ars longa, vita brevis

The installation of work of public art is a special moment, and for that we hold a small celebration and dedication. I would like to speak a bit about public art and how it is different from the domestic arts, those art works that we place in our homes or offices.

First of all – domestic art: easel paintings, watercolours, photographs, collages and montages, engravings and prints, glass and small cast sculpture, ceramics, needlework, found objects, action figures, Kinder Surprises, foreign money, postcards and greeting cards, fridge magnets . . . For all of the images I have a collected in my life I vainly try to find a place in my home. The most recent acquisitions find a prominent place in the living room or the study, the older pieces are relegated to a spare bedroom or hallway or stored in a closet, in a box. In my kitchen I hang posters and postcards and stick my son’s elementary school art work to the refrigerator – things that can be cleaned or thrown out or folded up and put away if damaged or no longer wanted. And in my bathroom, I try to find artwork that will withstand the dampness of the shower and perhaps articulate for me the romance of water and the banality of ablution.

Domestic art for me may be a little bit sentimental, recalling people I have known and worked with over the years, places I have been, or enthusiasms and interests that I have long since left behind. My domestic art might also be a charm, some dangling thing that is sweetly optimistic and speaks to my sunny side, or a talisman, a container for my fears and nightmares – an object that carries good luck, and wards off the bad.

What characterizes domestic art for me, however, is its temporality. We can change it according to our moods. We may acquire it impulsively, rearrange the furniture to accommodate it, paint the walls a different colour to frame it, then in a few months, or a year or two, grow tired of it. It gets knocked and jostled, acquires a wine stain from a party, a chip from the Nerf ball fight the boys had in the living room. The new girlfriend hates it. The old one takes it. Eventually it ends up in a garage sale. The life of an image begins again . . .

But a work of public art? Now that is a different life entirely. A work of public art is not an expression of personal taste or impulsiveness. Public art is a social activity from the beginning, the product of planning committees, juries, and advisory panels. The artist becomes a catalyst for the hopes and fears of the community. A public artwork may reflect a sentimental side or mark a milestone in the community’s history. In this way public art is not so different from its domestic cousin. The expression of the individual becomes the expression of the community.

Public art is different because it is made to endure, because the sun and the rain and the cold and the wind erode even stone over time. The surface must be resilient to withstand the probing and stroking of a million hands and the structure must be sound to support the climbing of a thousand children. Pubic art is made to endure the elements and in so doing, it lives a different life. We see it under different conditions. In the heat of the summer when we seek shelter from the sun and when shade seems hard to find, the artwork does not sweat. In the fall, when the wind blows cooler and the days begin to shorten, the artwork may begin to cast larger shadows, and glow in that peculiar orange light that I associate with autumn, and it will seem somehow strange that the artwork does not regret the passing of summer. In the winter, when we dress to ward off the cold, the artwork is naked but for a thin skein of snow or a decorative trim of icicles. It will appear to laugh at our frailty and our sensitivity to the cold. And in the spring it is new again, in those first warm sunny days, alongside the budding trees it shares that green and yellow light of the next growing season.

Carol Bradley's genius is to give what is durable – glazed and fired clay – the texture, sparkle and magic of lapping water, an image that is at once transitory and timeless. Where this artwork is placed, it won’t be climbed upon or receive the caresses of a million hands, but it will be there through the seasons and the years. In its position over the door I hope that it doesn't develop icicles. Carol has caught the blues, greens and turquoises we associate with a pool of water's colour refractions and she has given them back to us. In the summer when we are dry this Pool will signal the promise refreshment. In the winter, when we are cold, this Pool promises a tepid bath. For toddlers, Carol's Pool will always be associated with Water Babies, a first swim with a parent. For elementary school children, these colours and shapes will be associated with going to swimming lessons. For teenagers, this image of water will become a symbol of early romantic flirtations. For adults, the rippling surface of this artwork may come to represent the bittersweet discipline of regular physical exercise, or the pool lanes may become a symbol of a place of meditation and stress reduction from the burdens of work. Seniors will retain this image in connection with aquabics, the social life that this water activity affords them, and wonderful feeling of buoyancy that water can give to an aging body.

