Lisa Neighbour: Eye on the Square

I want them to be like sparks of light in the darkness that will fade out ... I don’t want

them to be works of art.

Toronto artist Lisa Neighbour’s Eye on the Square is the Library & Gallery’s public art installation for 1994-95. Mounted on the library’s Queen Square entrance and measuring 16 feet by 8 feet of 3/4 inch plywood, it is shaped and painted to resemble an eye and dotted with three hundred half-inch coloured Christmas lights. The highly stylized eye is described by a dark blue retina, within which is a stencil pattern of grey-blue scrolled acanthus leaves dotted with blue lights. The iris is a pastel orange at the edge of the iris, becoming yellow as it radiates outward, and punctuated by a ring of red lights. The eye white is sky blue, becoming a darker blue at the edges, with a stencil pattern of linden boughs highlighted by white lights. The eyelid is contrasting green with red and grey-blue scrolled acanthus leaves fused beneath green lights.

In the Eye on the Square, Neighbour has adopted festival lighting for the purposes of a work of public sculpture. In so doing she has linked her public art to the tradition of public exhibitions of seasonal decoration and celebration found on every block of every town and city on this continent. Making art with coloured lights allows Neighbour to side step the traditional artist/public relationship. We all participate in an act of public art when we put up the Christmas lights. We have seen the artist, and it’s the next door neighbour.

Perhaps that’s a bit too Pollyanna. It’s more than the eye of Rudolph gazing at us like so much familiar seasonal decoration: It’s enigmatic and detached – it arrests us. It’s even somewhat mysterious. But it’s not some giant fetish object either. It’s probably not going to protect the library and it’s patrons from hexes, curses, book burners and other malicious spirits. Broadly speaking, (not to exclude other fascinating interpretations of the eye as a symbol) the eye represents seeing and being seen, which is, not coincidentally, also the point of public art.

If the public art work is to be more than, to use Tom Wolfe’s words, "a turd left behind by the architecture", it must address a general public. This is not to say that the desired effect of the art work is any different. The artist similarly evokes a number of the basic tensions of the fictional narrative: familiarity and mystery, discovery and loss, comfort and anxiety, joy and despair. Only the rhetoric has changed slightly. The contours of the image are sharper. The stylistic references and sources are less obscure. The volume is turned way up so that everybody can hear it.

Public art mingles with the larger community. The public artist chooses a site for its visibility and for the opportunity to "chat with the neighbours". At its best, public art beckons the unwary pedestrian and adds a new perspective to the surrounding environment; an artist’s perspective. With the installation of a public art work the artist says to the passerby, “You see me, seeing you.”

I was watching a construction crew setting up lights on the church at Adelaide and Bathurst streets for a Portuguese festival. To me it was like a religious experience. I felt a transcendence over the reality of the moment. It was somebody’s expression of religious belief that was happy and real. I wanted to reproduce that feeling.

Lisa Neighbour has been actively exhibiting her work since 1983. Well known for her printmaking (she is a technician and instructor in the print studio at the Ontario College of Art), she has in recent years become known for her electrified and illuminated sculpture and paintings. She first exhibited her light sculptures in an exhibition of her prints at Open Studio in 1989. In 1992 she exhibited electrically illuminated sculpture in a collaborative piece with Carlo Cesta and Fast Worms entitled Artes Moriendi at the Toronto Sculpture Garden. Her solo exhibition, In The Dark, at the Red Head Gallery in 1993, established the scope of her engagement with light sculpture. Using commercial Christmas lights like another palette colour, Neighbour combined the festive reference of the coloured lights with a mystic and enigmatic imagery inspired by methods of divination.

The light sculptures are quite different from what I did before – they go a lot deeper than other stuff I was working on. I was doing it like a form of therapy. This is how I keep myself engaged with this world and involved in being on this planet: I make art.

The exhibition In The Dark focused on divination; the esoteric methods of acquiring prophetic knowledge. Fourteen light sculptures represented sources of divination. Included in the exhibition was a piece entitled Oculmancy. Shaped and painted to resemble an eye and illuminated by 66 coloured lights, it is the “scale model” precursor to the Eye on the Square, measuring approximately 1/5th the size or about 3 feet in length. In Oculmancy, Neighbour has carved into the wood surface to create primitivistic, zigzag patterns and roughhewn effects. The exhibition information defines oculmancy as “the examination of a person’s eyes to determine their future.”

In The Dark took place literally in the dark – an inverted context – a darkened gallery illuminated only by the coloured lights of the sculptures. Neighbour created an uncanny atmosphere where contours may verge on invisibility and images at times seemed to pop into three dimensional relief. A lasting impression of In The Dark was that of a space reserved for secret rituals and unknown ceremonies. The Eye on the Square is a continuation of the In The Dark exhibition – a distillation of the theme of divination into the symbolically abstracted and visionary oculus. However, in creating the Eye on the Square for the exterior wall of the Library & Gallery, the surrounding exterior space has altered the sense of the art work. No longer interior visions, the coloured lights are festive and celebratory in the dusk and darkness of the city. The artist has returned to the site of the original folk art roots influence of Portuguese and Mexican festival lighting.

