A Family Tree

Toronto's Don Valley is known for the natural history contained within its layers of geological sedimentation, where traces of the plant and animal life that once thrived in Southern Ontario’s prehistory survive as fossilized impressions. One sandy, fossil-rich layer called the Don Formation contains evidence of the mollusks and trees existing in the region some 120,000 years ago, the most notable example perhaps being the plant species Acer torontoniensis. Thought to be an evolutionary ancestor of the sugar maple, Acer torontoniensis (Latin for Toronto maple) is named for the city of its discovery.

Torontoniensis (pronounce every syllable: to-ron-to-ni-en-sis) is also the collective name taken by a group of artists who began exhibiting together in Toronto in the mid 1990s. Like the many other exhibiting collectives that emerged in Toronto during those years, Torontoniensis took root in the rocky soil that was the Canadian art scene during the last decade of the 20th century. And like a tree it grew and flourished from 1995 to 2005, producing eight exhibitions and representing the work of 32 artists. It was rooted in Toronto’s visual art scene of the 1990s and its branches were the artists who came from across the country, and eventually from as far away as Scotland. Its leaves were the many artworks that were exhibited and that were made to be exhibited in the collectives embrace.

Only a decade distant, the pre-digital, pre-Internet decade of the 1990s in many ways seems like a foreign country. It was a time of cultural reaction and economic restructuring in the face of a devastating recession. Government support for the arts, which had grown through the 80s, weakened in the face of the recession and challenges to government’s role in the economy. And during this period, Canadian art schools continued to deliver talented and ambitious graduates into an ailing economy and a barely breathing art market. As commercial art galleries closed down, artist run centres and artist collectives became the new centres of an emerging visual culture. The depressed economy provided a stable supply of relatively inexpensive raw urban factory spaces and downtown storefronts that were converted to galleries with the savings and sweat equity of the artists and the eventual support of the provincial and federal arts councils.

Canadian artist run culture in the 90s was a mixture of do-it-yourself marketing and sub-cultural salons. Artists gathered into groups loosely defined by the art schools they had attended or by their circle of friends, or they gravitated to groups defined by the media they worked with or the ideas that inspired them. Some were motivated to market themselves and their art, and others were content to make art intended to be seen by their friends and colleagues and to live within a street level cultural ambience that stimulated connections between people and nurtured a unique sense of community. Being part of an artist collective became an expression of community, and of cultural, career and individual survival -- a way to keep talking about, thinking about and making art when the rest of the culture was turning its back.

1. June 8 - 11, 1995, Mark Adair, Kate Wilson, Tim Howe, Andrew Cripps, Richard Banks, Lakeshore Village Artist Co-op.

Torontoniensis began in the Lakeshore Village Artist Co-op in Toronto’s west end. A project of the Co-operative Housing Federation of Toronto, the Lakeshore Village Artist Co-op had a mandate to provide stabilized rents and legal live/work spaces for artists. Tim Howe and Kate Wilson had moved to Lakeshore Village from Durham, Ontario in 1993. Wilson was a painter who worked primarily with oil on vellum, and was creating a body of work in which dilapidation and retro styling seemed to emerge from of a vortex of furious painting. Howe was developing video and mixed media installations, soundtrack compositions for film and multiple screen live performance works, taking found video material and modifying it to produce absurdist scenarios. Wilson’s work was represented in the Canada Council Art Bank collection and she had recently received a copy of The Art Bank: Celebrating Twenty Years 1972-92. Mark Adair, their new neighbour in the co-op was listed on page 15. Howe approached Adair at a co-op meeting and said, "Hey. Toronto Bank Robbery. Mark Adair."2

Wilson was an organizer. While in Durham, she and Howe had been involved in the CCAOS Festival (Canadian Centre for the Arts in Owen Sound) and Wilson had curated exhibitions of the work of Andrew Da Costa and later Mike Constable and Gail Geltner at Durham Art Gallery. The existence of a 1500 square foot gallery at her new home in the co-op presented itself as an opportunity, and so Wilson and Howe decided to approach Adair about organizing an exhibition. Mark Adair had recently returned to Canada following a period of time in the US. After finishing graduate school at the University of Victoria, he became involved in the founding of the Green Party of Canada. A committed environmentalist, Adair had developed a figurative approach to sculpture, painting and drawing to create political allegories of an ecologically suicidal society. Exhausted by politics, Adair’s response to the idea of organizing an exhibition was straightforward. I wont do anything unless its fun, he said. It has to be fun.3

Co-op members Andrew Cripps and Richard Banks were invited to be part of the four day co-op exhibition. Andrew Cripps exhibited an installation of semaphore figures and Richard Banks exhibited his two of his paintings. Mark Adair exhibited the beginnings of his massive Chaise Longue, Tim Howe installed a picture in picture video and Kate Wilson exhibited her oil on vellum paintings. There was no budget for publicity or mailing so word of the opening was spread on co-op bulletin boards and by telephone. When asked what was memorable about the exhibition, the Stoly fountain at the opening was recalled by more than one of the members. The exhibition was short, informal, produced on a shoestring and not all of the artists even agree that it was in fact their first show as a group. The official inaugural exhibition would take place a year later, with a new tongue-twisting name and a downtown location.

2. March 1 - 31,1996, TORONTONIENSIS: Inaugural exhibition by Mark Adair, Andrew Cripps, Suzanne Gauthier, Tim Howe, Kate Wilson, 425 Adelaide Street West, Toronto.

There are no blue prints for artist collectives they are the creations of groups of individuals who bond together voluntarily and their method of functioning is a product of the dynamic interaction of the members. Artist collectives function fluidly and dynamically, with duties and responsibilities falling to those who are able and energetic. People come and go according to their commitment and their contributions to the group. Typically, a core group of energized activists, organizers, and grant writers is the glue holding a collective together. Their energy and enthusiasm for the project spreads outward to involve other artists as exhibitors and as potential activist members of the collective.

Mark Adair, Tim Howe and Kate Wilson emerged as the core group of the collective for the inaugural show. The name of the collective was suggested by Adair, who having recently returned to Canada from the US, found the name to be an apt metaphor of what was organic and unique about living and making art in Toronto and Canada. Howe was the electrical genius and humourist of the group, in charge of providing the power requirements for lighting and video and keeping it fun. Howe could write and he put together clever, funny press releases that caught people’s attention. Wilson was exhibiting with the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Artists with their Work programme, had participated in the Surrey Art Gallery’s China/Canada exchange exhibition and had many contacts within the art community. Most importantly, she possessed the drive and vision to make it happen. She was an important link for the members of Torontoniensis to other artists and it was Wilson who invited her friend Suzanne Gautier to exhibit with the collective for its inaugural show.