The life of this mural will span generations whose memories of home, family and friends will take place under this sign. Children will be born, grow into adults and eventually die, yet the blue, green and turquoise of Carol's mural will continue to lap and sparkle – a constant in our always changing lives.

ars longa, vita brevis (art is long, life is short)

Gordon Hatt, 2003

Interior Life: Paintings and Prints by Moira Clark

Ghosts, it has been suggested, are the product of our living with the physical artifacts of past generations. We associate objects with individuals – Robert’s tools, Lisa’s desk, Mary’s car. We do it collectively too – the family cottage, the community pool, the neighbourhood store. When confronted by the objects we associate with the dead and departed, when we handle these objects, we feel a connection to those people – their presence – and we call these presences ghosts.

Townscapes (including cityscapes and rural agricultural landscapes), Interiors and Still Life are genres of painting and photography that represent the artifacts of people. These types of representation are literally, “art about art.” That is to say, the objects represented are the artifacts of culture – public places and private homes, domestic furniture, plates, pitchers, bottles, and food, both plain and fancy.

As signs of culture, these types of representation have great flexibility and are capable of speaking to us in very subtle ways. The still life tradition that can be traced to Roman times, for example, may speak to a culture’s love of feasting, revelry or earthy humour. Dutch still life has been variously interpreted as celebrating national prosperity, or as a moral reminder of life’s transience. Abundance and scarcity, wealth and poverty, exoticism and simplicity have all been allegorized by the subjects of still life. Flowers in full bloom, ripe unblemished fruit and full pitchers of fresh milk have typically signalled a sanguine and optimistic attitude towards life. These are the still lifes in waiting rooms and Holiday Inns that make up much of the chintz and wallpaper of our lives.

In the modern period, artists followed Cezanne’s example and still life became a mute support for formal experimentation and abstract composition. In the nineteen-eighties, when traditional genre was reconsidered as art photography, still life, interiors and townscapes were once again understood as symbolic and meaningful. In contrast to traditional genre, a number of photographic artists began to produce pessimistic and highly self conscious images that embraced the representation of age through distressed and accreted surfaces (Roy Arden) material exhaustion and pollution (Edward Burtynsky), and obsolescence (Bernd and Hille Becher). More recently, the German photographer Andreas Gursky has produced large format, digitally manipulated images of super abundance in a dystopic vision of globalized production and international corporate anomie.

It is in this context that the still lives and interiors of Moira Clark stand in quiet opposition. Her interest in genre was stimulated while a student in the nineteen-seventies. At that time, still life, interiors and landscapes were seen as the beginning of a reductive process that lead inevitably to a painted abstraction of the physical world. However, Clark’s still life and interiors, while spare and economically rendered, resisted resolution into compositional abstractions. Instead, rhythmic composition, counter point, pattern and symmetry, traced from the objects of her environment, continued to retain a prosaic and human character.

It is difficult today to imagine just how hard it was to paint genre in the nineteen-seventies. In those years, art schools and public and commercial galleries were in the full embrace of abstraction. For artists like Moira Clark who wished to pursue subject matter in their art, printmaking was one of the few viable alternatives. In the print shop the artful manipulation of the techniques and disciplines of etching, lithography, and block printing took precedence over the ideological battles against representation. As a result, the print studio at York University and the co-operative Open Studio in Toronto provided supportive and stable environments for Clark and other artists who desired to make non-conforming art in a less hostile atmosphere.

The art historian Norman Bryson has suggested that one of the unique characteristics of still life is it’s timelessness. The conventional subject matter of still life, for example – food and food service objects – are virtually indistinguishable from generation to generation. A Roman still life with fruit, or a breakfast composition by Chardin look as edible today as when they were painted. Images like these collapse time into an unchanging and indifferent present, and here lies both still life’s appeal and it source of friction. For those who desire art to bridge generations and ages, still life can be a comforting reminder of constant unchanging values. But for those who feel that a contemporary art should address the dynamism and forces for change in the present, still life is potentially reactionary. Unless pessimistic and critical, like some of the contemporary still life photography that I have cited above, conventional still life proposes relative, detached values – it exists outside politics and the issue-oriented debates of the day.

