Lisa Neighbour: Eye on the Square

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

them to be works of art.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eye on the Square by Lisa Neighbour

October 1994 – August 1995

The Library & Gallery, Cambridge, Ont.

Gordon Hatt, 1994

Thomas Burrows: Hematomas, Blanket Statements and Drawn Objects

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