In the large unheated space on Adelaide Street Kate Wilson installed her gestural expressionistic oil on vellum paintings of lush but toxic plant life and generic portrait heads. Andrew Cripps further developed his semaphore figures to encompass an entire wall, and Suzanne Gautier exhibited a large encaustic. Mark Adair exhibited his notorious Chicken Choker – a nightmare of unbridled consumption rendered as an autoerotic asphyxiation, and the Chaise Longue (The Coffin Project), which he had exhibited in a previous stage of its development in the co-op show. The Chaise Longue is a massive carved wood, bone and ceramic sculpture that took Adair over 10 years to complete and which he would exhibit in various states of completion in four Torontoniensis shows. Begun in 1990, Chaise Longue consists of a life-size medieval bed, on which lies a deathly, desiccated hermaphroditic figure. Hovering over the figure are groupings of angels, skeletons and demons that are, in effect, spectres of the Hermaphrodites dream. The work resists definitive interpretation as Adair sought to explore, through the process of making, how creation of myths permit us to act in the world. The intensity of the exhibition was unrelieved by Tim Howe’s video installation that featured a dialogue between a mechanical bird and cat, with the bird reciting a scene from the movie Goodfellas, You think I’m funny? You think I’m here to amuse you? Clearly, these artists had other ideas.

Torontoniensis’s inaugural exhibition was a mixed success. None of the newspapers, entertainment weeklies or art magazines reviewed the exhibition and no one bought anything. But the group of artists had succeeded in describing an emerging group aesthetic and artists in the community took notice. By the time of the next show three years later, the number of participating artists had doubled.

3. May 1 - May 29, 1999, No Fun Without You: John Abrams, Mark Adair, Shary Boyle, Catherine Daigle, Gail Geltner, Tim Howe, Francis LeBoutillier, Warren Quigley, Adrienne Trent & Kate Wilson, 425 Adelaide Street West, Toronto.

The bittersweet title of the second Torontoniensis exhibition, No Fun Without You, caught the tenor of the times. Betty Ann Jordan called No Fun Without You millennial humour, and on the cusp of Y2K it had the feeling of being dark, pessimistic and slightly manic.4 The exhibitions preoccupation with death and mortality aligned it with some of the major themes of the visual art of the 1990s, where the AIDS epidemic, ecological degradation, and the economic recession of the decade caused widespread cultural pessimism and despair.5 Mark Adair’s work both carried the burden of his experience as a founder of the Green Party of Canada and screamed his despair at the cultures apparent headlong rush to ecological suicide. He exhibited his mixed media assemblage Mechanical Spirits and his series of small paintings Death Goes Sailing, his darkly humourous series about death without purpose. Kate Wilson exhibited a piece entitled Molecular Adorn, influenced by a look back at her rural culture experience, specifically car culture, of living in Durham. Together with Tim Howe’s manic video animation of actors dressed as twin angels, spitting fireballs at cartoon dogs, the trio formed a gathering point for artists whose work variously touched on dislocation, loss and madness. John Abrams’s triptych from his Rethinking Canadian History series echoed the patriotic name of the collective -- his paintings of mediated images of Canadian history and geography underscored the uncertainty and pessimism that pervaded the country following the 1995 referendum in Quebec. Catherine Daigle’s shadow-box memento mori assemblage Vanitas (Stilleven), Gail Geltner’s photo-essay documenting the decline and death of her mother, Francis LeBouthillier’s video installation Onion Skins and Shary Boyle’s mixed media installation, were all meditations on transience and loss, while Warren Quigley’s Companions, an installation of stacked animal cages containing large faux-fur balls, and Adrienne Trent’s Sisters, were explorations in the realm of the disembodied and the surreal. The exhibition received favourable reviews in the Globe and Mail by Gary Michael Dault, where it was accompanied by a large photo of Catherine Daigle’s Vanitas, and by Betty Ann Jordan in Toronto Life. Torontoniensis had arrived.

The same forces that bring artists together also work in reverse. Artists drift apart as friends or colleagues, or their interests change and they find new connections and collaborators. Following No Fun, founding member Kate Wilson left the group to participate in the founding of a new artist collective, Persona Volare, leaving Mark Adair and Tim Howe as the two remaining founding members. With Wilson’s departure, Catherine Daigle and John Abrams stepped forward to take leadership positions in the group. Daigle brought to the group her passionate commitment to the project as well as her organizational and promotional skills. John Abrams was well known in Toronto through his regular exhibitions at the Garnet Press Gallery until its demise in 1996. He and his wife Carla Garnet brought the group significant profile in the Toronto art community and a web of connections to talented and developing artists.

4. May 20 - June 17, 2000, More Fun: John Abrams, Rhonda Abrams, Mark Adair, Beth Biggs, Laima Bruveris, David Craig, Catherine Daigle, Robert Houle, Tim Howe, 425 Adelaide Street West. Toronto.

Just over a year after No Fun, More Fun demonstrated the influence of the new core members. The More Fun exhibition advertised its inclusiveness by inviting artists whose interests ranged from pop culture, political culture, art history, craft traditions, economics, iconography, death and sexuality.6 Tim Howe continued to be the standard bearer for a pop culture gone horribly wrong and, for the opening, arranged to have made 5,000 fortune cookies containing bizarre fortunes, distributed by a woman dressed in a cat costume. Yet, as a whole, the exhibition demonstrated strong national and ecological preoccupations. Mark Adair’s Inventions of Greed continued some of the formal characteristics of the previous exhibitions Mechanical Spirits, thrusting mythic warships off the wall and into the spectators space. Adair’s archly dark humour had its absurdist, pop culture counterpoint in Tim Howe’s Klaus Super301, a video installation showing a Klansman-like figure in a jail cell viewing a modified animation of the 1950s Looney Tunes cartoon character Pepé Le Pew as a Nazi collaborator. Guest artist Beth Biggs’s, Gaze, focussed on adornment and political implications behind gaze. Catherine Daigle exhibited her multi-piece work Eleanor, a series of 13 shadow boxes that tell the story of her grandmother’s early pioneering life in Saskatchewan. Guest artist David Craig installed his photographs of Dundas Village in North Eastern Greenland, the most northern community traditionally inhabited by humans, and Laila Bruveris exhibited her ceramic installation The Village, a meditation on urban sprawl and ecological deterioration. Robert Houle exhibited Savage Love (Delacroix Indians), part of his larger critique of the commodification and objectification of aboriginal people and Rhonda Abrams exhibited her campy music video Trailer Song, where she sang of the virtues of country life. John Abrams exhibited a series of paintings called Canadian History from his Rethinking History (1991-1999) series. These monochrome paintings of the Plains of Abraham, the fathers of Confederation and an iceberg were alternately coloured by the addition of fire and a spray of gold droplets, a further elaboration of Abrams’s ambivalent relationship with his country’s history.

5. October 10 - November 3, 2001, Torontoniensis: QTIPS, at West Wing: John Abrams, Mark Adair, Ho Tam, Catherine Daigle, and Tim Howe, West Wing Artspace, 1267 Queen St. West.