Are we oculmantic? Do we try to divine the future in one another’s eyes? We love eyes. Or rather, we are very attracted to them. There is something in the experience of making eye contact with another person, when someone else sees you seeing them, that seems to define what it is to be human. The human eye – the conscious, thinking, seeing human eye – represents our passage in the world. It is our witness, our fear, our suffering, our happiness our accomplishment. The eye represents the promise that every individual has a story to tell – a vision, and that every person is the artist of their own life. The eye is a metaphor of light, of consciousness out of unconsciousness, awakening from sleep, of ignorance becoming knowledge. For Lisa Neighbour the eye represents a state of harmony with the world – a benevolent vision, that is a guardian and protector and humorous appendage to a public building.

I’m pretty superstitious. The eye is a symbolic protection against the evil eye: You draw an eye over the door of your house then you are deflecting evil away from where you are . . . It’s not just the sight of it – I guess (it is also) the feeling that there is something else watching over you and that objects have a life of their own. The world is not just a blank that we are walking around in but it has its own presence that responds to you. That benevolent vision is an element of this.

Neighbour’s frequent trips to Mexico, where her mother lives, have given her a knowledge of that country’s culture and have influenced both her art work and her attitude towards religious ideas. While in art school she reacted against many of the art doctrines that were taught her and cast about trying to find out what, for her, were legitimate reasons for making art. She sought an escape from concerns and models of behaviour and thinking that didn’t seem to fit. Folk art was a source of much of the essential spirit of art that she admired.

I remembered as a young kid making art for the sheer pleasure of seeing things become real at the end of my fingertips. The light sculptures were a reaction to the whole art world as I was beginning to understand it . . . 

The unveiling of a public art work involves a degree of personal exposure and risk for an artist that is a magnification of the experience of a gallery exhibition. For Lisa Neighbour, the Eye on the Square is an expression of joy and comfort and mystery. It is a very public display of a very individual and personal vision.

Eye on the Square by Lisa Neighbour

October 1994 – August 1995

The Library & Gallery, Cambridge, Ont.

