Additive Sculpture: Shirley Yanover and Peter Dyhuis

Additive Sculpture: Shirley Vanover and Peter Dykhuis is an exhibition that examines the work of two contemporary Canadian artists working in the area of assemblage art. Their mixed-media work, incorporating mass-produced, found objects and non-traditional art materials, exemplifies some of the strongest tendencies in current art making.

The title Additive Sculpture refers not only to the process of assembly that takes place in this work but also to the artistic vision which seeks meaning in the complex layering of information and experience that characterizes life on the eve of the 21st century. In contrast to artists who today or in the past have pursued their vision through a process of reduction and simplification, Dykhuis and Yanover exemplify an attitude which denies permanent essences and embraces relative positions and unfixed points of view. Their visions, like their work, are cumulative ones; composed of the daily experiences of the mind and the senses they describe what it feels like to be alive in the age of information.

Shirley Yanover's work is often characterized by its “modular” quality. Using wood as a primary building material, she cuts it into simple shapes to form the parts of her sculpture. In her earlier work, the influence of children's building blocks and interlocking bricks is evident. Her recent work demonstrates a simplification of the process in the increase in the size of the modules and a corresponding decrease in the number. 

While the wood module is a material of choice for the artist, the inclusion of found objects into her pieces plays a significant role. The chance discovery, a resonant object or a purposeful contradiction lie behind the inclusion of the found object. Not willing to simply create variations on the theme of constructive sculpture, Yanover questions the constructed object and subverts it. She removes it from the realm of the ideal and places it squarely in the here and now.

Yanover's interest in sculpture focuses on the built environment. As a motivating force behind her work she cites the tension between what is natural and what is artificial. What happens in the process of manipulating the environment in the creation of an artificial environment? What does this process of transformation mean to us? How do we balance our dreams of creation and our lived reality?

Shirley Vanover reminds us through her work that sculpture, and indeed all creation, is a form of play. The found objects in her work retain the same magic to her that one observes in a child 's fascination with an old tire. Her assembly of wood modules also recalls that elemental constructive form of play in early childhood. Yet these pieces are not innocent. They are tempered with knowledge and responsibility, and an awareness of the transient and temporal quality of life on earth.

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Peter Dykhuis emerged in the Toronto art scene of the early 1980's as a painter. He was identified at that time as being a part of the new trend toward ''the reappearance of

representational imagery." Employing the rare technique of encaustic (painting with pigmented beeswax) Dykhuis depicted the hard edges of technology in the most organic and apparently innocent medium. Jet planes, televisions, steel girder constructions figured as his subjects. These images underwent a gradual suppression of detail until the subject was reduced to a silhouette on a uniformly textured background. The earlier works are also characterized by the fact that they were composed as diptychs – two independent images presented as an articulated whole. 

The encaustic paintings established the thematic and formal problems that Dykhuis was to deal with in his three-dimensional work. The artifacts of technology continue to loom large in his work-now they are plugged in. Technology in the three-dimensional work carries some of the menace associated with weaponry and human displacement that is characteristic of the earlier encaustic paintings, but on the whole, it is presented as a fact of the contemporary urban landscape. As a subject it betrays the human presence of whose senses technology is but a mere extension. Similar to the way in which 19th-century landscape painting betrayed the presence of the explorer, the conqueror and the colonizer, these works are like a view from within the mechanism of contemporary technological civilization. 

The representation of the nature of technology presents a particular conundrum. It is because of technology that our perception of the world has changed so greatly over the last century. The static, representational image no longer suffices in a world of rapid and constant change. We know that we cannot trust an image or representation unless we know the context from which it was taken. Thus, Dykhuis paired images in his earlier diptychs to set up an uneasy relationship; odd pairs evoking comparison and contrast, innocent everyday objects became menacing and menacing objects became banal. These images give us fresh insight into the make-up of the physical and mental world we inhabit. 

It has been a logical step for Dykhuis to introduce the found object to the two-dimensional image. The symmetrical balance has given way to a circular relationship between three parts. These parts are the painted, two-dimensional image, a found object (a television, a trellis?) and a three-dimensional constructed image. Each part contributes to the whole by reinforcing the relationship between the basic perceptual processes: the found object belongs to the realm of the senses, the two-dimensional fainting is part of our ability to imagine, the three-dimensional constructions are a bridge between the imagined and the real – the engagement of mind and matter.

Shirley Vanover and Peter Dykhuis share a contemporary sensibility for the rich layers of experience and information that characterize contemporary urban life. Image, activity and fact are in a state of constant redefinition in the artists' work. By including the disparate and apparently contradictory elements in their work they point to a changing definition not only for art, but also for what we understand as the basis of understanding. We experience the world differently than our parents and grandparents. Our children will experience it far differently than we. This work offers us an insight into a rapidly evolving species.

Gordon Hatt, September 1989

Peter Dykhuis

1. HYBRID OBJECT (SPACE PROGRAMMING), 1987, multimedia.

2. WEAVE /GROWTH, 1989, mixed media.

3. MAELSTROM BIRDBATH/TRELLIS ANTENNA, SPEAK BUSH, 1989, multimedia.

4. NATURAL DISTURBANCE, 1988, multimedia.

Shirley Yanover

5. BED OF ROSES II, 1988, wood, paint, fabric.

6. CORNUCOPIA 1986, mixed media.

7. ICON, 1985, wood plastic, paint.

8. PROW, 1988, wood, wallpaper, glass, metal, alabaster.

Carl Whiteside: Le premier récit de la création (The First Book of Creation)

Carla Whiteside's The First Book of Creation consists of nine clay “drawings.” I use the word drawings cautiously because clearly, they are not drawings in the traditional sense of the word. Clay, as a medium of visual art, is generally associated with sculpture and indeed the artist's experiments with clay and its expressive properties began in the sculpture studio. The application of clay to the flat surface, however, has more in common with techniques of painting. The clay is applied in washes, in subtle degrees of tone and colour, at times smooth and at times with a ''painterly'' texture.