West Wing Art Space was a small artist run gallery founded in 2000 by Karen Azoulay, Paul P. and Ingrid Z, three recent grads from York University’s Visual Arts programme. The gallery quickly gained a reputation in Toronto as a centre of a street-level fashion, music and art. In that context, the group of artists in the Torontoniensis collective represented an older generation, and, in recognition of this, called themselves QTIPS, to signify their white or greying hair.

The press release for the exhibition continued the self deprecation and irony, . . . a show by a group of artists all interested in gender politics, politics, death and politics and all that crap. -- as if the kids would be rolling their eyes at all that. Yet, despite the defensive posturing, the group of accomplished but comparatively introspective mid-career artists again caught the uncertain mood of the time. RM Vaughan listed this apocalyptic fright show as one of the ten best exhibitions of 2001.7 Opening almost a month to the day after the attack on the World Trade Centre, the images and themes that had long been part of the work of this group of artists were inevitably read in the light of the confusion, fear and despair resulting from that catastrophe. The centrepiece of the exhibition was Mark Adair’s Harvest Time, exhibited beside the deathly portrait bust he had created for his Chaise Longue. For those wracked by doubt, Harvest Time, a painting of skeletal figures reaping not stalks of wheat but blocks of housing, could hardly be missed as an illustration of the biblical admonition “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”8 Against the self-righteousness of the powerful, John Abrams image of the arrest of a young shirtless man seemed to foreshadow the suspicion and obsession with security that has since dominated life in the American orbit. For those just trying to make sense of it all in front our televisions, caught between the depressing images of George Bush Senior and George Bush Junior, Tim Howe’s pet cat Prrrl, caught in the middle, was the figure many of us related to in his video Long Pig Finds Cleopatra’s Diary (also called Long Pig@Ground Zero). For those who felt powerless in the face of world events, Ho Tams series of candid photographs of tired subway commuters in Passages (1998), not only evoked the enervating despair we experience in the face of global conflict but also recalled the 1995 saran gas attack by the cult Aum Shinrikyo in the Tokyo subway. Finally, Catherine Daigle’s Hard Questions, shadow boxes of images of pale lifeless hands and bunches of flowers accompanied by the text from the Song of Solomon, was an elegiac statement which seemed to long for a more hopeful past.

6. March 8 - April 21, 2002, Songs From the Waterfront: John Abrams, Mark Adair, David Craig, Catherine Daigle, Libby Hague, Robert Houle, Tim Howe, Katherine Knight, Alistair Magee, York Quay Gallery at Harbourfront Centre, 235 Queens Quay West.

Returning to a large exhibition space after the small store front West Wing gallery allowed Torontoniensis to again represent a large group of invited artists. Less than a year after the West Wing exhibition, Adair, Daigle and Howe exhibited pieces that were elaborations of work in progress or that had been previously exhibited. The larger York Quay gallery space permitted John Abrams to exhibit his multi panel assemblages Land Mark Wheels (Red & Blue), which continued the Canadian iconography of his Rethinking History series. After exhibiting with Abrams in the two person exhibition Landmark: The Paintings of Robert Houle and John Abrams, organized by the Tom Thomson Art Gallery and the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, Robert Houle was invited back to exhibit with the group a second time and his paintings continued their direct dialogue with Abrams’s Landmark Wheels. Another dialogue was initiated by the inclusion of Libby Hague’s two channel video Parade, which found a counterpart in Tim Howe’s found video manipulations. Hague collaged watercolour figures on to video footage of parades on the right channel and contrasted them with a left channel of archival footage of an approving audience during a political campaign. The resulting asynchronous loops created a manic interplay between the two screens. The exhibitions horizons ranged from the street detritus of Alistair Magee’s meticulously painted hand notes to Katherine Knights large format wide angle silver prints of placid bodies of water.

7. October 16 - November 20, 2003, Good Medicine: John Abrams, Mark Adair, Mary Anne Barkhouse, Catherine Daigle, Libby Hague, Robert Houle, Tim Howe, University of Waterloo Art Gallery, 263 Phillip St., East Campus Hall, Waterloo, ON.

Good Medicine at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery was the groups fifth exhibition in four years an ambitious pace given that the artists were pursuing solo careers and requisite day jobs while they organized and planned their collective project. A number of the core members of the collective had also been involved in establishing the artist run co-op gallery Loop in 2000. At the same time, Torontoniensiss move from rental spaces and artist co-op galleries to public galleries afforded the group a larger profile and additional resources. Since More Fun, additional support had been coming to the group from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. At the University of Waterloo, Libby Hague exhibited with the group again installing her work Children See Everything, an ongoing series drawn from childhood recollections. This piece grouped together 30 groups of prints recalling comic book cells that described the large and small events of childhood. Guest artist Mary Anne Backhouse’s work fit well with the ecological/political profile that the group had developed. She exhibited two pieces, Focus and Petition, allegories of human conflict in the context of contemporary battles over land and resources. Tim Howe exhibited a new video installation entitled Tim Howe exhibited a new video installation entitled The Passionate David, an assembly of delusional correspondence by a Toronto street person by the name of David, juxtaposed with a video of an angel hovering above an inferno and John Abrams exhibited Everybody's Happy in Hollywood, the beginning of a new series of work based on film stills.

8. November 12 - December 31, 2005, Suitcase, the Good Medicine Group of Independent Artists: From Toronto (Torontoniensis): John Abrams, Mark Adair, Jane Buyers, Catherine Daigle, Tim Howe, JJ Lee, Alistair McGee, Rhonda Parkes, From Scotland: Matthew Inglis, Stuart Mackenzie, Moira Scott, Alastair Strachan, Donald Urquhart, York Quay Gallery, Harbourfront Centre, 235 Queens Quay West, Toronto, ON.,

It had been ten years since the first exhibition at the Lakeshore Village Co-op. Following the recession early in the decade, Torontoniensis had emerged along with the revival of the visual arts in Toronto. It had survived and thrived to embody the ambivalence that greeted the new millennium, to then witness the changes taking place in the world following the event of September 11, 2001. During this time, the artists, who had at one time had been outsiders exhibiting in rough unserviced commercial spaces, had progressed to being invited to show in publicly financed institutional art galleries. Along with the rest of the economy, the once sleepy Canadian art market had heated up. In Toronto, people were displaying a newfound wealth and were buying art in the galleries that were springing up all along Queen Street West. Despite the growing indications of the certainty of global warming, the globalized economy was on a roll in 2005 and the production and consumption of non-renewable resources was advancing unchecked. Even the art world had become global in ways never before seen, as art fairs and biennales all over the world became part of a non-stop world tour of artists, curators, dealers and collectors.

And where did Torontoniensis fit into this new world? What role did its eco-nationalist message play in the transnational world of hyper-capitalism? Was this species of local vegetation exportable and transferable to the global digital age? Or did this metaphor even work any more? Not all the members of the collective liked the awkward Latin name and since the Waterloo show, the group had also been calling itself Good Medicine -- an identity crisis, perhaps, signalling a less fun and more socially responsible and pragmatic approach to making and exhibiting art in the new world order.

