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.