Gordon Hatt, 1994

Thomas Burrows: Hematomas, Blanket Statements and Drawn Objects

Thomas Burrows, Blanket Statement No.10, polymer resin, 3 panels, 48"x 48" each, 1994. A hematoma is associated with trials and tribulations. It has a colour, blue, most often associated with bruising, the colour of the "school of hard knocks." Blue also, not coincidentally, lends its name to the "Blues," the musical genre of despair and misfortune. The "bruises" are metaphors, sonoric laments, wistful and ironic ballads of experience. "Bruises for Corporate Walls" Burrows calls his recent work, to recall the commodity character of art and to draw attention to the brutal nature of contemporary corporate culture. His "bruises" are artifacts of a psychic reality in the time of rampant, unrestrained global mercantilism. Tom Burrows first worked with polyester resin in the late 1960s – a time in the visual arts of great experimentation with the products of postwar technological research.1 He was interested in the medium as a vehicle for colour – ideal for binding dyes and pigments because of its extreme clarity and colourlessness. He returned to working with pigmented polyester resin at the end of the 1980s. In retrospect, his twenty-year absence from this medium which holds so much attraction to him, may be seen as a search for a political context in which it would be possible to make art. Born in 1940, Tom Burrows grew up in Galt, Ontario, Canada, an industrial town approximately 100 km. west of Toronto, now part of the amalgamated city of Cambridge. After finishing high school, he left for Canada's west coast to study medicine at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, then left university to work and travel the world, to eventually return to the University of British Columbia in 1964, as a student of art history. Back in Vancouver, Burrows wasted little time in his developing art career, quickly setting up a studio and producing sculpture on his own. Remarkably, after only a year of art school his work was exhibited, in 1965, at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Two years later he was included in Sculpture '67, organized by the National Gallery of Canada. In that year he received a grant from the Canada Council and travelled to England to do graduate studies in sculpture at the St. Martin's College of Art. His work at this time demonstrated his close identification with Minimalism, and was characterized by large scale, geometric forms in industrial and non-traditional art media. It was at St. Matin's in 1967 that he began his use of polyester resin. At St. Martin's he had been drawn to a radical critique of the western culture he had come to study.2 His proximity to the radical politics of the European student movement during and after May 1968 introduced him to active, counter-cultural resistance. On his return to British Columbia in 1969, Burrows made his home in a squatter's community on the Maplewood mud flats in North Vancouver, a focus for counter-cultural developments in Vancouver at the time. For Burrows, the mud flats were the place to act on specific political and ideological positions. He became interested in the indigenous culture of British Columbia and squatting as a counter-cultural alternative to the capitalist commodification of modern life. The legal battles in defense of the community and the subsequent razing of the homes in 1971 had a profound influence on Burrows. He worked for the United Nations as Co-ordinator of Information on Non-Tenured Architecture at the UN Habitat Forum in Vancouver (1976) and documented subjects in a seven-month tour of non-tenured housing in Europe, Egypt, India and Southeast Asia in 1977. Case studies of squatting communities around the world were later incorporated into his sculptural and photographic production and were exhibited in a number of venues under the title Squat Doc. Much of his work through 1970s and 1980s was influenced by this experience. Burrow's Minimalist sculpture of the 1960s and his political activities of the 1970s represent apparently diverse and unrelated activities. However, far from repudiating his sculptural work, Burrows initiated a pattern of point and counterpoint within the broader scope of his artistic production that has continued to the present. He never renounced the Minimalist aesthetic of his beginnings, only its canonical authority. He remained faithful to the aesthetic while seeking to humanize it by undermining its character as a commodity. Land art, assemblage, installation pieces and video from this time continue to show his interest in geometric form. Performances, photo documentation and conceptual work by the artist in the '70s, may be seen as doubt actualized – the "but, but, but . . . " gnawing away not only at the solid forms of his work, but also at the authority of existing social and political forms. His work during this time represented feminizing actions – fragile and transient essays that were an opening up to his environment instead of the traditional sculptural imposition upon it. It has been observed that Burrow's "optimistic" work of the 1970s turned bleak in the 1980s.3 In these darkly humorous and compelling works Burrows courted the extremes, with references to madness, marginality, and masochism. They can be alternately amusing and confrontational, cloyingly obvious and frustratingly obscure. The work incorporates some of the images from the Squat Doc work as well introducing some powerful new icons: the lead life saver of the Story of Oh (1983), the man-sheep of Ewe Guise (1985-86) and the steel re-bar contour heart of Organ Transplant (1987). Aspects of the work have been interpreted to reflect upon the social role of the artist and the conditions of capitalism in the world during the go-go years of the 1980s.4   Story of Oh (1983) Ewe Guise (1985-86) Organ Transplant (1987) Burrows is less categorical about his motivations. He cites a complex interplay of political, social and art developments behind that body of work. Perhaps, it was a personal desire to return to the making of objects in reaction to his earlier photo-based and conceptually oriented work. Certainly, the rightward shift in political culture caused a crisis of conscience in Burrows. He refers to his work of this time as an expression of "white rage."5 Angered by what he saw as a right wing political backlash and a renewed interest in the art community in art as a commodity, his response was to pile his work with references "so thick and so deep that it might short circuit and become nothing, like white noise."6 He deliberately made objects that were aggressive and unsaleable. It was an expurgation, and in the end probably too much to sustain – too much rage, maybe too much art. Like Matisse's proverbial armchair, Burrows felt himself compelled to make objects that were simply "pleasant things to be around."7 With the end of the decade and the expectations and protests that went with it, he felt he could fall back to living with things that were commodities again. He had come to terms with the dislocations that took place during the '80s, even referring to the work from that time as "an aberration." Returning to a medium he hadn't used in 15 years, Burrows also returned to some earlier imagery – imagery related to the Suprematist influenced Mud Flats work and the Minimalist objects of the late '60s and '70s. In the Drawn Objects series, he was drawn again to floating, geometric shapes and his enduring attraction with the forms and ideals of Suprematism. Polyester resin, in its raw state, is an unpleasant, noxious substance. It is a medium that requires the artist to work with an air filtering mask in a strictly controlled environment. It does not harden by drying nor dilute in common solvents. It congeals magically when introduced to its catalyst. With polyester resin, Burrows creates the marks, tones and hues of traditional and contemporary painting within a flat, smooth surface. Burrows is ambivalent about the character of the materials he uses, speaking admiringly of its translucency but defensively when its toxicity and commercial plastic character it mentioned. Thirty years have passed between Burrows’ most recent work and his earliest artistic successes in the medium.8 It is a medium that belongs to his youth. It belongs to that climate of utopian idealism and vital aesthetic debate of the late '60s and '70s. It belongs to a time when a progressive belief in better living through science was generally and widely accepted. Since that time, synthetic materials have gone from being a space age wonder to being regarded as cheap ersatz, from promising a beautiful future to being held responsible for a toxic present.9 As a medium, the polyester resin Burrows uses stands as a metamorphic touchstone to the changes that have taken place in a generation. The material disturbs. It ruptures illusions. To think about is to nervously touch and meditate on sudden strangeness of common plastic objects. The Drawn Objects is a series of small monochrome panels each measuring 60 cm. square and projecting 3 cm. from the wall. Burrows deliberately used awkward implements to remove as much intention and permit as much spontaneous play with the medium as possible. Like a drunken, slurred speech reference to his art historical models, he drew a primitive, childish, perhaps anal imagery in this hard space age material. He has called the result "Crazy Cat Suprematism," evoking an unsettling combination of utopian desire and mocking despair, resorting to a punning description of the works as "random portholes looking onto a space without gravity," summoning up images of physical and mental vertigo similar to some of his ‘80s work.10 For the artist it was a break with some of the basic tenets of the past. The anti-commodity art making of the '70s and '80s has given way to the conscious production of commodities. "I am consciously making commodities, like poker chips. In some ways the plastic appeals to me on that level. They talk about money as plastic now. I willingly admit that a lot of my beliefs that might have been presented in Socialism are over with in the '90s. So, I'm making this object that is in a sense a commodity in the new world order of sheer capitalism."11 The multi-panel, coloured pieces of 1992-93 called the Blanket Statements demonstrate Burrow's ambivalent acceptance of art's inevitable commodification. The Suprematist figures floating in the pictorial space of the Drawn Objects have given way to colour field objects. The hanging of the multi-panel pieces is related by the artist to the hanging of Navaho blankets on the wall for aesthetic contemplation.12 The panels' colours are a direct reference to a Canadian icon, the Hudson's Bay blanket; the wool blankets traded in the 19th century by the Hudson's Bay Company for furs in western Canada. A product of the mechanical loom, the mass-produced Hudson's Bay blanket was sought by the aboriginal peoples both as an aesthetic object and as basic shelter. A wonder of steam engine technology, it was perhaps the perfect commodity of colonialism. Again, Burrows returned to the themes of shelter and commodity. The artist invited the spectator to confront the distances between utopian dreams and physical necessity, between direct, unmediated indigenous relationships to the world and commodified, objectified and dislocated relationships. The title Blanket Statements forces us to acknowledge the artist's work as a "poker chip," a "plastic" currency, a commodity for barter and speculation, for accumulation and display. His desire to use colour, to make "pleasing things to be around," is conditional, and can only be made with reference to the mercantile character of this object of desire. It cannot be justified as pure caprice, isolated and elevated from coercion. It is a commodity, made from specific materials and techniques, within a specific context. For Burrows, it was a necessary obligation to refer to, and to acknowledge his work as commodity, before he could enjoy the limited freedom of playing with the medium. The Hematoma series beginning in 1994 is a major advancement in the artist's work with polyester resin. Drifting away from an abstraction based on conventions of painting,13 Burrows has developed a polyester language -- a visual aesthetic specific to the medium. The title of the series, Hematoma, draws our attention to similarities between the blotchy and mottled purple-blue-green translucent polyester resins and the polychromatic manifestations of trauma to the flesh. The smooth, flat translucent polyester, unlike the mechanical weave of a canvas, is mysterious and skin-like. It doesn't support pigment on the surface rather, like flesh, contains it within. The Hematoma series is about regret, like the Blanket Statements and the Drawn Objects, and the sculptures of the ‘80s before them. The weightless, abstract imagery, the commodity "poker chip" references, the toxic material associations, the artwork as a metaphor for the damaged body -- these are images and issues which sceptically probe, mock and bemoan the possibility of authenticity at the end of this century. Gordon Hatt, 1994   Notes Cf. other Minimalist artists and their use of industrial materials at the time: Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Ron Davis, Larry Bell and the California artists. At the University of British Columbia, Burrows’ friend and mentor Glen Toppings. Burrows became acquainted with Situationism, an anti-art position coming from French critical theory, while in England. Cf. Anderson, Andrea, Tom Burrow's Sculpture and Housing: A Material Dialectics of Form, Function and Corporeality, unpublished manuscript, 1993, p. 25. Ibid., according to Anderson the half man, half sheep piece Ewe Guise may be seen as the artist as the sacrificial lamb of capitalist commodity fetishism. Interview with the artist November 29, 1993. Ibid. Ibid. Burrows polyester works form the late '60s and early '70s are in the collections of Canada Council Art Bank, Vancouver Art Gallery and the University of British Columbia Art Gallery. Cf. Burrows’ reference to plastics and toxicity in Bhopal Tar & Feather, 1986. Cf. Organ Transplant, 1987, in which the heart form is encircled by a steel band carrying the inscription MAN'S LAUGHTER MAN SLAUGHTER. Interview, November 29, 1993. Cf. Burrows’ reference to Southwest native culture in the anthropomorphic Hopi ladder in Out of Site, Out of Mind, 1983. Notwithstanding the influences of colour-field painters such as Ad Rheinhardt and Mark Rothko. Tom Burrows Resume