The Suitcase exhibition was the collective’s foray into the globalized world of art. It was organized as an exchange show where five invited Scottish artists would reciprocate and in turn host the Canadian artists in a group showing in Scotland. Both Catherine Daigle, with her When Daddy Comes Home, All the Fun Stops, and Tim Howe, with his Les Jumeaux, exhibited digitally manipulated prints for the first time. Inspired by the theme of the exhibition Daigle also created a new piece out of an old suitcase. The suitcase was filled with bright yellow sunflowers whose message of sunny optimism was tempered by the inclusion of a scroll of flies.9 In another flower reference, John Abrams exhibited She was like a flower, from his Betty Blue Suite. The suite was a continuation of his film stills series and was derived from the 1986 erotic French film Betty Blue. Mark Adair exhibited the Eternal Pussy, who represents Life, Deaths counterpoint in the series of drawings Death is in Trouble Now. Guest Canadian artists Jane Buyers exhibited a ceramic book-work, J. J. Lee two of her juicy canvases of ironic Chinoiserie, Alistair McGee his acrylic renderings of found notes and graffiti, and Rhonda Parkes a series of enlarged instructional medical photographs addressing pregnancy.

As much as the collective was rooted in Toronto, the core members realized they would have to look beyond the city for new exhibitions, and Scotland was part of that calculation. Since its inception Torontoniensis had provided exhibition opportunities and exposure for its members and its invited guests, and making connections and creating events was what the group did well. But the Scotland show didn’t materialize and the days of rough space warehouse shows had long since passed in Toronto’s gentrified downtown core. Without another show to look toward, Torontoniensis drifted as its members pursued their individual careers.

But the body blow to the collective was the death of Catherine Daigle in December 2006 following a lengthy illness. Catherine had been the group’s graphic artist and media contact and its driving force after the departure of Kate Wilson. She was admired and adored by her colleagues for her feistiness and for her determination. As much as the work of any other artist in the group, Catherine Daigle’s work carried the minor tone that came to characterize the collective -- a tone that Carla Garnet characterized as a deep sadness. It was perhaps Catherine Daigle’s artist statement in the press release for the Suitcase exhibition that summed up not only her attitude to her own work, but also the legacy of Torontoniensis:

"[it] . . . has largely been informed by an interest in the transitory nature of life and how we, on a regular basis, reconfigure deeds to provide meaning."

Born of the economic uncertainties of the 1990s, Torontoniensis was a part of the movement of artist collectives and co‑operatives that emerged in those lean years – "the do it yourself " energy that helped to create the international reputation of Toronto as a centre for art. Over the course of a decade the collective brought together a wide variety of artists in exhibitions that gave form to many of the anxieties and desires of the time, and in doing so they made a mark on the culture of their city -- creating meaning for themselves, for the artists whose work they admired and exhibited, and for the community lucky enough to take part in their vision.

Gordon Hatt, 2008

Endnotes

1. The National Gallery of Canada's acquisition of Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire in 1990 began in Canada a national debate about role of art and the state. See Voices of Fire: Art, Rage, Power, and the State, eds. Bruce Barber, Serge Guilbaut, John O'Brian, University of Toronto Press: 1996.

2. Email from Kate Wilson, June 30, 2008.

3. Conversation with Mark Adair, June 15, 2008.

4. Betty Anne Jordan, Toronto Life, June 1999, page 34.

5. For a discussion of the subject of death in the art of the 1990s see Adam Gopnik, A Death in Venice, New Yorker, 2 Aug. 1993, pp. 67-73.

6. Introduction to exhibition brochure No Fun Without You.

7. "The Year in Pictures," RM Vaughan, EYE Weekly, December 20, 2001.

8. Galatians 6:7.

9. Mark Adair had been reading biblical prophecy to frame his dismay at the hubris and ecological blindness of industrial capitalism and had quoted to Catherine a verse from Isaiah 7:18. "And it shall come to pass in that day, that the LORD shall hiss for the fly that is in the uttermost part of the rivers of Egypt, and for the bee that is in the land of Assyria." The passage is in reference to Isaiah 13:5, "They are coming from a far country, From the farthest horizons, The LORD and His instruments of indignation, To destroy the whole land."

David Spriggs: The Architecture of Illusion

Transparency is also a medium of illusion. Since 2000, Montreal artist David Spriggs has been painting and drawing on transparent sheets of Mylar to create what he calls “Spatial Image Sculpture.” This body of work is characterized by large Plexiglas vitrines that resemble specimen cabinets and contain uncanny, seemingly three-dimensional images reminiscent of holograms or specimens preserved and floating in formaldehyde. Spriggs’s images, however, are neither chemical nor digital and if from some angles the vitrines appear to contain objects with volume and depth, from other angles they appear to dissolve entirely. 

Spriggs studied painting in art school but like many young artists felt constricted by the limitations of his chosen medium. While considering the conventions of perspective he began to speculate on the possibility of being able to make marks in real space instead of on a single surface plane. He began to tackle the problem of painting “architecturally” – analyzing phenomena in terms of plans and elevations in order to “construct” images in real space. He conceives of a typical Spatial Image Sculpture as a sequence of transparent vertical elevations, where, after selecting a subject, he proceeds to section it, as many as a hundred times (depending on the depth he wishes to suggest), representing each section with a sheet of clear Mylar on which he records the subject’s topographical information. Each sheet of transparent Mylar diffuses and softens detail, generating a murky haze and making it sometimes difficult, sometimes impossible, to see through to the other side. He suspends his inscribed Mylar sheets from the four corners of their rigid glass vitrines with small coiled springs. The basic mechanics that these springs reveal generate an odd visual energy, recalling, as they do, heating coils or even turnbuckles – creating tension and pulling the centre to the corners of the vitrine both literally and figuratively – the diaphanous layers of Mylar contrasting markedly with the mechanical support structure of the springs and the angular cabinetry. 

In his Spatial Image Sculpture Spriggs has developed two distinctly different ways of recording a subject’s physical information, producing dramatically different results. He uses air-brushed monochromes to describe the substance of volumes, or alternatively, he analyses a volume by tracing its edges with black contour lines – a descriptive system reminiscent of topographical mapping. With the airbrush he is able to create the illusion of substance while giving the subject a soft unfocussed outline – contributing to the characteristic appearance of something floating in a cloudy liquid. By contrast, where he chooses to render his subjects by mapping their contours, the result is abstracted and schematic. These contour renderings record volumetric information and present it in space, simultaneously suggesting and denying three-dimensionality and making it possible to both see and to see through a volume. The resulting images have a diagrammatic character that recall exploded graphic anatomical and mechanical manuals and aids.

