He do the Police in Different Voices: A Curatorial Apologia

The following blurb accompanied the exhibition "Sudden Frost" at Elissa Cristall Gallery in Vancouver during July and August of 2010. Footnotes are a drag with this software; so they have not been included. Feel free to question my academic integrity....

I must begin this curatorial statement with a confession: I was not a very committed undergraduate. The common expression that “youth is wasted on the young” did not suitably apply to my example. Consequently, the vast majority of my recollections from the period are more or less confined to a sporadic series of hazy reminiscences. I offer this confession less as a testament to the exuberant rigor of my youthful bohemia than as a means to shed some light on the resonance that T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” has had for me. I clearly remember my first encounter with the poem. Its words, phrasing and imagery rattled through my bones as though I’d struck an ocean liner with a sledgehammer. I didn’t understand all of the nuances and references contained within its 434 lines. I still don’t. But I knew that it was true, and that scattered throughout its sprawling verse there was a dreadful kind of beauty.

First published in 1922 , “The Waste Land” was largely written while Eliot was on medical leave from his position at a London bank. The official diagnosis given for this sabbatical was “nervous breakdown” ; and the poem clearly suggests a certain unraveling on the part of the author. It presents a series of lugubrious glimpses into the varied tension and malaise that confounded the polarized sliver of time between world wars. Its central metaphor, of a barren landscape wracked with drought, was inspired by Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance , an anthropological study of Celtic grail and fertility myths published in 1920. But unlike the myths from which he drew inspiration, Eliot’s tale presents us with no hero. There is no Arthur to drink from his cup, no Fisher King to make the land whole again. In Eliot’s view, there is little chance for redemption.

This exhibition was inspired by a specific passage from Eliot’s poem:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.

The works in this exhibition have been chosen and displayed more by “sensibility” and “feel” than by a more straightforward (or academically defensible?) point. These works are meaningful shards chopped from larger bodies of work. They share a whimsical yet somber lyricism, creating exfoliating panoramas of tangential fragments and divergent histories.

The remainder of this statement will look closely at the specific works in this exhibition. It will discuss these works against the backdrop of these artists’ larger projects and relate them more specifically (if tangentially) to various aspects of Eliot’s poem.

WHAT ARE THE ROOTS THAT CLUTCH
David Merritt is an artist who lives in London, Ontario. He works in a variety of media including drawing and installation, and much of his work lives in the fruitful intersection between these two disciplines. His large-scale drawing included in this show, “Never Again,” is a word-mapping of common statements that incorporate the drawing’s title. There is a sense of fatalistic pathos that invades this statement that is further reinforced and emphasized by Merritt’s fragile material rendering. This is a quiet drawing that is somewhat at odds with the verbal content that it idiosyncratically delineates. Phrases like “Never Fucking Again” are rarely said quietly. But the intimate and whimsical character of Merritt’s hand-written characters along with the sprawling lines that weave them together, give us a sense that these statements are being whispered. We lean in closely to hear it speak, and the reluctant messaging of Merritt’s reticent marks becomes visibly audible.

WHAT BRANCHES GROW
Michel Daigneault is a painter who divides his time between Toronto and Montreal. His colourful paintings hover between abstraction and representation. In so doing, his works draw into question the continued possibility and contemporary malleability of these historical forms. His modestly scaled works in this exhibition continue this dialogue. They present vibrant clusters of semi-abstract forms dangling like mistletoe from the ceiling of an ambiguous and illogical, abstractly architectural ground. These works are a nowhere-limbo of mashed-up, art historical tropes overlapped with recycled design motifs. In so doing, they reveal hidden truths about one of art’s most pressing questions: what would happen if you put a late-seventies deKooning into a blender with an album cover by Roger Dean , a Helen Frankenthaller, an assortment of do-it-yourself-tattoo-designs and a Jules Olitski, then zapped the mixture with gamma rays , and finally air-brushed the results onto a medium-large canvas?

