John Armstrong, Karma Clarke-Davis,
Jason Dunda, Dave Dyment, Katharine Harvey,
Alexander Irving, Mara Korkola, Stacey Lancaster,
Dionne McAffee, Wendy Morgan, Jan Noestheden,
Daniel Olson and Kate Wilson
Curated by Gordon Hatt
“Let's Get Lost” is about escapism (It's summer!), but
more specifically, it's about the compulsive desire to take flight from
reality, to seek temporary oases in artificial worlds, fantasy, hallucination,
heightened experience, travel, exoticism, romance, sensory deprivation and
intoxication. The theme of this exhibition has been influenced in part by Chet
Baker's music – his bittersweet song and the movie of the same name.
But the exhibition has also been influenced by many
artists, both contemporary and historical, for whom the experience of art may
be founded in a desire to describe ecstatic moments – moments of heightened
experience and awareness – moments that hint at the existence of absolute
transcendent freedom. This freedom may be charted either as an inwardly
directed journey – a construction entirely of the mind, or of outward journey –
into the world as an explorer, adventurer or tourist.
So the 18th century English artist William Blake, in defense
of his unique cosmology, remarked that he had to "create a System, or be
enslav'd by another Man's," and defined the image of the isolated genius,
at war with the banality and mediocrity of the world around him. Another
English artist, J.M.W. Turner, in his quest to describe the sublimity of God in
nature, created immersive turbulent seascape paintings that appear today as a
type of proto-abstraction. Turner’s paintings engaged the spirit and fantasy of
being on top of the world, of being in the centre of an earth-shaking drama, as
much as any contemporary Hollywood action-adventure.
Hollywood is, of course, the contemporary paradigm for
escape. Popular art in North America is considered to be a deliverance from
life, from hard work, from stress, and from obligation. Hollywood culture
doesn't like to dwell on unhappy endings and complicated narratives without
clearly defined good guys and bad guys. When we escape in North America, (and
increasingly in the rest of the world) we like to see that in the end, true
love conquers all obstacles, that virtuous people eventually succeed, and that
the greedy, the overweight, the unattractive, and the addicted (see Jurassic
Park) are eaten by large prehistoric creatures. The wish fulfillment agenda of
Hollywood production has created the problem of television addiction – people
who are enervated by the fast food aesthetics of television and are unable to
stop surfing with the remote control or turn the television off. For those so
afflicted, Dave Dyment has created an image, which is the equivalent of a
modern "Home Sweet Home" homily: "I love to watch things on TV."
Artists in “Let's Get Lost” engage the idea of escape
as both a native desire and as a representative social value. John Armstrong’s Smoking
paintings, for example, quote 1960's vintage cigarette advertisements and their
stylized images of the “good life:” glamour, sex and luxury. Viewed through
Armstrong’s painterly eyes, we are reminded of how advertising has used iconic
themes of art – Watteau’s idyllic fêtes champetres, or Manet’s Déjeuner
sur l’herbe for example – to lend an aura of Edenic pleasure to addictive
products.
Pleasure seeking and intoxication have a long and
intimate history and contemporary advertising continues to promote that connection.
Advertisements representing amiable house parties or camping trips with
attractive people, once almost the exclusive province of beer and wine
commercials, have in Canada metamorphised into the representation of high
energy bacchanals in commercials for spirits and “coolers.” Interestingly,
while the advertising of spirits is still prohibited on television in the
United States, advertisements of mood enhancing prescription drugs, featuring
apparently happy, drugged families, now fill the airwaves in that country: Ask
your doctor today.
Artists Alexander Irving and Daniel Olson engage the
reality and the myth of intoxication. Irving contrasts the light-hearted
conviviality of a drinking society with alcohol’s parallel reality of
alienation, isolation and loss. In his piece, The Lost Weekend, named
after the Billy Wilder movie starring Ray Milland and Jayne Wyman, Irving
presents us with a faux artifact of the closet alcoholic’s deception – the
mickey hidden in a cut-out book. Daniel Olson, on the other hand has decided to
document the process of intoxication, video taping himself smoking marijuana,
describing an activity that while mundane, is illegal in this country and
normally discreetly hidden. Olson’s video neither glamorizes the act, like a
music video or album cover art, nor does it moralize and warn us away. Intoxication,
this video suggests, is a fact of the human condition and a characteristic
unique to our species.