Within his chosen medium David Spriggs has explored a variety of imaging genres. The optical characteristics of the Spatial Image Sculptures provide him with the uncanny ability to describe specific phenomena and to conjure dramatic abstract effects. He variously works naturalistically, where the subject matter lends itself ideally to the medium, or expressively and abstractly, adopting the properties of the medium to generate subjects and approaches that recall art historical genres. Spriggs exploits the natural tendency of the transparencies to cloud by employing the airbrush to create soft semipermeable masses that merge seamlessly with each subsequent layer of Mylar. Thus the Spatial Image Sculpture seems ideally suited to representing clouds and cloud-like imagery such as in his Archaeology of Space, 2008; Abstract Object, 2007; Entropy, 2007; White Space, 2004; and Perceptible Consciousness, 2001. 

Similarly, when Spriggs moves away from white airbrushed clouds, he finds other subjects with similar characteristics that respond to the specific properties of his media. By changing from white paint to black he transforms his billowy white clouds into dense clumps of smoke in Dark Matter, 2007, where dark clouds may ominously suggest the smoke from a chemical fire or a corrupted liquid. In Blood Nebulae, 2002, Spriggs adopts the microscopic image of haemoglobin as a subject, where giant red blood platelets appear to float in a thick plasma, and in the piece In-Utero, 2001, a tiny pink baby appears to swim in a cloudy amniotic fluid.

Spriggs also explores a type of figurative expressionism through the use of non local colour in Incorporeal Movement, 2004, where the layered multiple image sequence of a body in motion is rendered in a brilliantly sanguine red. Similarly, white is used expressively where its effect makes the human portrait ghostly in Immaterial, 2001. An early work, Omniscient Spectator, 2000, is characterized by its expressionistic subject matter, when the artist’s precise analytical contour mapping describes a huddling and emaciated figure. By contrast Containment, 2007 and Fragmented Figure, 2000, evidence an Impressionistic approach, where rough, linear, free-hand renderings of the subjects provide just enough information for one to be able fill in the blanks and complete the three-dimensional image.

Spriggs’s impatience with two dimensional media developed from his interest in rendering images that more directly engaged time, space and movement. He found a reflection of these interests in the work of the Cubists and Futurists, who addressed issues of speed, time and space in paintings, collages, sculptures and in various manifestos around the turn of the previous century. Images such as The Aesthetics of Speed, 2005 and Incorporeal Movement, 2004, feature multiple layered profiles and suggest, for example, the influence of a Cubo-Futurist painting such as Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2), 1912.1 Similarly, in The Fall of Modernism, 2005, Spriggs adopts one of Cubism’s favourite still life subjects, the guitar, to describe the movement of an object in space. The falling musical instrument is rendered with a staccato rhythm of contour lines that make reference to the fragmented planes of the Cubists, and may alert us to the discordant sound which we anticipate will accompany the guitar’s inevitable crash to earth. And in the work Abstract Object, 2007, Spriggs shows the influence of the Futurists enthusiasm for velocity and power in art through his rendering of this comet-like form.2  

  

The influence of Cubism on Spriggs is also evident in The Paradox of Power, 2007, where the artist adopts one of Picasso’s favourite subjects, the bull. This major work features the image of an upside-down bull, rendered motion-like with the layering of overlapping profiles. The image is split down the middle, with the left realized in blue and the right in red. Spriggs has chosen to problematize the symbol of male power and aggression by suspending the beast harmlessly, as if the animal was struggling to free itself from its powerless and undignified position, as well as through his seemingly arbitrary blue/red colouring – a sly reference to his own power to create illusions.3  

Spriggs distances himself from art historical models when his subject matter reflects back knowingly on his media’s eccentricities. In Progress, 2006, he uses his contour mapping approach to reflect on the logic of his own layered system of representation with his description of the complex internal mechanics of an escalator. In Still-Life, 2003, an image that looks as though it may have been created by an X-Ray surveillance device, Spriggs speaks to the issue of a type of invasive transparency which we recognize may not be universally desirable. 

Walls are built to preserve privacy -- to separate what we feel is the legitimate business of others and of what is not. We maintain barriers to preserve mystery, where the banal mechanics of the thing somehow seem to do its larger meaning and significance a disservice. We draw curtains to preserve dignity, when the display of an individual’s vulnerability is considered an unwarranted invasion. David Spriggs work demonstrates that in transparency there is neither absolute clarity, fidelity nor morality. Transparency is as capable of generating illusions as it is in revealing truth. 

Gordon Hatt, October 2008

Endnotes

1. Duchamp was in turn inspired by the early stroboscopic photographic motion studies of Étienne Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge. See Katherine Kuh, The Artist's Voice: Talks With Seventeen Modern Artists, New York: 1962. 

2. Giacomo Balla & Fortunato Depero, The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe, 1915. “Balla initially studied the speed of automobiles, thus discovering the laws and essential line-forces of speed. After more than twenty exploratory paintings, he understood that the flat plane of the canvas prevented him from reproducing the dynamic volume of speed in depth. Balla felt the need to construct, with strands of wire, cardboard sheets, fabrics, tissue paper, etc., the first dynamic plastic complex.”

3. The blue/red colouring is a reference by Spriggs to 3-D glasses and the anaglyphic system of rendering stereoscopic images. Spriggs also sees the colours symbolically, with the red representing the physical and the embodied and blue representing the immaterial and abstract.

Plastic Shit

Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit . . .

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984

On the face of it, Milan Kundera’s declaration that kitsch is the denial of shit appears wrong. Kitsch, after all, IS shit. It’s all that cloying, mewling, cutesie crap found in gift shops and tourist strolls, all those visual gags of dogs playing cards and mechanical singing fish for sale at the hardware store, and those maudlin Elvis busts and Diana icons and acres of knick-knacks on the shelves at Value Village. For Kundera, what makes all that stuff kitsch, and not art (or at least not art with a capital “A”) is that it is missing a vital organic element. Kitsch, for Kundera, is art removed of life’s messy bits: pain and suffering, hunger and sorrow, decay and waste. Kundera’s kitsch is a sanitized art of Pollyannaish desire that wants nothing to do with the more disturbing parts of our existence. It just wants to be liked. Excessively needy and too willing to please, its lack of shit overwhelms it, and it becomes what it lacks. Kitsch becomes shit.

In recent years, Toronto-based artist Katharine Harvey has been creating sculptural installations using plastic packaging and cheap dollar-store items – materials and merchandise that are intended only for a single or limited use or for the stimulation of momentary sentiment – things which, having passed only briefly through the stage of utility, are destined to quickly become refuse, stuff we tend to call shit. Harvey’s fascination with this material came from her experience as a painter trying to capture the fleeting reflections and refractions of water. Her investigations into water’s infinitely variegated visual qualities led her to a remarkably similar phenomenon found in the reflections of store windows. She was drawn to those curious, older, family-operated stores whose windows display an accumulation of dusty unsold gift items and bric-a-brac. Viewed from different angles, the windows featured a parade of curios suspended between the reflections of the activity on the street and glimpses into the store’s interior. Flattened first through the working photograph and secondly through painting and glazing, Harvey’s Storefront paintings became liquid spaces in which inside and outside flowed into each other, punctuated by a dream-world of floating Venetian gondolas, ballerinas on point, elaborate clocks and fancy vases.

