Featuring work by John Armstrong,
Karma Clarke-Davis, Jason Dunda, Dave Dyment, Katharine Harvey, Alexander
Irving, Mara Korkola, Stacey Lancaster, Dionne McAffee, Wendy Morgan, Jan
Noestheden, Daniel Olson and Kate Wilson, Curated by Gordon Hatt
“Let's Get
Lost” is about escapism (It's summer!), but more specifically, it's about the
compulsive desire to take flight from reality, to seek temporary oases in
artificial worlds, fantasy, hallucination, heightened experience, travel, exoticism,
romance, sensory deprivation and intoxication. The theme of this exhibition has
been influenced in part by Chet Baker's music – his bittersweet song and the
movie of the same name.
But the
exhibition has also been influenced by many artists, both contemporary and
historical, for whom the experience of art may be founded in a desire to
describe ecstatic moments – moments of heightened experience and awareness –
moments that hint at the existence of absolute transcendent freedom. This
freedom may be charted either as an inwardly directed journey – a construction
entirely of the mind, or of outward journey – into the world as an explorer,
adventurer or tourist.
So the 18th
century English artist William Blake, in defense of his unique cosmology, remarked
that he had to "create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's,"
and defined the image of the isolated genius, at war with the banality and
mediocrity of the world around him. Another English artist, J.M.W. Turner, in
his quest to describe the sublimity of God in nature, created immersive
turbulent seascape paintings that appear today as a type of proto-abstraction. Turner’s
paintings engaged the spirit and fantasy of being on top of the world, of being
in the centre of an earth-shaking drama, as much as any contemporary Hollywood
action-adventure.
Hollywood is,
of course, the contemporary paradigm for escape. Popular art in North America
is considered to be a deliverance from life, from hard work, from stress, and
from obligation. Hollywood culture doesn't like to dwell on unhappy endings and
complicated narratives without clearly defined good guys and bad guys. When we
escape in North America, (and increasingly in the rest of the world) we like to
see that in the end, true love conquers all obstacles, that virtuous people
eventually succeed, and that the greedy, the overweight, the unattractive, and
the addicted (see Jurassic Park) are eaten by large prehistoric creatures. The
wish fulfillment agenda of Hollywood production has created the problem of
television addiction – people who are enervated by the fast food aesthetics of
television and are unable to stop surfing with the remote control or turn the
television off. For those so afflicted, Dave Dyment has created an image which
is the equivalent of a modern "Home Sweet Home" homily: "I like
to watch things on television."
Artists in
“Let's Get Lost” engage the idea of escape as both a native desire and as a
representative social value. John Armstrong’s “Smoking” paintings, for example,
quote 1960's vintage cigarette advertisements and their stylized images of the
“good life:” glamour, sex and luxury. Viewed through Armstrong’s painterly
eyes, we are reminded of how advertising has used iconic themes of art –
Watteau’s idyllic fêtes champetres , or Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe for example –
to lend an aura of Edenic pleasure to addictive products.
Pleasure
seeking and intoxication have a long and intimate history and contemporary
advertising continues to promote that connection. Advertisements representing
amiable house parties or camping trips with attractive people, once almost the
exclusive province of beer and wine commercials, have in Canada metamorphosed
into the representation of high energy bacchanals in commercials for spirits and
“coolers.” Interestingly, while the advertising of spirits is still prohibited
on television in the United States, advertisements of mood enhancing
prescription drugs, featuring apparently happy, drugged families, now fill the
airwaves in that country: Ask your doctor today.
Artists
Alexander Irving and Daniel Olson engage the reality and the myth of
intoxication. Irving contrasts the light-hearted conviviality of a drinking
society with alcohol’s parallel reality of alienation, isolation and loss. In
his piece, The Lost Weekend , named after
the Billy Wilder movie starring Ray Milland and Jayne Wyman, Irving presents us
with a faux artifact of the closet alcoholic’s
deception – the mickey hidden in a cut-out book. Daniel Olson, on the other
hand has decided to document the process of intoxication, video taping himself
smoking marijuana, describing an activity that while mundane, is illegal in
this country and normally discreetly hidden. Olson’s video neither glamorizes
the act, like a music video or album cover art, nor does it moralize and warn
us away. Intoxication, this video suggests, is a fact of the human condition
and a characteristic unique to our species.
