These two exhibitions at Occurrence are both architecture-heavy. It is an interesting juxtaposition with each set suggesting something quite different, not necessarily complementary.
A set of paintings, they are controlled exercises in clashing modes of abstraction knit together through a clear set of intersecting parts that each offer a different mode of painterly articulation. Based on found and personal source material, these images are readily legible as solariums and other spaces where wet and light intersect, rich in patterning.
Instantly, deliberate or not, in terms of imagery and colour scheme, Weinstein’s warm-cool graded paintings are reminiscent of the aesthetics associated with vaporwave and comparable slightly melancholy nostalgia nods to the 1980s.
Thematically, Weinstein’s suite of images deals with the threshold where interior and exterior meet. This is done in a lot of very blatant ways. Almost everything in her figurative selection is bent to this.
In design, it plays tight line and repetition against fluidity. The former provides both the structure and the strength of the image, and the latter is more of an effect that is never quite integrated, like an overproduced background atmosphere in a music track.
The contrast between these two aspects is not too easy. The almost mesmerizing rigidness of the densely built-up repetitive motifs she frequently interrupts with paint bleed, washes, and stains. If the decor feels present, it is the world outside ornament that tends to read as mildew.
This seeps into the floors of her imagery. It’s here that the paintings risk becoming too melodramatic. Palm trees wilt and the wet exteriors bleed into the framing that demarcates the space of the images. Although these vegetal motifs are barely articulated, they seem too sentimental, too “touching” in their sense as crumbling phenomenal traces that overdramatize the act of painting.
A collaboration between the two artists, this installation encourages the viewer to enter through its narrow, low door. Open to the ceiling of the gallery space dominated by industrial plumbing, the sculptural sphere of the installation is largely lit from within. Elaborate, small windows reveal pastel colours painted onto its interior to capture the light. When not flattened in this manner, it seems to congeal and fall in clumps to the floor.
Inspired by the recollection of the artists’ phenomenal experience of the city’s Victorian architecture, this exhibition also takes part in a kind of nostalgia, albeit one that is less about the fuzzy and untouchable image than the crippled tactility of time perceived in architecture.
Although the accompanying text suggests that the work integrates architecture and object, it seems to me that this is precisely what doesn’t happen. Instead, it disintegrates, albeit in a stunted way like the frozen screen grab of a video flecked with distorted pixels and glitches.
There is a stuttering awkwardness to perception involved in the piece as the fragments of soft coloured light either sit as though freeze dried and sifted by window frames or stay angled flat as a theatre backdrop.
This latter aspect is apropos given that the shape of their object is less organically melded to the gallery space than a maquette for a mausoleum. An overriding morbidity sets in after you have perambulated the structure and passed in and out of it.
Weinstein’s ruminations flirt with the quality of a holographic nature that seems to at least approach something less sentimental than the obsessive “botanical turn” that has been popping up everywhere for the past couple of years. Chagnon Côté and Charce’s installation, meanwhile, puts me in mind of architectural historian Anthony Adamson’s observation that the Victorian architecture of Canada was rife with a sense of blossoming uselessness that abstracted landscape into motifs to be composed and created deliberate offense to those who saw either the vegetal or the architectural in productive terms.