But escapism is far more than self-medication. As
children we are enchanted by the surreal and mechanical world of the annual
fall fairs and the CNE midway. Everything about it – from the colours to the
noise, to the toxic candy floss grates on the sensibilities of the adult, but
promises only relief from obligation, boredom and predictability in the world
of children, who have not yet accepted life as a sober pastime. Wendy Morgan's
distorted fairground photographs verge on the shapeless, yet they communicate a
visual equivalency to this youthful intoxication and the elevated sense of
being in the world that the fairground can give. Similarly, Kate Wilson draws
inspiration from country fairs, car culture, and small town speedways. Her
fairground escapism is a little bit more adult than Morgan's. Her paintings and
drawings communicate dilapidation, and a kind of desperate thrill seeking that
recalls a James Dean aesthetic of "live fast and die young." The
intoxication that fast cars and familiar midway haunts provide is very often a
temporary escape from narrowly defined opportunities and small town
horizons.
Mara Korkola's No Place paintings also have
their sources in the desperation of the highway. Her twilight images of
automobile headlights on two-lane highways are an earthly limbo, neither here
nor there, neither day nor night. Raised on the mobility provided by the
automobile, North Americans are a restless people for whom the keys to the car
and a tank full of gas are often sufficient promise of escape.
Karma Clarke-Davis's personally expressive work
operates ironically and in reference to the popular genre of music videos. We
are simultaneously entertained by her inventions and transfixed by her personal
narrative. The enacted passion in this case, however, is not the typical
glamour posturing of popular youth culture, rather, it is a complex
acknowledgment of simultaneously seeing and being seen, of being in the middle
of your life's own music video. Similarly, Dionne McAffee's video work, Trance,
acknowledges this escapist project as a conflict between desire and self-consciousness.
One has the potential to escape from everywhere and everything, except the self.
Katharine Harvey's paintings have consisted of
parallel interests in sailing and the store windows of urban life. In the past
she has painted sailboats on thick accumulations of acrylic gel medium that
takes the water from the marine genre and gives it a wholly new and unexpected
dimension. In her store window paintings she has focussed on the interplay
between inexpensive knick-knacks and reflections in the plate glass windows –
creating a dialogue between the minor moments of exotic transport (symbolized
by the knick-knacks) and the illusions and distortions of the reflections in
the plate glass. Her current paintings in "Let's Get Lost" combine
the elements of her marine paintings and her store window work. Working from
photographs taken under water, Harvey paints the image of toy boats floating on
the surface. The resulting images are both disorienting and comforting, a small
reminder perhaps of an infantile desire to return to our original amniotic
fluid.
Water, of course, has deep associations with the
origins of life, and Stacey Lancaster's video, The Bay Model, continues
in this symbolic tradition. The dream-like sequences of a woman diving for her
submerged clothes lost in the bay are evocative of separation and the desire
for reconnection. Escape in this video is an escape from alienation, from adult
knowledge and from the physical and psychological dissociation that separates
us from our past and our present.
Jan Noestheden is inspired by clip art, those
hieroglyphs of efficiency, service, quality and optimism that in less
sophisticated times illustrated the yellow pages, stationary and business cards
of commerce. Taken out of context his vinyl images seem giddy and ridiculous –
over-the-top behaviour typical of the manic-depressive on a roll. Noestheden’s
art is an escape from sober-minded adult behaviour, and an ironic embrace of
sophomoric and low-brow taste. Jason Dunda is similarly inspired by the graphic
art of adolescence, in his case that of comic books, and the ease with which
magic is created with an economy of line and colour. Having been at one time
addicted to comic books myself, I can attest to their intoxicating effect, and
Dunda's paintings bring me back to that magic.
We crave escapes, in all forms, and the art of escape
is an aesthetic we may crave for its own sake. We may read escapist literature
or enjoy fantasy movies and art for the simple pleasures of the textures,
colours and forms. Art is intoxicating. It get's us through the day.
Just take it easy though. Not too much.
Gordon Hatt