But escapism is
far more than self-medication. As children we are enchanted by the surreal and
mechanical world of the annual fall fairs and the CNE midway. Everything about
it – from the colours to the noise, to the toxic candy floss grates on the
sensibilities of the adult, but promises only relief from obligation, boredom
and predictability in the world of children, who have not yet accepted life as
a sober pastime. Wendy Morgan's distorted fairground photographs verge on the
shapeless, yet they communicate a visual equivalency to this youthful
intoxication and the elevated sense of being in the world that the fairground
can give. Similarly, Kate Wilson draws inspiration from country fairs, car
culture, and small town speedways. Her fairground escapism is a little bit more
adult than Morgan's. Her paintings and drawings communicate dilapidation, and a
kind of desperate thrill seeking that recalls a James Dean aesthetic of
"live fast and die young." The intoxication that fast cars and
familiar midway haunts provide is very often a temporary escape from narrowly
defined opportunities and small town horizons.
Mara Korkola's No Place paintings also have their sources in the
desperation of the highway. Her twilight images of automobile headlights on
two-lane highways are an earthly limbo, neither here nor there, neither day or
night. Raised on the mobility provided by the automobile, North Americans are a
restless people for whom the keys to the car and a tank full of gas are often
sufficient promise of escape.
Karma
Clarke-Davis's personally expressive work operates ironically and in reference
to the popular genre of music videos. We are simultaneously entertained by her
inventions and transfixed by her personal narrative. The enacted passion in
this case, however, is not the typical glamour posturing of popular youth
culture, rather, it is a complex acknowledgment of simultaneously seeing and
being seen, of being in the middle of your life's own music video. Similarly,
Dionne McAffee's video work, Trance , acknowledges
this escapist project as a conflict between desire and self consciousness. One
has the potential to escape from everywhere and everything, except the self.
Katharine
Harvey's paintings have consisted of parallel interests in sailing and the
store windows of urban life. In the past she has painted sailboats on thick accumulations
of acrylic gel medium that takes the water from the marine genre and gives it a
wholly new and unexpected dimension. In her store window paintings she has focused
on the interplay between inexpensive knick-knacks and reflections in the plate
glass windows – creating a dialogue between the minor moments of exotic
transport (symbolized by the knick-knacks) and the illusions and distortions of
the reflections in the plate glass. Her current paintings in "Let's Get
Lost" combine the elements of her marine paintings and her store window
work. Working from photographs taken under water, Harvey paints the image of
toy boats floating on the surface. The resulting images are both disorienting
and comforting, a small reminder perhaps of an infantile desire to return to
our original amniotic fluid.
Water, of
course, has deep associations with the origins of life, and Stacey Lancaster's
video, The Bay Model , continues in
this symbolic tradition. The dream-like sequences of a woman diving for her
submerged clothes lost in the bay are evocative of separation and the desire
for reconnection. Escape in this video is an escape from alienation, from adult
knowledge and from the physical and psychological dissociation that separates
us from our past and our present.
Jan Noestheden
is inspired by clip art, those hieroglyphs of efficiency, service, quality and
optimism that in less sophisticated times illustrated the yellow pages,
stationary and business cards of commerce. Taken out of context his vinyl images
seem giddy and ridiculous – over-the-top behaviour typical of the manic-depressive
on a roll. Noestheden’s art is an escape from sober-minded adult behaviour, and
an ironic embrace of sophomoric and lowbrow taste. Jason Dunda is similarly
inspired by the graphic art of adolescence, in his case that of comic books,
and the ease with which magic is created with an economy of line and colour. Having
been at one time addicted to comic books myself, I can attest to their
intoxicating effect, and Dunda's paintings bring me back to that magic.
We crave
escapes, in all forms, and the art of escape is an aesthetic we may crave for
its own sake. We may read escapist literature or enjoy fantasy movies and art
for the simple pleasures of the textures, colours and forms. Art is
intoxicating. It get's us through the day.
Just take it
easy though. Not too much.
Gordon Hatt
2002
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