Moreover, conventional still life poses the uncomfortable question of gender roles. Still life was considered a minor genre by the academicians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – a suitable occupation ideally for a female artist. Of course, one today would never establish such a hierarchy and appoint women to its lower orders, yet the conventional still life may be an area of unconscious discrimination. Here again Norman Bryson sheds valuable light on the gender character of the still life. Comparing still lifes painted by male artists to those by female artists, Bryson notes that inevitably, those painted by males seem to occupy the perspectival centre of the visible universe, as though those objects, or those foods, were the sole and unique property and subject of the viewing artist. He notes however that still life, as painted by female artists, has the character of existing independently of the artist and viewer, as the tools and products of work – not solely of work’s delectation – but as the evidence of “the creatural and ordinariness of domestic culture.” Perhaps then, according to this understanding, we should more correctly distinguish between the genres – still life may be better characterized as male, and the interior genre – female.

Indeed, what has strikes one about Moira Clark’s work is that the subjects of her painting and printmaking are never about her or her surrogate viewer alone. Each work affirms the value of interlacing, interdependence and connection. So, for example, an early etching such as the  Staircase with Artichoke Tiles (1979), is a study in asymmetrical symmetry, where the left and right mirror images are almost, but not quite identical. Adjacent doors, parallel staircases and bannisters, and the rendering of the tile pattern are very faithfully described, and yet, as much as the print is an abstract exercise, it is also a metaphor of attachment and identity, where these doors are markers in space for the beginnings of similar, connected, but separate lives. 

In Sunlight Through Glass (1982), a still life arrangement of an empty bowl and three tomatoes sits on a table occupying an almost overlooked place in the near foreground, while two pots of geraniums, sit on a widow ledge in the background. Together these objects define a space that otherwise consists of a tangle of confusing shadows and reflections. The physical, tangible character of the still life objects contrasts with an interior space of shifting phantoms and shadow presences. Domestic space in this image may be considered to consist of objects which reflect the spirits of those who live there and whose long shadows are cast over the hard and soft edges of the room.  

A rare image by the artist featuring the presence of human figures, The Three Sisters (1986) tends to reinforce the sense that human presence is ineffable at best in Clark’s work. Here it is the figures that are pushed to the edges of the frame and which define the common central space of the table top. Rather insubstantially and summarily rendered, the three sisters form a circle of charged space – a space that is defined by their interaction. The table top is a medium, not unlike a Ouija board, which each of the sisters touch, with arms and legs interleaving above and below the table in circle of connection. In contrast, when the figures are absent from the picture plane altogether as in Three Chairs After Dinner (1977) and All Night Café (1982), everything is more substantial. Chairs that look quite capable of sustaining weight, have not been pushed back to the table, and their random arrangement betrays a recent and hasty departure. The repetitive patterns on the table cloth in Three Chairs After Dinner , or carpet patterning and abstracted arrangements of plants in the back ground of All Night Café are more substantial, more regular and more firmly contoured than any of the three sisters.

In the early 1990's Clark left the print shop. She left the layered, methodical and distanced discipline of printmaking to develop her imagery in the more tactile and direct medium of acrylic. In the process, she moved away from the spatial and compositional explorations of the interiors and began to focus on isolated objects. These objects – food and flowers, plates, bowls, glasses and pitchers – rendered weightless in space, began to hover over soft indeterminate grounds, as though they existed as pure ideas, outside the work-a-day world of food service and hospitality. Sometimes, Clark would present these objects lined up on a narrow ledge, like the unique and individual characters in a family portrait. Flowers, at one time subjects of her still life, became decorative motifs that floated in well ordered columns and rows, in front of and behind of Ironstone plates and pitchers, finally, in later work, to come to rest on the china itself, as part of its decorative surface.