Harvey’s Storefront paintings were elaborations on water as a metaphor of the subconscious – a diorama of submerged desires and stunted fantasies. They were also the basis for installations that used existing art gallery vitrines to assemble fantastic versions of the vernacular (Seasick , YYZ Artists Outlet, 2003; Storefront, Stride Gallery window, Calgary, 2001; To the Depths, Parts I & II, Solo Exhibition, Toronto, 2001-02). In these installations, Harvey organized dense collections of giftware and costume jewellery by tone and hue, and in the process created a series of impressionistic tableaux that deflected attention from the individual objects. The collections of spectrally shifting coloured objects seemed to strike a familiar but minor chord, evoking those dyspeptic feelings of detachment and alienation we often experience during the Christmas season in face of a sea of pointless merchandise and hollow commercial sentiment.

During 2006 and 2007, Harvey’s media migrated from glass and ceramic giftware to plastic packaging and mass produced dollar store items. She continued her colouristic approach to assemblage, prismatically organizing the recyclable blister packing and muffin containers as a clear spray at the top of Waterfall, (Rodman Hall, 2006-07) down to the deep pools of translucent greens and deep blues of the plastic waste baskets, water bottles, dish racks and other seemingly limitless blue-green coloured plastic dollar store ephemera. In the installations Fountain (Making Room, 2006), and in the Waterfall, (Service Canada, Harbourfront, 2007), Harvey left behind her dollar-store merchandise to create impressionistic assemblages made entirely of transparent packing material – works of pure plastic froth.

Harvey's work is notable for the parallel investigations she pursued into both the optical and metaphorical qualities of her subjects and her chosen media. Her open process of free association allowed her to move from a study of the optical effects of water, to water as a metaphorical container of submerged consciousness, from an investigation into the attractions of kitsch back to the optical possibilities of colour-classified junk, and from the foamy optical character of a dense mass of polyethylene packing, back to the existential reality of a mountain of plastic shit.

One would be hard pressed to find two things materially more opposite than plastic and shit. Plastic is organically inert – a product of the petrochemical industry. Shit is fetidly natural, organic and very personal. Shit belongs to each of us individually. Plastic comes from somewhere else. Plastics are associated with cheapness and disposability. They can be easily moulded and mass-produced. They can be made flexible, elastic and paper thin or rigid and sturdy in proportion to their lightweight. Plastic can be transparent or opaque and is highly prized as an impermeable moisture barrier. All this make plastics cheaper and more adaptable than either wood, leather, cloth, ceramic, glass or metal would be used for similar purposes.

We know, however, that plastics are not as durable as organic materials and we know damn well that plastics do not decompose. Moving plastic parts break and wear out all the time and many plastic objects are just a waste – designed for limited or single usages, rendering their active life cycle shorter than that of many insects. And the passive life cycle – life after disposal – is immeasurable. While many plastics can be vaporized with intense heat, most often they avoid decomposition and continue to exist somewhere in the world: in a landfill, at the bottom of a lake or ocean, or ground up and melted down to be made into more plastic. Plastic is two times shit: first because it so often fails us and second because we are continuously in the process of disposing it.

By representing and including kitsch, plastic merchandise and disposable plastic packaging in her work, Katharine Harvey ensures that romantic sparkle and liquid shimmer is not merely a vehicle of escape, but a memento mori of our embodied subjectivity. That is the existential reality that Harvey’s work probes. As we find ourselves drowning in our own refuse, we are forced to examine our habits of consumption and production. In any dollar store, Wal Mart, Zellers, Canadian Tire or Best Buy we can see our own infantile and narcissistic desires reflected in row upon row of cheap merchandise and the mountain of plastic garbage that they generate. This stuff will never die. We will.

Gordon Hatt, 2008

Daisuke Takeya: Kara

Daisuke Takeya, Waveless Ocean, 1999, oil on wood, panel, 32 x 47"

When Daisuke Takeya asked me if I would talk about his work on the occasion of his exhibition at the Japan Foundation here in Toronto, I was a little unsure of where I would begin. Takeya is an artist whose work ranges from figurative, portrait and landscape painting to video, installation and conceptual practice. His work is informed by personal experience, social criticism and by his professional training in figurative art – concerns and considerations which at times are articulated in specific bodies of work and at other times can be seen to form threads that connect and reappear at various places in his art.

It is impossible within the limited framework of this talk to adequately address all of the threads and media which encompass the artist’s practice, and I won’t attempt to do it here. Instead, I would like to apply conventional art historical method to a close analysis of some of Takeya’s paintings over the last 15 years. This examination will deal with how the artist’s concerns as a young man were given form within the idiom of his academic figurative art training in the early 1990s. I will trace the artist’s evolving engagement with the figure and the landscape as signifiers of feeling and desire to arrive at the current body of work.

* * *

“Kara” in Japanese means “empty.” Its Kanji character also represents the word for sky, air, and space (“Sora”). Both “Kara,” and “Sora” hover above Toronto and Tokyo, as well as Ottawa, Osaka and the village of Pouch Cove, Newfoundland. It is one thing that all these places have in common. The “emptiness” or the “sky” of the Kara series of paintings can be seen to have its origins as far back as some of the artist’s early student work, where the inclusion of horizons into the backgrounds of figure studies and later as pendants to figure studies come to represent both a rhetorical and literal “emptiness.” 

In the mid 1990s, Takeya was a student at the New York Academy of Art, an art school dedicated exclusively to the study of the human figure in painting, sculpture and drawing. The study of the human figure has its roots in classical Greek art and in its Roman imitators, where the gods and goddesses of Olympus were rendered as beautiful and heroic humans wearing little or no clothing. The revival of interest in classical mythology and art during the Italian Renaissance stimulated a return to illustrating mythologies and histories with the naked figure and learning the skill required to render the nude convincingly became one of the pillars of the academic teaching of art.

The study of the human figure meant originally learning anatomy from skeletons and cadavers. In the modern era photographs are an important source for visual information about the body. But most often the study of the human figure is accomplished through that staple of art school – the life drawing class. In life drawing class, a model disrobes and strikes a pose for a predetermined length of time. The model usually stands, sits or reclines on a low riser, surrounded by students at easels or with drawing pads. Depending on the point of the class, the model may start out with quick gestural poses, and then settle into one or two extended poses. To render a “finished” figure composition convincingly from life (e.g. without recourse to photography) the model must remain in the same pose for hours or in sittings that extend over days. The pose must be something that can be held reasonably still – no extended and raised limbs, or difficult and uncomfortable positions that cause the model to move and adjust position frequently. The job of modelling is not for fidgety people. If a person is capable of relaxing into a state of torpor, they will probably make a good model and the artist will not have to constantly readjust the perspective and recast shadows. The good model is a paragon of inactivity. The good model does nothing. Just stands, sits or lies there. 