Carlo Cesta: The Material Image

Poetry is an electrical discharge

Vicente Huidobro

The recent work of Carlo Cesta marks a departure from working exclusively with traditional art media in favour of their use and combination with industrial and domestic materials. His inclusion of new media seem at once to compliment and to contradict his constructed images: hot and cold, technological and handmade, organic and mechanistic, the pieces seem caught between two magnetic forces. Aluminum foil tape, rubberized undercoating, aluminum and steel plate combined with graphite, oil stick and paper are the material from which he generates two dimensional images that are a semi-abstract, semi-recognizable hybridization of technological hardware and organic life forms. His work is born both out of a natural love and curiosity for the natural and constructed world and a critical, rigorous approach to the problem of art making. As such, it is the specific culmination of many historical and contemporary issues in art.

The material image is a contradiction in terms and a synthesis of opposites. An image, after all, is a representation, a reflection or a projection of something that is material. We think of an image of something or someone, or, we simply imagine something. As a noun or a verb, the concept of image and imagine are transitive terms - always leading somewhere else. Material on the other hand is inert and concrete. Perceivable by the senses, it refers to nothing other than itself. We can see and touch the material of an image but the image itself remains in that illusive realm of knowledge, perception and recognition.

So it is, that material is the lens through which we receive an image. The paradigm in art for the lens as a transmitter of images lies in Renaissance perspective - perspective meaning literally "to see through." It is perhaps no coincidence that parallel to the development of perspective in the Renaissance was the development of oil painting and the methodical laying of transparent colour glazes through which an image was eventually realized. Seeing through the material, and entering the world of a higher order was the method and the goal.