The surfaces surrounding and supporting Clark’s still life objects eventually crystallized into tight weaves of coloured bands, reminiscent of cane or wicker – grounds that began to function as optically vibrating planes – flattening the spaces and removing the air that had at one time had flowed around and between her subjects. She superimposed translucent cut glassware over her colourful grids, muting and softening the hard edges, and in the process these still life objects began to dematerialize. The glassware has become a cipher – a thin veil described only by white contour lines and refractions and extremely subtle modulations of the interleaving grid in the background. Those solid objects that had at one time hinted at human presence, seem to be no longer necessary. Clark has moved on now, to describe the trajectories of connection itself, through weaving, interleaving, intersecting and connecting of bands colour.

The Art of Gardening

The Art of Gardening

At some point, just about every gardener feels the urge to place a work of art amongst the annuals and the groundcover, to nestle a sculpture in a budding grove, or to frame it with a wall of ivy. It is curious, this urge, because we tend to associate gardening with a love of nature, and art sometimes seems so “unnatural.” Art is symbolic. Art represents human feeling and thinking, and by its very definition, something made by human hands. But gardening isn’t entirely ‘natural’ either. Gardening is the human cultivation of the natural world – a humanization of the wild. “Select this flower. Plant its seed here. Trim this bush and make a place for people.” Next will come a bench, a small table, and then maybe, some art.

Both gardening and art making are component parts of place making. We make places by projecting ourselves into a space. When we garden, we project our place in the natural world. We prune and shape bushes to create paths and walk ways. We plant grass to grow under our feet, flowers to bloom around us, trees shade us from the sun. When we make art we gather the things around us that we love and admire, things that remind of the past, charms and votive objects that represent our hopes for the future, and our talismans for the things we fear. This now is a place that we can call home.

And so when it came to discussing the little piece of land owned by the city of Cambridge – that lot adjacent to the Ferguson Cottage at 37 Grand Avenue, just the other side of the fish and chip shop – and whether it was to stay as it was or become a parking lot, Heather Franklin, artist and member of the Galt Horticultural Society and Judy Welsh, executive member of the Horticultural Society, proposed to the city in 1999 to establish the Cambridge Sculpture Garden. The Cambridge Sculpture Garden would be a place where contemporary artists would place their work on the banks of the Grand River, on land that would be cultivated and tended by the horticultural society, in the old community of Galt, for the residents of the modern city of Cambridge.

One of the first accomplishments of the Cambridge Sculpture Garden was the relocation of Andreas Gehr’s sculpture, Twilight, in September of 2000, from its location at the Grand River Conservation Authority. Andreas Gehr’s piece was originally built in the nineteen eighties as part of Cambridge Galleries’ Public Art Programme. The once electrified and illuminated piece had since that time languished in benign neglect. Yet, even minus its electrical peripherals, the rust red spiralling tower is still a remarkable sculptural object. Part ‘Tower of Babel,’ part soft ice cream swirl in rust red steel – it is dramatically visible again, thanks to the sculpture garden.

Early commissions by Sculpture Garden were undertaken for short terms and special occasions, and the committee began to experience the challenges of exhibiting art outdoors. To celebrate the opening in the fall of 2000, Graham Todd, Dennis Bolohan, Scott McNichol and Allan Flint were invited to install temporary works. Dennis Bolohan’s Labyrinth,a maze planted in the summer of 2001, suffered from an exceedingly hot and dry summer and never fully realized the artist’s conception. Scott McNichol’s A Question of Who’s in Charge, originally constructed impermanently of painted Styrofoam and installed just for the opening, was recreated in fibreglass for long term installation in the summer of 2001. Unfortunately, the piece has been repeatedly vandalized. The bold rhetorical challenge to authority posed by the artist in the work has been played out in real life, as the Sculpture Garden struggles to assert its right to exhibit art outdoors and to present artistic expression in a public space. 