Initially, working from the model is a transgressive experience. After all, how often do we sit in a room with a naked stranger? But the unsettling nature of this situation soon gives way to the various and complex challenges of rendering accurately the perspective and proportion of the human anatomy. Combined with the study of proportion, the repetition of the practice of drawing from the model in poses of extended duration produces artists who are adept at a naturalistic representation of the human body. 

The reality of this practice of learning to draw from the figure, however, has had the inevitable effect of characterizing what we know of as figurative art. It gives us a disproportionately large number of images of a relatively narrow range of human activity and attitudes. Typically subjects recline or sit, are apparently thoughtful or vacant, sexually available or enervated and despairing because, that is what life models do best. Figurative painting can provide us with models of action, but these images are heavily dependent on photography and always betray the conventions of the lens. Painting and drawing from the figure then rely on a stationary and relaxed model and, as a convention, it tends to idealizes passivity, isolation and vulnerability.

Looking at Takeya’s early figurative work, one can see that the landscapes and environments in which he has placed his figures underscore the apparent enervation and lassitude of his models. Paintings such as Abandon, 1993, oil on linen, 81.5 x 43"; and Dead-End Street, 1994, oil on linen, 80 x 55" feature the juxtaposition of the naked figure with vacant, despoiled and dark cityscapes. These paintings don’t create believable spaces as much as they describe to us symbolic and psychological states of mind. In Abandon, the reclining figure’s legs are supported by what looks to be a pile of junk. Further examination closer to the bottom of the canvas reveals random objects that one might find in an artist’s studio, piled high, occupying almost 90% of the canvas. Above and beyond the pile of junk, is a city scape – the silhouettes of a few tall buildings against a light sky, and above that a dark low-lying cloud. In Dead End Street, a model standing in the classic contraposto position with head bowed is surrounded by road and highway barriers, a dust pan, a fire extinguisher, and a welding mask among other objects. A yellow line passes below the triangular police barrier, directing our line of vision to a horizon which is marked by a checkered yellow “Dead End” sign. The dark low- hanging cloud and the pile of junk, the “Dead End” sign, and the various street barriers, all work to signify a mood of pessimism and despair, a mood which already seems to be illustrated by the demeanor of the model.

In this early work, one is able to identify a youthful alienation expressed in the language of figurative and landscape painting – enervated figures and the bleak cityscapes are symbolic rendering of the artist’s own feelings. Takeya characterized his mood at this time as being “happy to be sad.” On the threshold of adulthood, his experience of life was coloured by a pessimism born of a personal loss and an isolation that was accentuated by the experience of studying in a foreign country, in a language and in a culture that he was just beginning to understand.

A series of diptychs produced by the artist in the late 90s ( Untitled, 1999, charcoal on paper, 56 x 40.5"; Pornography,1999, oil on linen, 64 x 88"; Waveless Ocean, 1999, oil on wood, panel, 32 x 47"; Eternal Flame, 1999, oil on wood panel, 32 x 47"), contrasts, in the right hand panel, figures in various states of repose to, in the left panel, city, sea or landscapes familiar to the artist which are comprised of 80 to 95% sky. The right-hand panels, many of which were based on life modelling sessions, are, like Abandon and Dead-End Street, rendered again in moody, dark environments that create a general feeling of languor, aimlessness or despair. Like the earlier student paintings, each figure is cloaked in shadows and revealed only by the raking light of a single source – a light bulb, a television sometimes, but most often from what appears to be a window. One can imagine that the left-hand panel may be the view outside that space, through the window perhaps, or again, psychologically speaking, a symbolization of the figure’s emotional landscape. Takeya has told me that the landscape images are of of Japanese places. Todaiji Temple in Untitled, Yokohama City in Eternal Flame,Yokosuka City in Pornography. After the gloomy cityscapes which complete the backgrounds of the earlier paintings, the big skies of the diptychs may seem bright and airy by comparison. But on further examination these big skies are overcast, or dusky or just bleakly empty. Perhaps the dark foreboding and pessimism of the earlier work has cleared up some, and become something a more manageable nostalgia, a little less heavy, and maybe the beginning of something new.

In the series of diptychs Everybody Loves You, done while he was still living in New York, Takeya continues the contrast between a big-skied landscape on the left and a figurative representation on the right. By this time, however, the figure studies have become somewhat uniform head and shoulder portraits lit by a single low frontal light. Recalling his earlier work where the figures were cloaked in shadow, the position of the light in the Everybody Loves You portraits illuminates the tip of the nose, cheekbones, and the brow, and casts heavy shadows on the rest of the head, including the bridge of the nose and the sides and top of the head. The effect, which is similar to holding a flashlight to your chin while standing in the dark, can be quite theatrical. It exaggerates contours, focuses attention on the eyes, diminishes the hair and surface quality of the skin, and in doing so de-emphasizes gender. The effect has been used in the cinema to allude to demonic possession or to an evil alter ego that may emerge after dark. But it is also associated with a type of campfire intimacy – the shared experience of being in the dark with others and the bonding in the face of uncertainty which that brings.

In other words, Takeya’s choice of lighting may be ideal for the complex topic of speaking of love, de-emphasizing gender and bringing into relief our conflicted identities and often awkward relations with friends, acquaintances and the objects of our affections. Moreover, the expression of affection, which is possibly more freely given in the United States than in Japan or even among the famously reticent Canadians, is none-the-less, universally problematic, and no amount of world travelling relieves the individual from this personal accounting: Do you or don’t you (love me), do you mean what you say (when you say “I love you”) and do you say what you feel (when you say “I love you”). 

Perhaps this ambivalence is emphasized by the left-hand panel cityscapes of the New York skyline as seen from Brooklyn. Few other skylines are as recognizable as the New York City skyline, and yet, as Takeya renders it under towering skies, he makes it seem quite ordinary, diminished in comparison to the infinite sky above, suggesting perhaps that like the famous skyline, the words “I love you,” may be just another banal social construction in the grand scheme of things. In Everybody Loves You the moodiness of the early figurative paintings and diptychs has been stripped down into a complex ambivalence. The anonymous and quiescent nudes have morphed into individuals with names – seemingly self-aware and capable of action, but perhaps also with self-identities and beliefs as insubstantial and as unformed as the sky above.

From being “happy to be sad” in the years immediately following his arrival in North America, Takeya adapted emotionally and philosophically to his new home. In his painting he pared down the conventionalized figurative representations of sadness and despair into existential mug-shot like portraits and flat, almost featureless landscapes expressing neither happiness or sadness, but a heavy, pervasive spiritual emptiness. 