There is, however, another, older tradition, in which the material of image making is in itself meaningful. Medieval icons, biblical illuminations and liturgical wares employed precious metals in the creation of the image. Halos, details and surrounding space were gilded to enhance the rarity and preciousity of the depicted image, but also, to act as a metaphor. Gold, for example, was seen as symbolic of the sun and its reflective light was likened to spiritual illumination.

            Bright is the noble work; but being nobly bright the work

            Should brighten the minds so that they may travel,

            through the true lights

            - Abbot Suger of St. Denis

In the gilded medieval icon, the material bestowed values and meanings to the image and in return, the image lent a particular significance to the material. The interrelationship between material and image was largely abandoned during the Renaissance in favour of scenic narratives, and was not again reconsidered as an expressive possibility in picture making until the Cubist explorations of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the first and second decades of this century.

The Cubists, with their pioneering mixed media collages, were soon followed by the Italian Futurists and the Dadaists in bringing to the picture surface materials other than traditional drawing and painting media. In diametrical opposition to the preciousness and rarity of the gilded icons, however, mixed media collages and montages employed the valueless ephemera of daily life: newspaper clippings, wallpaper swatches and chair caning were some of the original collage materials. Picasso and Braque, through the combination of painted image, printed word and material object invited the viewer to piece together an image similar to the picture we construct of the world through the reading of a newspaper or the creation of a scrap book. Their interest was not in enhancing the authority of the image, but to destroy it, to reveal it as constructed, complex and conditional. Influenced by contemporary notions of relativity they wanted to reflect a modern world of simultaneous impressions and fragmented information. The notion of a single image as a representative expression of experience or understanding was challenged and in it's place all that remained was a collection of perceptual, conceptual and material fragments.

It is no coincidence that the Futurists and the Dadaists, who were influenced by the collage aesthetic of the Cubists, turned to the machine as a subject in their art. For it was the machine, or, more correctly, technology itself, which had contributed most to the modern understanding of time and space. The telescope, the steam engine, the telegraph and the photomechanical reproduction fundamentally changed people's conception and experience of the world. Images of mechanical parts, machines and other human devices, for the Futurists and the Dadaists, formed an anti-romantic image of the fragmented universe in which humanity's engagement in the natural world was reflected in its tools. Mechanized human figures and anthropomorphic machines posited the paradox of western society; namely, that while people often felt depersonalized and devalued in the face of a technological world, machines were also essentially human extensions. Because in the end, technology is the representation of human labour and the image of human desire. We are the technology. Our technology is us.

It is some distance from the cut and paste collages of the Cubists, Futurists and Dadaists to Carlo Cesta's elegant muffler tape swirls and gasket stencils. The old Cubist collages and montages had by comparison the nervous, jittery energy of a Model "T" Ford. Cesta's collages are radically refined and pared down. Their material composition can as little as rubberized undercoating on aluminum or graphite and tape on paper, to more complex combinations of materials. There is a unifying force behind these images, which reminds one much more of the medieval icon than a 1920's collage or montage. Cesta encourages us to revel in the mysteries of the materials; the contrasts of the almost mystical, illuminating reflective tape against the torn and scuffed paper or on oxidized and rusting steel, the primary black stencil images of gaskets on the hypnotically buffed aluminum plate. His materials are like polished gemstones laid into the crown of a depicted deity.

The deity which Cesta describes is the two headed god Technology. It is not the half human, half machine god of the Dadaists. It is more pervasive than that. Cesta's god Technology is half electrode, half vegetal. It is a god at once more benign and more frightening than any Frankenstein. The artist's works have a material seductiveness and organic fulsomeness that suggest transcendental radiance and natural regenerative growth -- powerful material and graphic metaphors. At the same time his images suggest an organic life that is rationalized into the crystalline forms of technological systems. It is not human personality that is affected by technology in Cesta's visions, but human cell structure itself. The artist describes a world in which technology flourishes while organic life petrifies..

Efflorescing leaf springs, sprouting antennae, bouquets of resonators, daisy chains of engine gaskets in Carlo Cesta's work pose the paradox of a natural technology and a technological nature. He contrasts beneficient images of natural growth and communication with electromagnetic plants and rubberized organisms -- images that are the very picture of a despoliating and denaturing technology.

Carlo Cesta's process, imagery and materials chart a complex attitude toward nature and technology, home, work and culture. These are transcendent images, which take the viewer from the component parts and industrial by-products of daily life to the core of its strangely familiar spirit -- and back again, to the material image.

Gordon Hatt, April 1991

The Library & Gallery, Cambridge, Ontario

April 28 - May 25, 1991

John Hartman: Heaven and Earth

Introduction
This text is a re-edited version of the original text for the exhibition John Hartman: Recent Paintings, published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name in October and November of 1990.