OUT OF THIS STONY RUBBISH
Kevin Rodgers is (mostly) a sculptor who lives (mostly) in London, Ontario. His large scale works present sparsely formal reconfigurations of institutional and corporate furnishings. Using these broken down and discarded emblems of a watered-down-and-sold-out Modernist idealism as his working material, Rodgers cuts up, reworks and mashes together these found objects into new and surprising formal variations. His floor piece on display here, “Qualify and Satisfy” (2009) is a striking example of this process. A sculptural diptych, it’s human-like scale commands the centre of the gallery’s floor like a provisionally constructed sarcophagus. There is an awful sense of vacancy that emanates from this work. One can almost picture the cubicles that these reconstructed fragments previously occupied: empty and dehumanized. How many “man hours” did these sculptures bear witness to? How many micro-particles of time transformed into dollars and cents? In this sense, Rodgers’ sculpture is modestly monumental. It is a monument to the monotony of time passing through human labor. Time is spent. Money is spent. Time equals money.

SON OF MAN, YOU CANNOT SAY, OR GUESS
Nicole Vogelzang is a painter who lives in Toronto. Her hyper-representational works explore, provoke and ultimately thwart a photographic language than has been thoroughly absorbed into the discourse of painting. As such, her works play with the perceptible gaps between photographic and naturalistic and imaginary phenomenon. Her imagery is frequently wrought with an absurdist sense of both horror and whimsy, and her paintings in this exhibition stomp both feet into these metaphorical puddles. In Cup (2007), a clear plastic disposable cup has been filled with water. Eye-like slots have been violently carved from its face. Thick tears pour down from these scarified orifices, pooling at the cup’s base. A yellow plate radiates with an unnatural light from the back end of her wooden table top, like a UFO carrying extraterrestrial Lilliputians hell bent for anarchy. The background space becomes increasingly illogical as it recedes into amorphous ground. A moonlike shape glows there with a treelike silhouette interrupting its spherical demarcation. There is no evidence of a window through which we look out. Rather Vogelzang’s moon hovers uncannily in a dark, implausible limbo. Unknown and unknowable, we surrender our convictions to her seductively rendered uncertainty.

FOR YOU KNOW ONLY A HEAP OF BROKEN IMAGES
Jenn E Norton is a Toronto artist working in video and sculpture . Her piece in this exhibition, Very Good Advice (2009), is a tragic love letter, a conflicted ode to the city of Toronto (as well as a more generalized post-industrial Western experience) rendered in high-definition video. The piece opens with Norton posing daintily in the middle of a traffic-filled city street. Like Lucy draped over Linus’ piano, Norton sings her melancholic lullaby, “Very Good Advice,” appropriated and personalized from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. As the central metaphor that runs through Norton’s sobering-but-psychedelic non-adventure, it loosely connects a series of haunting vignettes filmed during Toronto’s most recent garbage strike. “Very Good Advice” presents the city as a site of internalized trauma, impotence and escapist denial. Everyone knows the destination of the road of good intentions, putting one foot down in front of the other along its junked path.

WHERE THE SUN BEATS, AND THE DEAD TREE GIVES NO SHELTER
Sky Glabush is a painter who lives is London, Ontario. His large-scale paintings provide a startling vision of a crumbling, regionalized pastoral. Marred by tragedy and rife with pathetic fallacy, Glabush’s 60’s architectural suburban dwellings are neglected, overgrown and decayed. “Fence” (2010) is one such piece. In it, a darkened gray-purple haze falls over a joyless Mudville. An eerily under-painted, green light radiates from the twisted branches of the backyard barren trees. The faded yellow split-level hasn’t been repainted in quite some time. Its floral print curtains were replaced by bed-sheets that never open. Mrs. Cleaver died in ’87, and Mr. Cleaver moved into Sunny Ridge Mature Lifestyle Community in ‘88. He cheats at bridge and has grown increasingly incontinent. The Beaver and Wally left town years ago and no longer visit. Para-militaristic squatters converted the garden shed into a hydroponic-grow-op. Ward and June’s handsome cold-war-bomb-shelter was transformed to a meth lab, with racks of non-perishable dry good replaced by post-trailer-gangster artillery.