One of the landmark pieces of the Sculpture Garden has been Allan Flint’s Use, installed in the spring of 2001. Flint was originally invited to participate in the grand opening, but his work arrived later, and in a much more resilient form. A concatenation of large, yellow, three dimensional letters, Useseems like text on a holiday, where language and meaning withdraw from the world of chatter to sink into a primordial garden of sights and sounds and smells.  

Thanks to a project grant from the Ontario Arts Council, a call for entry was circulated in the province and a jury was convened to commission three new works in the Spring of 2002. Ryzsard Litviniuk, Max Streicher and Marguerite Larmand were charged with creating semi-permanent works of art – artworks that would endure the arbitrary temperaments of man and nature for one calendar year. Ryzsard Litviniuk’s hollowed wood sculpture Tension - 14 from 2, was the first of this group to be installed in the summer of 2002. Litviniuk wields a chainsaw like a scalpel, and cuts thick unseasoned tree stumps into delicately telescoping forms. The piece installed at the Sculpture Garden consisted of fourteen sections cut from two triangular shaped stumps and mounted on steel reinforcement rods. There is an elegant machismo to all of Litviniuk’s art. In the grand tradition of male abstract sculpturing, his work expands and rises with strength and virility – a strength which in his case is also tempered by the deftness and delicacy with which he directs his roughly hewn material.

Ironically, the delicate parts of Ryszard Litviniuk’s sculpture proved too delicate for the Cambridge Sculpture Garden. Tensionwas vandalized and the piece was removed. The Sculpture Garden was relandscaped and berms were created to prevent vandals from driving their vehicles on to the property to tow or drag the sculptures from their moorings. Subsequently, the works proposed for the site by Max Streicher and Marguerite Larmand both included design considerations to deter further vandalism.

Max Streicher’s piece, Windsock, was installed in October of 2002. Streicher has become internationally known for his inflatable sculpture and recognized locally for his 1998 exhibition at Cambridge Galleries. Obviously, a thin mechanically inflated membrane, sitting on the ground would be impossible given electrical power limitations and increasing security concerns for the site. Streicher decided that instead of using electrical fans to inflate his work, he would elevate the figures on flag poles, and open them up to collect the prevailing winds like windsocks. The adult male figures that he customarily uses in his inflatables was substituted for an infant toddler proportioned figure. The proportionately larger head and little round pot belly recall the famously animated dancing baby hallucinated by Calista Lockhart on the television show Ally McBeal. But Streicher’s babies, blowing with the winds high above the Grand River, are not biological determinism’s siren song. Rather, they resemble more the spirit of the lullaby “Rock a bye baby” – lazily lolling in the breeze like kites, rising and falling, sleep inducing and hypnotic.  

Similarly, Marguerite Larmand, whose work Afloatwas installed in May of 2003, chose to elevate her wax figures in towers constructed of young maple trees. In contrast to Streicher’s floating figures, Larmand’s sentinels are made of sterner stuff. As is customary for the artist, her figures are created and then wrapped and supported by natural elements, articulating her belief in humanity’s cyclical place in the eco system. Yet this work is not dewy-eyed naturalism either. These sober figures seem to survey the community from fortified watchtowers, as if they might be at once both the city’s guardians and its prisoners. Perhaps Larmand’s sentinels are like an ecological and art settler movement, as they greet the elements and challenge the vandals from their fortified towers: “We are here,” they seem to be saying, “We are strong and multiplying.”

The art of gardening requires that every spring the dead and dying plants and vines are cut back and new life is transplanted and seeded. The life of cities needs replanting too, and the Cambridge Sculpture Garden is one of those new seeds.