In 1989 I proposed to John Hartman the idea of an exhibition of paintings at the Library & Gallery in Cambridge. Having seen only illustrations of his work before this I had always assumed his work was of a large scale. I soon learned that this was not the case and that, although a number of his works were on canvas, he was primarily known for his works on paper. John responded enthusiastically to the proposal, however, seizing on the opportunity to give a greater physical dimension to his narrative allegories. The paintings in this exhibition were consequently all made within the past year. They describe the artist's current formal developments as well as reflecting current thematic concerns. Thematically the works can be divided into three groups: works based on the native community of Collins, Ontario, works based on the Midland/Penetanguishene region of the artist's home, and works based on the Baffin Island community of Cape Dorset which the artist visited in the fall of last year. 

In this exhibition I included 16 graphic works based on the artist's memories of Collins. (See Talking with the Animals, Ink on paper, 1988.) These drawings were originally part of a group of drawings he did for the exhibition Life on the Edge at the Agnes Etherington Gallery in 1988. My reasons for including these drawings were threefold. The drawings are, in part, an insight into the artist's working process and an acknowledgement of the importance of graphic work to his oeuvre. While they are prized by the artist as a spontaneous and direct way of retrieving memory and "finding subjects," much of their essential character is retained in his other media-based work. In contrast to the large panoramic works, the drawings are also for the most part simple narratives. Where Hartman has expanded onto the larger canvas, much detail and anecdotal narrative has been telescoped onto a single image. While it is by no means suggested that these drawings comprise a key to the interpretation of the paintings, they do offer the viewer a key to discover the richness of detail in the larger works. Finally the large body of drawings from which I have selected comprises a detailed description of the community of Collins. The events and the memories of this community affected the artist in a profound and lasting way and any discussion of his work must inevitably return to this time. 

* * * 
Si j'étais peintre, je déverserais beaucoup de rouge, 
beaucoup de jaune sur la fin de ce voyage,
car je crois que nous étions tous un peu fous.1

In 1976 Hartman and his wife Patricia moved from Southern Ontario to the village of Collins, a small native community 300 kilometres north of Thunder Bay. Patricia Hartman had been employed by the Federal Department of Indian and Northern Affairs to teach at the community's one room school house. The isolated community gave John Hartman the legendary Northern Ontario landscape for his paintings, but it also gave him a distance from the dominant southern Ontario art scene. The community of Collins was more than an exotic, isolated location in which the artist was able to discover his authentic voice. It exerted a profound and lasting effect on both John and Patricia. It influenced their perceptions of the southern Ontario culture from which they had come, and of the other, aboriginal culture, into which they had settled. Like modern missionaries from the dominant southern culture they became part of the native community, and yet remained apart from it. Maybe they lacked the cultural arrogance carried by previous generations of missionaries and educators. They learned to respect the Ojibway perception of individual, community and land, and in doing so, they gained a new perspective on their own culture. 

Central to the Ojibway world view is the perception that man is an integral part of the world which is animate at most every level. Western culture, by contrast, sees man as separate and apart from the natural world which is inanimate. The biblical creation myth, the Expulsion from the Paradise, characterizes the western position concerning nature. Banished from Eden, Adam and Eve were forced to till the land. The biblical parable provides a key to the development of Hartman's work in view of the Collins experience. John and Patricia enjoyed life in the community and were happy during their time there. The lasting impression of the community as recorded in Hartman's paintings, however is one of epic tragedy. Hartman was a witness to the gradual disappearance of the aboriginal culture -- a disappearance which was clearly perceptible with the succeeding generations of Indian families. He saw a community of individuals caught between the two conflicting cultures. The tragedy that is represented by the Expulsion from Paradise became a living reality for John and Patricia in Collins. 

Following his years in Collins religious iconography began to surface in Hartman's paintings. In 1983, he introduced figures into a series of pastel landscapes based on the arrival of the Jesuits to the Midland area in the seventeenth century. The disaster that this initial encounter of the Woodland Indians and Jesuits represented -- the Huron Indians were decimated by exposure to the smallpox virus -- connected Hartman's experiences at Collins to the history of the community in which he had grown up. His retelling of this tragedy in pastels led to a radical departure from the earlier models and influences that characterized his painting in the 1970's. He developed more simplified compositions defined by broad areas of colour. The smooth pure colour planes have lost their translucency and became darker and dirtier. From equal value colour compositions of serenity and eternal nature, Hartman discovered the expressive possibilities of impure, mixed colours and agitated surfaces. Figures emerged in ghostly form, sometimes so small in the landscape they seem like insects seen from high above, and sometimes large and ephemeral, like spirits emerging from red skies or black waters. 

By 1985-86 the figurative element had largely supplanted the landscape in Hartman's work. His canvases and watercolours began to fill with images; crosses, ladders (Jacob's), animals, small dwellings, churches and human figures drawn in an expressively naive and primitive manner. The perspectival structure of the landscape gave way to a decentralized type of topographical referencing. Indications of landmarks, coastline and topography became manifest as graphic images of equal value and size with other figurative elements out of proportional scale. 

It was in 1986 that Hartman turned to his experience in Collins as a subject of his work. Using brush, pen and ink he began to record the people, the community and the events of that time in rapid order. These drawings vary between having the character of fine line detail pen drawings of camp sights and topographical settings to crudely expressive brush drawings of interior lives and dramatic events. In all, the studies eventually numbered over 100. These images are the material to which he has returned for his Collins themes in his paintings, pastels, watercolours, prints and glass work during the past four years. 