THE CRICKET NO RELIEF
Will Gorlitz is a painter who lives in Guelph, Ontario. With no offense intended to the rest of our underappreciated national field, Gorlitz might be the best painter living in this country. His post-conceptual approach to representational painting merges a highly sophisticated and visibly self-evident intellectualism with a nearly unparalleled material sensitivity. In this regard, his recent series “Always Already” is no exception. Inspired by an 18th Century allegorical painting by Johann Melchior, Menagerie Landgraf Carls von Hessen-Kassel (1721-28), Gorlitz’s paintings present a vast range of warm-weather animals either deceased or fighting for survival in stark winter settings. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes allegory like this:

the expression by means of symbolic fictional figures and actions of truths or generalizations about human existence.

Animals are one of the more classic vehicles for true allegory. In most historic allegorical tales, animals are used as a device to symbolize various aspects of the human character. The tortoise is slow but determined. The hare is overzealous and lackadaisical. The lion is always courageous. In the “Always Already” series, Gorlitz uses animals in this traditional allegorical manner, as though all of the redemptive features of humanity are likewise deceased or fighting for survival. The steadfast rhinoceros is dead and buried. The graceful zebra is forever preserved in its frosty tomb. “Always Already” creates a profound sense of pathos because it is clearly a winter of our own making. In this sense, Gorlitz’s bleak winter prophecies might stop being allegories. They might actually happen.

AND THE DRY STONE NO SOUND OF WATER
Patrick Mahon is an artist who lives in London, Ontario. Coming from a background in printmaking, Mahon extends this historicized language into the discourse of painting, sculpture, installation and even the occasional video. His works in this exhibition continue his unique material strategy of screen-printing imagery onto clear Plexiglas panels. This process creates an unusual optical effect for the viewer, as the framed works create a soft doubling of the image via the shadow that is cast on the wall behind them. The concrete materiality of Mahon’s drawn image is forever tied to its perpetually shifting, ephemeral twin. His works on display here are taken from his recent series, “Baker Lake House,” in which graphically reductive renditions of portable, modular homes in the extreme Canadian North are thrust into wild and tumultuous grounds. These architectural structures are derived from photographs taken by the artist in Baker Lake, Nunavut in 2007. The background line work is based upon a series of J. M. W. Turner’s landscape engravings. Mahon’s reductively modern and seemingly abandoned housing structures are placed within a European, capital-S-Sublime, capital-R-Romantic, background framing. These works create a harrowing glimpse into a highly marginalized community, filtered through the perceptible lens of an inescapable European exoticism and haunted by the transient shadow that lurks beneath their clean, plastic exterior.

SHANTIH SHANTIH SHANTIH
Although the world has changed exponentially since “The Waste Land” was written, it is easy to draw various parallels to the broader social climate under which it was created. Like the times in which Eliot penned his infamous ode, we too are living in an anxious, polarized climate. There are striking similarities between our seemingly disparate worlds. As a particularly clever poetic genius, Eliot was prone to more than his fair share of moments of incredible lucidity. In Murder in the Cathedral he states:

We do not know very much of the future
Except that from generation to generation
The Same things happen again and again

Like the quotation that inspired this exhibition, the title for this show is likewise borrowed from “The Wasteland”:

"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

"Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?


The artists collected here, working in a wide range of media and within a broad critical spectrum, address the frenzied conditions of our current social-political experience. These works provoke us to reexamine our contexts and to reanalyze our framing. In this sense, they have sprouted and are in full bloom. Digging ardently with sharpened nails, they disturb our bed.