one important one is Munch’s foetal nerve-bundle from The Scream. The figure is not a person but an anecdote (“then I heard the scream”), a pictogram for a non-visual phenomenon. Not a reflection of the viewer or a summation of the artist, but a sign stuck between our space and the space of looking, pressed up against the former by the baldness of its facture and appended to the latter by the most passive of painterly drags.

J.L.