Gordon Hatt, 2003

Review: Who Means What / Brent Roe / Paintings / 1992-2001

Agnes Etheringon Art Centre, 5 January - 28 April 2002 Since the early 1980's Toronto painter Brent Roe has been exhibiting his work in parallel spaces, artist collective exhibitions and in small annual and biannual shows at Wynick Tuck Gallery. He first gained attention for a narrative cartoon-style of painting that commented ironically on cold war politics. By the mid-eighties he had replaced the caricature style and political references with a looser, schematic figurative rendering accompanied by captions and texts describing conundrums, solipsisms and random streams of consciousness. The essential components of Brent Roe's mature style have changed little since that time, but in spite of that his work has evolved markedly. Figure ground relationships, paint handling, colour, surface texture, canvas sizes and proportions have constantly changed in relationship to each other in a concentrated on-going activity reminiscent of a chemist's careful measuring and testing of the volatility of his compounds. Through the waxing and waning of stylistic and ideological enthusiasms in the 1980's and 1990's it became apparent that Brent Roe had been focused on a specific and unshakable mission. Just what this mission is, however, remains a slippery subject. In the quest to understand Brent Roe's mission I organized a five-year, 31 piece survey at Cambridge Galleries in 1997. John Massier tackled an ambitious 10 year, 93 work survey of Roe's work at the Koffler Gallery in 1998. The third and current survey, organized by John Armstrong and Michelle Jacques for the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, falls somewhere in the middle of the previous two. In the quantity of work and in its 1992 starting date, it is closer to the Cambridge survey. But like the Koffler exhibition, this show also contains a selection of sketchbooks and the baroque touch of the artist's idiosyncratic miniature graffiti on the walls between the paintings. Also in a manner similar to the Koffler survey, the conventional horizontal alignment of paintings at eye level is supplemented by the additional hanging of works high above – salon style. An added feature of the Agnes Etherington exhibition is the existence of a ping-pong table in the middle of the gallery. Demonstrating perhaps a newfound tongue-in-cheek interest in the decorative arts, the surface of the ping pong table and its paddles have been painted by Roe in his characteristic manner. Roe's characteristic manner is typically a combination of a painterly abstraction with ironic, deflating texts. Often, the texts seem to mock not only the pretensions of painting, but of all redeeming notions of art. The belief that some larger meaning can be divined from studying art, for example, is derided by texts like "truth and meaning can be found within 5 metres of this spot" or "All those seeking meaning line up behind this canvas," configured either as the visual voice balloons of declaiming cartoon figures or slogans painted on an abstract and expressionist ground. Expression, essence, truth and genius, and other popular notions associated with art receive similar treatment at the hands of Roe. Of course irony and sarcasm can quickly wear thin, and thinness is the most common criticism leveled against Roe's work. This perception is not diminished by the institutional and logistical imperatives of both commercial and public galleries to emphasize solo exhibitions. I don't think I have ever left a Brent Roe exhibition wanting more, and in fact the artist has a history of crowded solo exhibitions, which have included just too many works. It is my experience that these paintings work best not in solo exhibitions where they can begin to seem like a string of one-liners (and where one begins to suspect that he's got more than a million of 'em), but in-group shows. There, surrounded by extroverted expressions of earnestness and virtuosity, the negative ions thrown off by Roe's paintings create deep rich spaces of calm and existential awareness – a cold steely clarifying of the moment – not unlike the way a great wit can at once celebrate and expose the pretensions of the guests at a party. Never-the-less, a