The initial representations of Collins, first in the ink studies and later in the paintings and pastels, were constructed in a shallow stage like space. Further engagement with the subject by the artist resulted in the reintroduction of the landscape, with the result that depictions of Collins fell into two categories: narrative and topographical. The work of the last two years represents an effort by the artist to reconcile the narrative with the scenic. By reintegrating the stories of the people with the place Hartman has set himself the epic task of righting the wrong. To unite again landscape and narrative, is for Hartman to allow the customs of people to inhabit their landscape and to insist that the landscape is in turn inhabited by the spirit of its people.

The canvas The Day Lugi Cut His Hand (1990) represents a theme the artist has returned to on many occasions. It is based on an incident that took place at Collins when a man named Lugi accidentally suffered a deep gash in his hand. Lugi was advised that the cut was serious enough that it should be tended to by a doctor. Taking him to a doctor meant that a freight train on the CNR tracks would have to be flagged down, to transport him for treatment at a clinic in the town of Armstrong. Partially out of fear, and partially due to a state of belligerent inebriation, Lugi refused the advice. An argument ensued in which Lugi was struck unconscious and placed on an eastbound freight.

The story represents a minor and isolated incident in the life of the community, yet it is easy to understand how it has compelled the artist and has suggested itself so often as the subject of Hartman's work and reflections on Collins. It addresses the complex and difficult problem of alcoholism among the native community, yet, this is incidental to the story that Hartman is trying to tell. Rather, it is a story of Hartman's own helplessness within the maelstrom of cultural confusion. Both the cause and the cure of Lugi's accident are cultural imports; one insidious and addictive, the other remote and impersonal. Both signify dependency and a loss of autonomy, and the resolution to the situation was tragically violent. 

In the Day Lugi Cut His Hand (1990) the proportionally oversized and bleeding hand of Lugi is situated squarely in the centre of the canvas. The figure of Lugi and other figures are superimposed on a panoramic view of Collins identifiable by its lakeside coastline and community church, the CNR line and the mountain passes at the west ends of the community. Surrounding the figure of Lugi are human figures with their arms upraised as if in a free fall -- biblical images of the fall from grace or of religious ecstasy -- and animals, spiritual icons of native belief. On the right-hand side of the canvas is a large muddy red foot on fire. It is a figure which recurs frequently in Hartman's work, which, in his personal iconology represents the physical, non-intellectual man. To the artist this figure suggests both the integration and separation of man from nature. 

Other recognizable imagery includes the upturned bottle of J&B scotch which refers to Hartman's own habits, and the image of Jock Patience, a Shriner (hence the red fez) and former merchant and patriarch of the community. These are images, which although irrelevant to the narrative, situate it in time and place. 

The centre of the painting is shot with deep cadmium red, cadmium orange and hookers green. Toward the horizon are less saturated colours: pastel pinks, greens, yellows and oranges blend together and contrast to the strong, combative colours of the picture's focal point. Toward the left and right peripheries, dark blues, blacks and earth tones act as a sombre stage curtain. These peripheral grounds are characterized at times by the strong movement of paint in a gestural counterpoint to the colour contrast of the centre stage. 

The theatre analogy is appropriate here not only in Hartman's formal organization of the image. As much as the artist tries to integrate personal anecdote with history, and personal and cultural demons and saints and the landscape itself, one still experiences a theatrical separation from the enacted tragedy. Our raised viewpoint sees the unfolding of the passion, not unlike the report of a foreign correspondent, or an out-of-body experience. 

The complex of figurative and stylistic devices used by Hartman to deal with the subject of his experiences in Collins is turned toward the memory of childhood in the paintings Expulsion from Paradise, Port Severn, Resurrection, 12 Mile Bay and the Expulsion From Paradise As It Occurred On the Old Penetanguishene Road. Returning to the idea of the land of his birth as a theme for investigation, Hartman traded the legendary history of the Jesuits for a personal history. The south shore of Georgian Bay becomes the topographical background for anecdotal, childhood memories and events, strange and isolated Madeleine objects, and ecstatic figures and spirits. These signs and images combine to issue an emotional pitch similar to his images of Collins -- almost manic in their sensibility, they speak simultaneously of ecstatic joy and painful loss. The paintings seem to result as a need to explore the associative memories which the land thrusts back into his consciousness. Yet far from being merely childhood reveries, these images speak more of displacement, separation and loss. The naïveté of mere sentiment is confronted by itself -- revealed to be a longing for simple certainties and an escape from the demands of an adult life. 

From the legends of the Jesuits treated by Hartman in the early eighties, to the memories of Collins and his Midland childhood of the latter part of the decade, Hartman has recently begun to turn his vision to the present. In paintings such as Flying out of Dorset, Cape Dorset, Kadloona Come to Cape Dorset, and The Garden, the artist has attempted to ground his operatic vision in contemporary experiences. The Dorset paintings are a result of a trip to Cape Dorset in late 1989 under the aegis of a federal government programme for artists in the north. Having neither the familiarity of the place from prolonged and intimate contact nor the personal attachment, the Dorset paintings are journalistic in their approach. Hartman describes a monumentally foreign landscape with all the qualities of a romantic traveller. The images of light passenger aircraft and their cargo of government officials and southern dealers of Inuit art are like the dispatches of a foreign correspondent stranded in an airport. The images of Kenujouac, the Inuit printmaker and the motorboats of the fishermen who ply the Hudson Straits are superimposed over the settlement houses on the land. Above all, however, it's the land which Hartman records in these paintings of Dorset. Whether by intention or by default, it is the massive barren landscape of Cape Dorset that has captured the imagination of the artist in these works. The people and the events of this strange place are in the end unknowable, and it is only the landscape which the artist recognizes. Treeless and frozen it has become a traditional landscape metaphor, a reflection of the soul.