The Kara series of paintings retains and enlarges the city scape with the big sky and altogether dispenses with its figurative pendant. No longer are we asked to consider the symbolic despair of the slouched model, or the identity of the flashlight-illuminated individuals. No longer does the landscape act as an exclamation mark for these figures. Depicting the skies over a number of cities and towns in Japan and Canada, each of the canvases of the Kara series measures 6 feet in height. The cityscapes in each painting occupy less than 2 per cent of the paintings’ vertical height – a proportion of sky to land even more dramatic than in the earlier work. If you watch the reactions of viewers, the natural inclination is to approach each painting in a slight crouch, in an attempt to identify the depicted city scape. Once a landmark is identified and thus the city too, the spectator feels able to stand up straight and back up from the painting to take it in whole. 

In the Kara series, questions of identity have shifted from individuals to cities and towns, but perhaps, like the head and shoulder’s portraits of Everybody Loves You which, after a time begin to seem less and less dissimilar, so too seem the cities of Osaka, Tokyo, Toronto and Ottawa when juxtaposed to the vastness of the sky above. The radical perspective of Takeya’s view of the cities which he visited and lived in, reminds one of looking at the earth from space, where countries and ethnicities and borders are invisible. When asked about the feelings behind these images, the artist responded, “I wanted to feel like air.”

The Kara series was originally painted in 2001 and 2002. Those paintings were tragically destroyed, and the current series of paintings is a recreation of the original, five years later. The discipline required to re-paint the entire series is a testament to the personal significance the works held for the artist. When asked about the inevitable difference between the paintings of five years ago and the contemporary recreations, the artist responded by saying that the current series is more colourful. This is not hard to imagine when we look at the tonality of the city scape panels of the preceding Everybody Loves You series. In Kara, the sequel, Takeya’s work has opened up. The skies begin to be less leaden and airier. A general greyness has given way to a luminous spectral range of colour ranging from sky blue to indigo, to pink and to orange. Emptiness, or Kara, at one time a burden for the Daisuke Takeya, has become a space of possibility.

Ed Pien: A Soft and Gentle Darkness

In a Realm of Others is a multimedia installation of drawing, video and slide projections. The centrepiece of the installation is a long passageway connected to a series of three circular chambers made from translucent glassine paper. Enveloping the structure is a continuous green curtain of glassine, covered with hand-painted treetops. At one end is a narrow opening leading to a passage whose curtain walls gently billow around you as you advance. At the end of the passage are the inner chambers – round curtain walls of white glassine rising to the ceiling. These walls are animated by graphic images of twisted and disfigured ghouls and demons – horrible, nightmarish figures surrounding and hovering threateningly above images of vulnerable and frightened children.

Located in the innermost structure of the installation is a video monitor showing a succession of children attempting to make scary faces and threatening noises. The video of children exploring their ideas of monsters is paralleled by a second video, outside the glassine structure, of adults recounting their personal ghost stories. The children in the video puff themselves up to become what they imagine to be frightening and monstrous. They’re cute in their play acting, and it seems they needed little prompting to mug and growl for the camera.

Being inside the enveloping structure of In a Realm of Others is an extraordinary experience. The walls transmit a diffused coloured light, and they move as you move, like a sympathetic living organism. The ink drawings of monsters are unsettling and disturbing – ghostlike, when seen through a second layer of the translucent glassine. Passing out of the inner sanctum you notice overhead a violet-mirrored image of tree tops – a sort of moving Rorschach blot – projected on a hanging disk. It is dizzying, disorientating and exciting – an intriguing and complex punctuation to a remarkable journey. I feel sad that it is over, sad to be leaving this space.

* * *

“If I die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take.” How strange it is to remember these words today, words I at one time recited before every bedtime. Sleeping alone in the dark would seem to be frightening enough for any child without introducing the idea of sudden death. The prayer, I now realize, was a parent’s small plea for mercy, pitched from the tiny voice of a child. Walking through the installation I find myself thinking about childhood nighttime fears, bedtime stories and prayers. Here between these satiny sheets I am reminded of the painful anxieties and candied dreams of my childhood.

Fear of abandonment, I think, may be one of the most profound traumas of childhood. Looking back, I know that it was a critical aspect of my childhood psychological development. It is easy to see how this anxiety at an early age can have profound effect on the development of character. Most people can remember the childhood anxiety of being temporarily separated from a parent in a crowed place, or being the last child to be picked up at school. For a child, the possibility of abandonment is a reality of every waking moment – living in a world that is largely mysterious, and dependent on adults for every need, monsters and demons have the potential to lurk in every closet and under every bed. Abandonment, loneliness and isolation, of course, are only places where fear begins. It is the imagination of what happens next, which is the stuff of dreams, nightmares, fairy tales and art.

Some parents tell their children fairy tales before bedtime. Stories such as the Grimms’ fairy tales “Hansel and Gretel” and “Little Red Riding Hood” or the Taiwanese fairy tale “Tiger Grand Aunt,” explore childhood night fears. Passage through a dark, malevolent forest is a common metaphor in these fables. Adults in these fables are ambiguous figures – alternatively protectors and predators, nurturing parents and savage beasts. Wolves and tigers impersonate grandmothers and grand aunts. Mothers, and surrogate mothers in particular, play important roles, as symbols of the anxiety of separation and abandonment. Fundamental to the stories is the young protagonist’s success at tricking the demon; killing it and managing to successfully escape its clutches. The endings are always more or less happy.

The fairy tales that were told to me as a child, or the prayers I recited at bedtime did little to either stimulate or allay my fears of the night. A bigger factor in my falling asleep was more likely the comfort provided by a seam of light filtering through a bedroom door left slightly ajar. That light was my link to the world of the living – to the gentle clink and clatter of dishes being washed, to muted adult voices and to the resonant hum of the television still on in the living room.

* * *

I’m on the outside now, standing in the soft green glow of the glassine. Scanning the monumental image of treetops, I can almost feel them swaying and groaning in the wind. Here outside, this luminous paper giant feels strange and threatening. I turn around and go back, to feel again the thrill of moving through the maternal folds of the passageway, of the walls of light that flow magically around me. I am drawn again to the hearth-like inner sanctum, which, in changing from green to white, this time seems hotter and angrier.

In A Realm of Others seems to be an inversion. Instead of the passage leading you into darkness, like the process of falling asleep, or walking into a dense forest, going from the outside to the innermost sanctum, you pass into light. But it is not a metaphorical enlightenment to which we are drawn, rather it is as if travelling to the molten core of the earth, to the white-hot source of passion, and anxiety, to the reptilian brain of this strange creature. These kids and their monster faces and noises only teach us that we are born of fear, and that at the centre of our personality is insecurity and doubt and the trauma of separation. And as we turn to leave that bright white place and distance ourselves from the primal scream, as we talk to our therapists and begin to take control of our inner child, it is not a light we step into, rather a soft and gentle darkness.

Gordon Hatt, 2005