solo survey exhibition gives us the opportunity to examine constant thematic and stylistic devices and the conscious changes that the artist engages over a period of time. On the occasion of the Agnes Etherington exhibition, the organizers provided interpretative assists in the form of a colour-illustrated catalogue with an essay by curator John Armstrong and an interview with the artist by Michelle Jacques. A panel discussion focusing on Roe's use of language in his paintings was held toward the end of the exhibition. An added bonus was the recorded audio guide conducted by the artist. Armstrong's essay introduces the focus and the scope of Roe's art-about-art commentary and Jacque's interview reveals the artist's playful, evasive, reflective and iconoclastic character. On the audio guide Roe offers up startling details about the iconology of the paintings in the exhibition. It is worth listening just to be able to experience the depth of his engagement with the ideas he presents. The symposium was less successful, focusing perhaps too much on the history of texts and voice balloons in art and not enough on what makes these devices effective in Roe's paintings. Two comparisons made by Armstrong at the symposium, however, were illuminating. Beyond the common use of text, the proximity of Roe's work to that of the senior American artist Ed Ruscha had not previously presented itself to me so forcefully. However, their similar preoccupation with the tensions between image and words and abstraction and representation contribute to a shared ascetic mysticism and a riveting evocation of the existential present. This is an aesthetic which has roots in the early modernism of Picasso and Braque and which had its most theatrical presentation in the work of Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists. It is no accident that these are among the artists cited as influences by Roe in the catalogue interview. But why text? Why use language in a painting, in a picture, which, as the saying goes, is worth at least a thousand words? It seems to me that question is partially addressed by another image cited in the panel discussion. An Annunciation by Simone Martini showing the Virgin Mary being informed by the angel Gabriel of the immaculate conception and the impending birth of Jesus. In an attempt to mimic the way words are directed from one person to another, Martini has laid text on the surface of the painting in a straight line beginning at the angel's mouth on the left and heading toward of the head of Mary. Language and text in the biblical sense are traditionally associated with the divine revelation of God's laws and interventions. Applied to the painting's surface, text makes the image revelatory. Brent Roe's text balloons function as gem-like personal revelations, and for the viewer they work like a cleverly pointed reality check. I suspect however, that the issue for the artist is not his use of language in painting, rather, it is what painting and language can uniquely achieve when combined, for Roe is first and foremost a painter. Every one of his paintings foregrounds the act of painting, with references to painterly abstraction and other historical styles, or in his decorative doodles, flourishes and graffiti inspired markings. T. J. Clark, in his fascinating study of Jacques-Louis David's Death of Marat, draws attention to the two letters in the painting and contrasts them with the great expanse of scumbled, burnt umber that occupies the canvas's upper half. Clark sees this large area of dark ground as the objective reality of paint, the “endless, meaningless objectivity produced by paint not quite finding its object.” He contrasts that with the deception of the Charlotte Corday letter in Marat's hand, and the trompe d'oeil illusionism of the letter on the plinth that appears to project into the viewer's space. In the visual telling of this revolutionary tragedy, illusion and deception are in a struggle against truth. It is text that clarifies the activity of painting, and brings us in someway closer to its uncanniness. But it is also painting that makes language present, frames it – makes it more real. And making both painting and language more real, may just be Brent Roe's mission. Gordon Hatt