The Garden is a treatment of the artist's own backyard. The location is not far from the site of many of the Jesuit history in the Midland-Penetanguishene area. This painting, however, is firmly rooted in the present. Figured in the image is the garden on the north side of the family home, the concession road which cuts diagonally from the bottom right-hand side of the canvas to the top centre, and the neighbouring house across the road. Religious iconography is recognizable on the left-hand side of the painting. A pietà is flanked by a winged angel in the upper left centre. Just to the left and below that is a small Golgotha crucifixion and to the right is a burning hand. The green landscape of the Penetanguishene is subjected to an apocalyptic sky of deep blue, sulfurous cadmium yellow and crimson red. The centre foreground of the painting is characterized by its darkness and agitation focused only by the inclusion of a crouching figure and a bodiless head with an elongated, twisted neck. On the other side of the concession road the ground itself has become crimson red. 

In The Garden there is little in the way of personal anecdote; no clearly recognizable personalities and no indications of designations that will inform us as to the members of the Hartman family or their personal tragedies and tribulations. The artist, his family and his home have been abstracted into the garden itself, surrounded as it is by a firestorm of spiritual and physical uncertainty.

Naming Collins is a painting that has the character of summation. Nearly 10 years after having left the community of Collins Hartman has succeeded in creating a work based on the subject which speaks not of the immediacy of the events of that place, but recalls them at a distance. The ghostly figure of the artist hovers in the rose coloured sky naming the place. The place, Collins, seems bathed in the glow of sunlight, with only the CNR passes, its hilly western and eastern boundaries, darkened. The cold dark blue lake is the ground upon which is figured the pietà of Collins. Whose body? Victor Kwandibens, Lugi, Charlie Mesnigeesik, Richard Spade, Luke Yellowhead, the artist himself? This pietà is all bodies who have tried to find some kind of satisfactory relationship between the earth and the sky. 

Gordon Hatt

Notes

1. Blaise Cendrars from the Prose due Transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France.

Works in the Exhibition

1. Collins, 1988, ink on paper, 28 x 38 cm, sheet.
2. Charlie M.'s House, Collins, 1987, ink on paper, 28 x 38 cm. 
3. The Store/Post Office/Patience Home, 1988, ink on paper, 28 x 38 cm.
Margaret Nothing's House, Collins, 1987, ink on paper, 28 x 38 cm. 
4. Walking to Armstrong, Collins, 1987, ink on paper, 28 x 38 cm. 
5. Telling Stories in John Spade's Winter Camp, Collins, 1987, ink on paper, 28 x 38 cm. 
6. Mike Yellowhead Dividing the Moose, Collins, 1987, ink on paper, 28 x 38 cm. 
7. Scraping Skins, 1988, ink on paper, 28 x 38 cm. 
8. ‘Shaganash' Bearing Gifts, Collins, 1987, ink on paper, 28 x 38 cm. 
9. Luke Taken From His Family, 1988, ink on paper, 28 x 38 cm. 
10. The Residential School, nd, ink on paper, 25.5 x 34.5 cm. 
11. Victor K. (After the Moose Hunt the guides and Hunters Drink), ink on paper, 28 x 38 cm. 
12. Victor's Funeral, Collins, 1987, ink on paper, 28 x 38 cm. 
13. The Prayer Line, 1987, ink on paper, 28 x 38 cm. 
14. North Spirit Lake Baptism, 1988, ink on paper, 28 x 38 cm. 
15. Wrestling with an Angle, nd, watercolour and ink on paper, 25 x 34.5 cm. 
16. The Day Lugi Cut His Hand, 1989-90, oil on canvas, 210 x 165 cm. Collection of the University of Lethbridge. 
17. Naming Collins, 1990, oil on canvas, 480 x 165 cm. McMichael Canadian Collection. 
18. Expulsion From Paradise as it Occurred on the Old Penetanguishene Road, 1989-90, oil on canvas, 240 x 330 cm. McMichael Canadian Collection. 
19. Expulsion from Paradise, Port Severn, 1990, oil on canvas, 210 x 165 cm. (Private collection). 
20. Resurrection, 12 Mile Bay, 1990, 210 x 265 cm. Collection of the University of Lethbridge. 
21. Kadloona Come to Cape Dorset, 1990, oil on canvas, 165 x 480 cm. Collection Canada Council Art Bank 
22. Cape Dorset, 1989-90, oil on canvas, 165 x 420 cm. 
23. Flying Out of Cape Dorset, 1989, oil on canvas, 120 x 165 cm. 
24. The Garden, 1990, oil on canvas, 90 x 240 cm.