The works' character as “drawings” becomes manifest when the artist begins the process of removing the layers of clay much as an artist working in charcoal or graphite would use the gum eraser to define subtle gradations of tone to create volume from flat, darkened areas, or to define contours with the negative erased line. Gradually, the amorphous, solid area of clay – that dense, inert mass – takes on a more complex form. The erasures break it up into areas, and those areas may, through gradations of tone, define volume. Lines divide spaces and create areas of volume. They describe direction and energy which travel across the clay surface. The whole emerges as an active ground of perceptible surface texture, contour and tonally described volume. These are the qualities which Carla Whiteside balances and contrasts when drawing in clay. 

Along the bottom of each drawing runs a continuous text. At either end of the drawing this text lies at the threshold of perceptibility, distinguished from the clay surface only by the low relief of the letters. Toward the centre of the drawing the letters and the words of the text emerge from their obscurity to contrast with the white of the exposed paper. These words and phrases, familiar from the book of Genesis, serve as titles. 

The image and text have a special relationship. The text does not stand outside the drawing like an explanatory note or a key to understanding; rather it weaves its way through the image – it is part of the image – like the integral warp of a tapestry. The text's antiquity, its resonant solemnity, its imagistic rendering of the creation as the basis of all life illuminates and is illuminated by the drawing from which it emerges.

It would be misunderstanding the artist's aims, however, to see in these drawings an illustration of the book of Genesis. The associations which the text brings forth lend texture and timbre to the images. They retain, however, no specific meaning. The words and phrases are drawn out of the larger text – out of context – and in so doing are left open to a multiplicity of interpretation and significance. 

Genesis, as a creation myth, is the story of the creator in the image of an all-powerful man. Purposefully, he designs a universal order that he judges to be “good.” Within this order there is given a specific hierarchy of beings which have specific purposes and roles. Creation is a human concept. The universe, the earth and its infinite life forms could only have been conceived as the product of a creator by a being who also creates. How does the artist create now that tradi­tional hierarchies are discredited? How does the artist create without imposing roles and purposes or proposing meanings when they cannot be known? Is it possible for a creation myth to emerge which describes a unity of living things as liberating instead of a hierarchy of living things as predetermined? 



Carla Whiteside, UN FLOT MONTAIT DE TERRE ET ARROSAIT TOUT (THERE WENT UP A MIST FROM THE EARTH AND WATERED THE WHOLE), clay, iron chromate, graphite, paint on paper, 43 x 90 inches, 1988.

In this context the influence of feminism plays a significant role. Whiteside acknowledges the initial attraction of clay as a reference to the feminist rediscovery of pre-Christian earth goddesses – a female creator. Consequently, all textual references have undergone a gender change from the familiar masculine to the feminine. This is received neither polemically, nor as proselytizing, but rather as a natural expression of the creator (the artist) representing creation in terms of personal knowledge. 

The artist speaks of re-mythification and re-enchantment in connection with her work, where the knowledge of the self and the knowledge of greater things – outside "historical, cultural and personal times'' merge into an aesthetic pleasure that is timeless. As one meditates upon these nine drawings one is reminded of the dual image of their particular, handcrafted quality and of the large, impersonal associations of earth, creation and the time before light was divided from darkness. The contrast and inextricably bound character of the finite and the infinite, the personal and impersonal, of time and timelessness are the mythical forces and sublime narrative of this work.

1.        PORTANT SEMENCE (YIELDING SEED), clay, iron chromate, graphite, paint on paper, 43 x 90 inches, 1988.

2.        SOYEZ FÉCONDE (BE FRUITFUL), clay, iron chromate, graphite, paint on paper, 43 x 90 inches, 1988.

3.        QU'ELLES SERVENT DE SIGNES (LET THEM BE FOR SIGNS), clay, iron chromate, graphite on paper, 43 x 90 inches, 1988.

4.        QUI LA SÉPARAIT DES TÉNÈBRES (WAS DIVIDED FROM THE DARKNESS), clay, iron chromate, graphite, paint on paper, 43 x 90 inches, 1988.

5.        ELLE COUVAIT L’ABÎME ET SON ESPRIT PLANAIT SUR LES LIEUX (SHE WAS UPON THE FACE OF THE DEPTH AND HER SPIRIT MOVED UPON THE FACE OF THE WATERS), clay, iron chromate, graphite, paint on paper, 43 x 90 inches, 1988.

6.        ELLE ÉTAIT VAGUE ET VIDE (SHE WAS WITHOUT FORM AND VOID), clay, iron chromate, graphite, paint on paper, 43 x 90 inches, 1988.

7.        COMME PUISSANCE DE LA NUIT (AS RULER OF THE NIGHT), clay, iron chromate, graphite, paint on paper, 43 x 90 inches, 1988.

8.        UN FLOT MONTAIT DE TERRE ET ARROSAIT TOUT (THERE WENT UP A MIST FROM THE EARTH AND WATERED THE WHOLE), clay, iron chromate, graphite, paint on paper, 43 x 90 inches, 1988.

9.        ET TU MOURRAS CERTAINEMENT (AND THOU SHALT SURELY DIE), clay, iron chromate, graphite, paint on paper, 43 x 90 inches, 1988-89.