Dan Kennedy: Shack of Deals

Because infants perceive only movement and contrast, adults open their eyes wide, arch their brows, and raise the pitch of their voice in an attempt to bond. This is how we learn that we are not alone in the world - a revelation that must seat itself profoundly in that part of the brain that records emotions. Is it any wonder, when our very first existential crisis is met with a toothy smile, big eyes and singing happy talk, that as adults we thrust Mickey and Minnie on our children for comfort, or find ourselves seeking solace in pop stars with cartoon smiles? The traveller notices it first - the billboards, the magazine covers, the TV screens featuring unfamiliar yet attractive, wide-eyed, smiling characters with indecipherable foreign texts. You think, "Why are all these people smiling at me, and what are they trying to say?" It seems like the world has begun to feel like a giant crib, with dozens of strange relatives looking in and talking baby talk. Westerners travelling from the old West Berlin to the communist East Berlin used to experience another kind of shock. It was a shock of withdrawal - the total and complete cessation of visual happy talk - no billboards, no backlit signs, no glamour magazines at the newsstand. It was like the aural equivalent of turning the television and the radio off. Clearly, being accustomed to its sensuous embrace, we become confused when commercial publicity is absent. The promise of contemporary urban life is the satiation of desire, where you can get anything you want, where no anxiety need go unaddressed, where no impulse lacks an expression. The world of commercial imagery that surrounds us is a fantasy of glamour and affection, providing meaning and security in a community of economic values. Publicity and advertising assure us that even if we can't afford it, even if we aren't good enough or glamorous enough, comfort exists. *** Dan Kennedy's paintings in the exhibition "Shack of Deals" have all been created since 1999 and comprise aspects of two bodies of work. The painting Trick #6 comes from a series of work of the same name and takes as its compositional format the conventional advertising poster or signboard, where texts at the bottom and the top frame a central illustration. Kennedy makes reference to these recognizable formats in his Trick series paintings, seeking to create a layered, visual representation of the voice of the huckster, combining the illusions of the sales pitch, with the pictorial illusions of age in the apparently yellowing varnish and fading enamels. Illusionism, the artist seems to be saying, is the property of both the artist and the huckster. A separate body of work is illustrated by the title piece of the exhibition Shack of Deals, in which the conventional graphic format of the posters is replaced by dense layers of images and text that seem to float in weightless spaces. These painted collages conjure a world filled with cartoon characters, comic pastorals and fragments of words in commercial typefaces. No text is complete. No phrase resolves into a statement. Instead, the words begin to resemble the aural detritus of a garbled salesman's shill. All that remain are the superlatives and the false imperatives. These are airless paintings, whose cartoon figures are incomplete, fragmented, inverted, colliding and jostling in a soupy, viscous space. Pastel bubbles appear to leak and hiss from the recesses and cavities of this claustrophobic world. Pictorial spaces shift, from illusionistic depths, to flat dripping areas of colour. Moments of innocent charm - popular cartoon characters for example - seem overwhelmed and oppressed by the crowded space in which they seem doomed to exist, like some Disney version of Dante's Inferno. *** Looking up from our cribs at our mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers and extended family can be a both a comforting and terrifying experience. As hard as they try, not all of those high voices and exaggerated smiles manage to bridge the gulf between knowledge and innocence. Aged faces scare babies, and why not? They provide a little bit too much information about things to come. It is hard not to feel that Kennedy's vision is not dissimilar to the infant's view from the crib. Cartoons of wide-eyed innocence exist side by side with caricatures of the wizened and sinister. These images mirror the same emotional mixture of comfort and threat, and beg the question: is this an isolated world view, or is this vision an insight into a larger social pathology? Much current speculation on the effects of globalization and the penetration of corporate cultural values suggest that social infantilization is the inevitable and even desired outcome. Benjamin R. Barber has described contemporary marketing's targeting of children as ideal consumers: The result is a new consumer who is neither a kid nor an adult, but a "kidult" with grown-up buying power and childish, uniform tastes that can be catered to by fast food, athletic shoes, T-shirts, cola drinks, Gap-style coed clothes based loosely on sports apparel, and - the merchandising and branding engine behind it all - the global pop culture of homogenized MTV music and Hollywood's cartoonish blockbuster films and videos.(1) The defining aspect of multinational global consumerism at the turn of the millennium is the pursuit of economic self interest and personal self gratification, to the detriment of all other values. We are encouraged and enabled to pursue our most immature desires, to demand from the world endless comfort and gratification, to consume out of our most irrational fears and to forego the basic responsibilities of citizenship. Dan Kennedy's work is not the product of an isolated individual, but rather that of an observer of contemporary life. He uses the tools of pop culture familiarity and character recognition to connect with viewers and bring people into his work. At the same time, we may be troubled and discomfited by his ambiguous, mysterious and toxic spaces, by the shrill bleating of his advertising graphics and by the ominous signs of aging and mortality that he builds into these paintings. These works mirror what growing numbers of people feel - the simultaneous experience of desire and disgust, of charm and alienation, of satiation and of emptiness, in the new global market place - in this great shack of deals. Gordon Hatt End Notes 1. Benjamin R. Barber, "The Global Infantilization: How We Became Kidults without Noting the Loss of Freedom In Society," Tagespiegel Online, Tagespiegel Online Dienste Verlag: 2001, <http://www2.tagespiegel.de/archiv/2001/09/08/ak-so-am-558006.html>.